LOVE is word we Homo sapiens have defined and yet struggled to understand throughout time and different cultures. It is a word that can mean simultaneously both pain and ecstasy. Such a simple four-letter word has been the bane of some poet’s existence and at the same time been the muse for others. When pondered about, love can be determined as an easy emotion but at the same time vastly hard to achieve. This contradiction and overall ideology has been the topic of poets, writers and artist since humans first invented the word. Divided by two different artistic movements, both Sir Thomas Wyatt and William Shakespeare were no strangers to the subject of love. While Wyatt wrote primarily poems and is credited as the father of sonnets, Shakespeare wrote both plays and sonnets. Each author tackle’s the subject from there own prospective and offers their thoughts on what they think the word love means. Two sonnets that can represent both authors’ attitudes on love are Wyatt’s “The Long Love” and Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130”. While some similarities between “Sonnet 130” and “The Long Love” are evident, the differences are striking. Both sonnets offering wonderful examples on what two brilliant minds think of the overdone and universal theme of love.
The quote: “The long love that in my thought doth harbor”, not only includes the title of the sonnet within the first line it also sets the tone for Sir Thomas Wyatt’s romantic and Petrarchan sonnet. From this line the reader right away gets a yearning feeling, an almost sad and melancholy feeling, because of the word long. If you were to remove the word long you would find that line too much more pleasant. This attitude is continued thought the sonnet and is one of the key differences betwe...
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... that doesn’t "treads on the ground.” love that is "as rare/ as any she belied " and no amount of visions of "a goddess" would change that.
In the end, what is seemingly two simple sonnets about love turn out to be two very different viewpoints on the topic: two men writing about a topic that clearly is important in their lives. Reading each poem is a gateway into the author’s mind, letting us see their own thoughts and feelings on the subject. Sir Thomas Wyatt seems to feel almost depressed and hopeless while understanding the rarity of finding true love. Where as Shakespeare is confident and realistic but also takes love for granted and doesn’t open up emotionally. Because love isn’t as simple and straightforward as most poets suggest, these two sonnets are great examples on how this universal and worldwide topic can be expressed in many different way.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was a Renaissance poet and playwright who wrote and published the original versions of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language, and often called England’s national poet. Several of his works became extremely well known, thoroughly studied, and enjoyed all over the world. One of Shakespeare’s most prominent plays is titled The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. In this tragedy, the concept that is discussed and portrayed through the characters is love, as they are recognized as being “in love”.
The imposition of the British aggressor is even made apparent through the structure of the work, the two sonnet form stanzas not only highlight the inadequacy of the loveless union, but with their Shakespearean rhyme scheme also imply the cultural dominance of English tradition. The use of half rhymes, such as ‘pulse’ and ‘burst’ or ‘pain’ and ‘within’ leaves the stanzas feel...
The sonnets deal with the speaker who loves a lady, but she will not permit him to declare his love. It is the portrayal of emotions complaints and personal expression of love by lover. Wyatt's sonnet is the insightful representation of the poet's dual observation of love. He exposes two sides of love, physical and spiritual but there is no bond between them. This concept is different from the Petrach's mold of love concept. However, Surrey follows the traditional petrachian theme version. His sonnet is much more commanding version. He expresses the speaker's feelings as unrelinquishing, relating love as lives pinnacle achievement.
Shakespeare’s sonnets include love, the danger of lust and love, difference between real beauty and clichéd beauty, the significance of time, life and death and other natural symbols such as, star, weather and so on. Among the sonnets, I found two sonnets are more interesting that show Shakespeare’s love for his addressee. The first sonnet is about the handsome young man, where William Shakespeare elucidated about his boundless love for him and that is sonnet 116. The poem explains about the lovers who have come to each other freely and entered into a relationship based on trust and understanding. The first four lines reveal the poet’s love towards his lover that is constant and strong and will not change if there any alternation comes. Next four lines explain about his love which is not breakable or shaken by the storm and that love can guide others as an example of true love but that extent of love cannot be measured or calculated. The remaining lines of the third quatrain refer the natural love which can’t be affected by anything throughout the time (it can also mean to death). In the last couplet, if
Sonnet 130 is Shakespeare’s harsh yet realistic tribute to his quite ordinary mistress. Conventional love poetry of his time would employ Petrarchan imagery and entertain notions of courtly love. Francis Petrarch, often noted for his perfection of the sonnet form, developed a number of techniques for describing love’s pleasures and torments as well as the beauty of the beloved. While Shakespeare adheres to this form, he undermines it as well. Through the use of deliberately subversive wordplay and exaggerated similes, ambiguous concepts, and adherence to the sonnet form, Shakespeare creates a parody of the traditional love sonnet. Although, in the end, Shakespeare embraces the overall Petrarchan theme of total and consuming love.
The love that a person has for someone is not the same for other people. They can look at their love through nature or just by their beauty. Shakespeare has the ability to explain his love for someone by using nature as a reference. Looking at two of Shakespeare’s sonnets 18 and 130 explore the differences and similarities between one another. In Sonnet 18 and 130, both show Shakespeare’s knowledge in developing his love and respect.
In “Sonnet XVII,” the text begins by expressing the ways in which the narrator does not love, superficially. The narrator is captivated by his object of affection, and her inner beauty is of the upmost significance. The poem shows the narrator’s utter helplessness and vulnerability because it is characterized by raw emotions rather than logic. It then sculpts the image that the love created is so personal that the narrator is alone in his enchantment. Therefore, he is ultimately isolated because no one can fathom the love he is encountering. The narrator unveils his private thoughts, leaving him exposed and susceptible to ridicule and speculation. However, as the sonnet advances toward an end, it displays the true heartfelt description of love and finally shows how two people unite as one in an overwhelming intimacy.
One striking difference between the two poems is that Petrarch directs the final line of his sonnet towards his mistress, claiming ‘she’ is the causer of his ‘sate’. By contrast, Wyatt directs the entirety of the sonnet to the ‘third-party’ reader, despite having kept reasonably close to Petrarch’s original before this moment. This departure suggests how, in Wyatt’s work as a whole, despair and bitterness tend to predominate, whilst in Petrarch the emphasis remains on a hope for transcendence. ‘Farewell, Love’ can also be used to depict Wyatt’s despair and bitterness, as it follows the speaker’s lamenting attack upon love itself. Throughout the sonnet, the speaker makes it appear as though he has escaped love’s clutches, particularly when describing its “baited hooks [that] shall tangle [him] no more” (XXXI, l. 2) and that in him it claims “no more authority.” (XXXI, l. 11) In these two instances, it appears as though love is a dominating form, which had hooked the speaker at the earliest opportunity. The speaker is now addressing Love after being ‘freed’ from its ensuring embrace, and tells it to “go trouble younger hearts” (XXXI, l. 10) as he as aged too cynical for it to delude him. The concluding couplet summarises the speaker’s experience in love “For hitherto though I’ve lost my time, / Me list no
Though ballads and Sonnets are poems that can depict a picture of someone’s beloved, they can have many differences. For instance, a Ballad is a story in short stanzas such as a song would have, where as a sonnet typical, has a traditional structure of 14 lines employing several rhyme schemes and adheres to a tight thematic organization. Both Robert Burn’s ballad “The Red, Red, Rose, and William Shakespeare’s “of the Sonnet 130 “they express their significant other differently. However, “The Red, Red, Rose depicts the Falling in new love through that of a young man’s eyes, and Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 depicts a more realistic picture of the mistress he writes about; which leaves the reader to wonder if beauty is really in the eyes of the beholder.
Therefore, because William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” and Edmund Spenser’s “Sonnet 75” share the idea that love is sincere and eternal, they can be looked upon as similar in theme. However, although similar in theme, Shakespeare’s intent is portraying the true everlasting beauty of his love, which is already achieved, whereas Spenser concentrates more on trying to entice his desired love, remaining optimistic throughout the entire poem.
Much has been made (by those who have chosen to notice) of the fact that in Shakespeare's sonnets, the beloved is a young man. It is remarkable, from a historical point of view, and raises intriguing, though unanswerable, questions about the nature of Shakespeare's relationship to the young man who inspired these sonnets. Given 16th-Century England's censorious attitudes towards homosexuality, it might seem surprising that Will's beloved is male. However, in terms of the conventions of the poetry of idealized, courtly love, it makes surprisingly little difference whether Will's beloved is male or female; to put the matter more strongly, in some ways it makes more sense for the beloved to be male.
Love is the ubiquitous force that drives all people in life. If people did not want, give, or receive love, they would never experience life because it is the force that completes a person. People rely on this seemingly absent force although it is ever-present. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is an influential poet who describes the necessity of love in her poems from her book Sonnets from the Portuguese. She writes about love based on her relationship with her husband. Her life is dependent on him, and she expresses this same reliance of love in her poetry. She uses literary devices to strengthen her argument for the necessity of love. The necessity of love is a major theme in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Sonnet 14,” “Sonnet 43,” and “Sonnet 29.”
Lackluster love is the subject postulated in both sonnets, Petrarch 90 and Shakespeare 130. This is a love that endures even after beauteous love has worn off, or in Petrarch, a love that never was. The Petrarchan sonnet utilizes fantasy to describe love. It depicts love that is exaggerated and unrealistic. Shakespeare’s sonnet, on the other hand, is very sarcastic but it is more realistic as compared to the Petrarch 90. Petrarchan sonnets, also called Italian sonnets were the first sonnets to be written, and they have remained the most common sonnets (Hollander 28). They were named after the Italian poet Petrarch. Its structure takes the form of two stanzas, the first one an octave, in that, it has eight lines, and the next stanza is a sestet, meaning that it has six lines. The rhyme scheme suits the Italian language, which has the feature of being rhyme rich, and it, can take the forms of abbaabba, cdcdcd, or cdecde. These sonnets present an answerable charge in the first stanza, and a turn in the sestet. The sestet is the counter argument of the octave.
During the Renaissance period, most poets were writing love poems about their lovers/mistresses. The poets of this time often compared love to high, unrealistic, and unattainable beauty. Shakespeare, in his sonnet 18, continues the tradition of his time by comparing the speakers' love/mistress to the summer time of the year. It is during this time of the year that the flowers and the nature that surround them are at there peak for beauty. The theme of the poem is to show the speakers true interpretation of beauty. Beauties worst enemy is time and although beauty might fade it can still live on through a person's memory or words of a poem. The speaker realizes that beauty, like the subject of the poem, will remain perfect not in the eyes of the beholder but the eyes of those who read the poem. The idea of beauty living through the words of a poem is tactfully reinforced throughout the poem using linking devices such as similes and metaphors.
In Shakespeare’s sonnet 130, the speaker ponders the beauty, or the lack thereof, of his lover. Throughout the sonnet, the speaker presents his lover as an unattractive mistress with displeasing features, but in fact, the speaker is ridiculing, through the use of vivid imagery, the conventions of love poems and the way woman are portrayed through the use of false comparisons. In the end, the speaker argues that his mistress may not be perfect, but in his eyes, her beauty is equal to any woman who is abundantly admired and put through the untrue comparison.