Shakespeare has been noted as one of most quoted romantic writers. One of his most iterated lines is “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day, Thou are more lovely and more temperate” (Sonnet 12, 1-2). Despite using copious Petrarchan images Shakespeare also coveys the punitive characteristics of love as seen in Sonnet 147. Shakespeare articulates his definition of love through fashioning love as a disease by using structure, metaphor, tone and imagery.
Shakespearean sonnets contain three quatrains and a couplet with a strict rhyme scheme. The quatrains alternate in rhyme (ABAB CDCD EFEF) and end with rhyming couplet. The entire fourteen lines are written in iambic pentameter – which consist of five iambic feet. Iambic feet contain an unstressed syllable followed stressed syllable. Furthermore each quatrain introduces or expands upon an idea. As demonstrated in Sonnet 147 that focuses around comparing his love to a disease each quatrain advances this point. The first quatrain depicts the disease itself and his vulnerability to it:
“My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.” (1043)
The second quatrain expands on said metaphor and adds a new idea. The speaker reckons the idea of reason to as foolish as a physician attempting to cure him of lovesickness – an impossible feat:
“My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did expect.” (1043)
The third quatrain describes the consequences for abandoning reason as the narrator is now driven mad. Furthermore the narrator acknowledges that he is n...
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...onnet 147 employs literary techniques in order to covey the turbulent side of love. Many of Shakespeare’s other sonnets focus of the beauty of ideal love, but Sonnet 147 shows the destructive side. Love can be all consuming and drive one to madness. Similar to have fevers can cause delusions; men can turn mad when in love. The structure, metaphor, tone and imagery contribute in carrying the overall message – that love is a disease throughout Sonnet 147.
Works Cited
Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 12.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Sixteenth Century the Early Seventeenth Century. Ed. M.H Abrams. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. 2000. 1030-.
Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 147.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Sixteenth Century the Early Seventeenth Century. Ed. M.H Abrams. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. 2000. 11043.
In “Sonnet,” Billy Collins satirizes the classical sonnet’s volume to illustrate love in only “…fourteen lines…” (1). Collins’s poem subsists as a “Sonnet,” though there exists many differences in it countering the customarily conventional structure of a sonnet. Like Collins’s “Sonnet,” Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” also faces incongruities from the classic sonnet form as he satirizes the concept of ideal beauty that was largely a convention of writings and art during the Elizabethan era. Although these poem venture through different techniques to appear individually different from the classic sonnet, the theme of love makes the poems analogous.
Wilson, John Dover. An Introduction to the Sonnets of Shakespeare: For the Use of Historians
Canfield Reisman, Rosemary M. “Sonnet 43.” Masterplots II. Philip K. Jason. Vol. 7. Pasadena: Salem Press, 2002. 3526-3528. Print.
Shakespeare, William, "Sonnet 42." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Eds. M.H. Abrams and Stephen Greenblatt. 7th ed. 2 vols. New York: Norton, 2000. 1:1033.
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.
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.
Steele, Felicia Jean. "Shakespeare's SONNET 130." Explicator 62.3 (2004): 132-137. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Nov. 2013.
Spencer, Edmund. “Amoretti: Sonnet 37”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Gen. ed. David Simpson. 8th ed. Vol. 1. New York: Norton, 2006. 904. Print.
In Sonnet number one-hundred sixteen Shakespeare deals with the characteristics of a love that is “not time’s fool”, that true love that will last through all (Ln: 9). This sonnet uses the traditional Shakespearian structure of three quatrains and a couplet, along with a standard rhyme scheme. The first and third quatrains deal with the idea that love is “an ever-fixed mark”, something that does not end or change over time (Ln: 5). Shakespeare illustrates this characteristic of constancy through images of love resisting movemen...
Shakespeare, William. "Sonnet 18." The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1. M. H. Abrams, ed. W. W. Norton (New York): 1993.
Love can be conveyed in many ways. It can be expressed through movements, gestures or even words on a paper. In William Shakespeare’s poems, “Sonnet 18” and “Sonnet 130,” both revolve around the idea of love, but are expressed in a different ways in terms of the mood, theme and the language used.
Shakespeare, William. "Sonnet 130." The Longman Anthology of British Literature: compact edition. Ed. David Damrosch. Addison-Wesley, 2000. 556.
Steele, Felicia Jean. "Shakespeare's SONNET 130." Explicator 62.3 (2004): 132-137. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Nov. 2013.
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
The fourteen line sonnet is constructed by three quatrains and one couplet. With the organization of the poem, Shakespeare accomplishes to work out a different idea in each of the three quatrains as he writes the sonnet to lend itself naturally. Each of the quatrain contains a pair of images that create one universal idea in the quatrain. The poem is written in a iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Giving the poem a smooth rhyming transition from stanza to