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Shakespeare's use of language
Comparing and contrasting poems
Poetry comparison analysis
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“This love is difficult, but it’s real”, is a modern day lyric, from a modern day love song, “Love Story”, by a popular modern day musician Taylor Swift. Just as modern artists still do, Shakespeare tries to convey a message of support towards women and their appearances and circumstances. This poem skillfully uses selective diction through selecting specific words and phrases to influence the poem. Directing his sonnet to have more meaning, his diction is influenced to include symbolism. Additionally he selects these items for comparisons to create juxtapositions. He does all this to demonstrate and reaffirm how his mistress is not like other women. This is enabled through the pairs Shakespeare has chosen to compare in order to critique the
When he writes "And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare as any she, belied with false compare." (lines 13-14) in the final couplet, one responds with an enlightened appreciation, making them understand Shakespeare's message that true love consists of something deeper than physical beauty. Shakespeare expresses his ideas in a wonderful fashion. Not only does he express himself through direct interpretation of his sonnet, but also through the levels at which he styled and produced it. One cannot help but appreciate his message of true love over lust, along with his creative criticism of Petrarchan sonnets.
In Elizabethan England, usually sonnets were written in a similar style to that of Francesco Petrarch. Petrarch wrote a series of sonnets in which he compliments his mistress’ using a considerably large number of metaphors like those that Shakespeare parodies in this piece of literature. When this poem was written, most of these metaphors and comparisons were considered as cliché as they are today. However, the techniques were still used to write sonnets that compared nature with the beauty of women. There are many ways in which Shakespeare’s poems completely flip the common techniques used in that day. This love poem, for
Love is one of the central ideologies present in this text. Shakespeare endues love with numerous traits and flaws, elaborating on the nature of love with statements made by the young lovers. Through Helena‘s soliloquy, Shakespeare describes many of the frustrating characteristics attributed to love. When considering this monologue in terms of Jacobean ideals of order and sensibility, some elements of love seem contradictory to such ideals.
This piece of a sonnet by William Shakespeare tells us a lot about his idea of what love is.
Daniel wrote a conventional love sonnet using the traditional Petrarchan style of putting the idea of love, or the mistress, on a pedestal. Shakespeare turned these ideas on their heads by portraying a mistress who was by no means special and most certainly unappealing. By comparing Daniel's “Sonnet 6” and Shakespeare's “Sonnet 130,” one may quickly conclude that Daniel’ s and Shakespeare’s ideas of the perfect lady and of love differ greatly..
Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare is one of his better know works of literature. This sonnet aims to define love by communicating what its is and what it is not. Shakespeare makes his point clear from the beggining of the poem: true love does not change even if there are circumstances that stand in its way. Shakespeare then goes onto define what love is by saying what it is not. Love is something that does not change even when it is confronted by tempests. It is not something that comes and goes, but rather is “not Time’s fool”, meaning that it is not subject to the passing of time. Shakespeare also compares love to a star, which sets the tone for the entire poem. The fact that he compares it to a star that guides every human being who is wandering. The star represents a mysterious and almost incomprehensible force that guides us even though we cannot pinpoint its location. Shakespeare uses imagery throughout the poem in a unique way that defines love by what it is not. By comparing love to an unchanging force such as time and mortality, and also by staking a personal claim in his statements, Shakespeare effectively communicates his opinions on love.
Shakespeare has chosen the sonnet forms to develop his idea of everlasting love with questions, imagery, metaphors, rhyme schemes, and structure. Without these techniques we would not be able to gain the correct perspective that the beauty of love prevails over the beauty of nature; also how nature is not permanent and the sonnet will be everlasting.
In conclusion, Shakespeare has brought this world many interesting and famous plays. Many of these plays are about love and how people experience them. People have many different opinions on what Shakespeare is saying about love in his text. In my opinion, he is telling us that people will find love based on physical beauty rather than inner
Shakespeare's collection of sonnets is heralded as one of the greatest, most ambitious sonnet collections in English literature. Of these154 sonnets, the first 126 of them are addressed to a 'fair youth', a beatiful young man, with whom Shakespeare has developed an intimate friendship. The overarching theme of devotion in antimony to mortality denotes that “Sonnet 18” is predominantly a love poem. Accordingly the purpose of the poem seems initially to be to compare his beloved friend's handsomness with a common symbol of beauty, a fine summer's day. However, Shakespeare actually provides a pragmatic critique of the conventions of love poetry in his doing so. He not only exposes the flaws of the love poetry through the comparison but also suggests the merits of it in conveying the idea of his everlasting love, and the ability of verse to immortalise both love and beauty.
Shakespeare’s brilliance lies in his concise, efficient use of language and “Sonnet 18” is no different. Shakespeare’s use of language is precisely the reason for his timeless legacy. In “Sonnet 18”, Shakespeare pokes fun at the typical love poetry written by many poets of his time, and often still today, which uses false comparison to highlight the beauty of another. Shakespeare’s use of structure, literary devices, and metaphor highlights his interesting subject angle and meaning.
This poem speaks of a love that is truer than denoting a woman's physical perfection or her "angelic voice." As those traits are all ones that will fade with time, Shakespeare exclaims his true love by revealing her personality traits that caused his love. Shakespeare suggests that the eyes of the woman he loves are not twinkling like the sun: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" (1). Her hair is compared to a wire: "If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head" (3). These negative comparisons may sound almost unloving, however, Shakespeare proves that the mistress outdistances any goddess. This shows that the poet appreciates her human beauties unlike a Petrarchan sonnet that stresses a woman's cheek as red a rose or her face white as snow. Straying away from the dazzling rhetoric, this Shakespearean poem projects a humane and friendly impression and elicits laughter while expressing a truer love. A Petrarchan sonnet states that love must never change; this poem offers a more genuine expression of love by describing a natural woman.
Ironically, most Elizabethan love poetry has very little to do with love at all. The writers of this poetry where men whose only desires were to have sex with women and used their writing to seduce them. This poetry brings to question if there was ever any real love in the Elizabethan age at all. Shakespeare provides some hope that there was in fact real love during this period but the majority of writing would suggest love was just a trade between men and woman, with the man providing a home, wealth and items such as clothes in exchange for sex. I believe Shakespeare was aware of the rarity of real love because he finishes his “Sonnet 130” with “And yet, by Heaven, I think my love as rare/ As any she belied with false compare.” (page 167, lines 13-14).
Love is something that affects us all, it can be the most valuable thing. in Shakespeare sonnets 18 & 116 we can understand the strong idea of the value of love while comprehending the writer's definition of love and his undying message that true love never fades. we can understand this through language techniques such as sonnet form, metaphor & personification.
...tly repeats a pattern. He is well aware of Petrarchan sonnet conventions. Shakespeare does not present loved one as virtuous or courtly, and also does not show love for a beautiful lady as represented in Petrarch’s sonnets. The cruel loved one in maximum of his sonnet is a young man, not a woman, and the ‘Dark Lady’ of sonnets 127-154 is neither virtuous nor ideally beautiful. Shakespeare even criticizes the traditional notion of a beautiful and virtuous lady.
Sonnet 18 is one of the most famous of Shakespeare’s works and is believed by many to be among the greatest love poems of all time. Like other sonnets, it is written in iambic pentameter form, consisting of four quatrains and a rhyming couplet. It deals with the theme of beauty and how it can be affected by prolonged lapses of time. In this sonnet, Shakespeare also claims to have the power to preserve his love’s beauty through poetry which has lead critics such as James Boyd-White to claim that it is actually ‘one long exercise in self-glorification’ rather than a love poem.