After reading “The Reformation” and two of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, I have come to realize that someone else’s reality may not be another’s. Throughout these literary works, the authors are describing their perspectives on certain subjects. The minds of the audiences for these literary pieces are opened to a whole new way of seeing a certain topic. In “The Reformation”, readers see why Protestants thought it was right to leave the Roman Catholic Church; and in the Sonnets, the audience get an image of Shakespeare’s perspective of what love should be like. One example of differentiating perspectives, is “The Reformation” period in England. In the early sixteenth century England had “a single religion, Catholicism” (324). All was well until the …show more content…
“Sonnet Eighteen” was one of the first of the Sonnets to become very well known. It “sets a fearful problem in turning it into prose”, because it is so straight forward and easy to comprehend (Rowse 39). Throughout this poem, the reader will acknowledge that Shakespeare “finds the human beauty “more lovely” and more lasting than nature’s” (Kastan 10). In the Sonnet, Shakespeare is comparing a woman to a summer’s day. He uses imagery to differentiate the harshness of summer and beauty of the woman. The audience can see the speaker’s perspective of youth and beauty throughout the lines in the …show more content…
In lines two and three, Shakespeare writes to the woman “thou art more lovely and more temperate: / rough winds do shake the darling buds of May” (2-3). You can see in those two lines that the poet views nature as harsh and unenjoyable, but contrasts his viewing of the woman as lovely and with more mild characteristics. After describing the qualities of nature and the woman, the speaker goes on to talk about the time given for these assets to last. The speaker believes that the “lease” which translates to “allotted time”, allowed for summer is not enough to compare to the eternal beauty of a woman (4)(Kastan 10). On line nine he talks about the time frame of the woman’s beauty, he writes “but thy eternal summer shall not fade” meaning that her beauty cannot be phased by time, unlike nature (9). In those few lines, the audience can see that although a summer’s day can be rough only for a little while, the beauty of the woman is unfading. At the end of the poem, the audience can understand that the woman’s beauty is sealed in the poem “so long lives this, and this gives life to thee” (14). The next new perspective on love comes from Shakespeare’s “Sonnet One Hundred and Sixteen”. “Sonnet One Hundred and Sixteen” “sets forth an ideal of true love as something permanent and never changing” (Kastan 17). Integrated throughout the poem are various circumstances in which true
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Show MoreThis is an enjoyable sonnet that uses nature imagery, found extensively in Petrarca, that Shakespeare uses to get his point across. Not much explication is needed, aside the sustained images of nature, to fully understand its intent, but I would like to point out a peculiar allusion. When reading line 3, "the violet past prime" has made me think of Venus and Adonis. In the end, Adonis melts into the earth and a violet sprouts where his body was, which Venus then places in her heart, signifying the love she has for him. Reading this into the poem makes the few following lines more significant. Having Adonis portrayed as the handsome youth, Shakespeare is alluding to the death of youth (in general and to the young man) through the sonnet. In the next line, it is not certain if "sable" is an adjective or a noun and if "curls" is a noun, referring to hair (which is plausible) or a verb modifying "sable." Invoking the allusion to Adonis here, Shakespeare portends that if Adonis did live longer, he too would have greying hair; thus, Shakespeare sees ["behold"] an Adonis figure, the young man, past his youth.
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.
Love is portrayed in numerous mediums: song, history, rhythmic dance, or poetry. These four instruments of love typically identify the notion as subjective, lifeless, and static. Song writer of this age often convey love as a goal in life not as an element of living. While people from different periods in history used love to gain power giving love a bare and emotionless personnel. And lastly dance and poetry perceives love as inaudible and plain, because the vary performers and authors have not experienced love on an intimate or divine level. However William Shakespeare is one of few to frequently incorporate simple, yet complex terminology in sonnets to convey different concepts of love. The comprehensive
Shakespeare’s themes are mostly conventional topics, such as love and beauty. Nevertheless, Shakespeare presents these themes in his own unique fashion, most notably by addressing the poems of beauty not to a fair maiden, but instead to a young man: ‘‘shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate” (book). Shakespeare points out that the youth’s beauty is more perfect then the beauty of a summer day. It is also “more temperate”, in other words more gentle, more restrained whereas the summer’s day might have violent excesses in store. At first glance of sonnet 18, it’s pretty much certain that one would think Shakespeare is referring to a woman, not a man. The idea of a man describing another man with such choice of words is always seen with a different eye. Several even stated that Shakespeare is homosexual. Whichever the case may be, Shakespeare painted beauty in the most original matter. He dared to do what everybody else didn’t, or maybe feared to, and accomplished his goal with flying colors. Besides, in his sonnets, Shakespeare states that the young man was made for a woman and urges the man to marry so he can pass on h...
The theme of love and beauty is explored in all of these sonnets. With “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” Shakespeare is speaking about how her beauty will last forever even though he compares his lover to summer he states that her beauty will be much longer than summer because,
First, Shakespeare uses figurative language to demonstrate the Fair Youth beauty and explaining how it will not last for him. With that being said, the only way his beauty will carry on is if he reproduces. The poet begins the poem with a metaphor: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” This line is describing the Fair Youth to a summer’s day claiming that a summer is only contemporary so his beauty is not going to last a
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 begins with the "whim of an inventive mind," (Vendler, 120) a rhetorical question asking if he should compare the subject of the sonnet to a Summer’s day. After the readers see that Shakespeare does not ask to compare her to anything else, we realize that this one proposed comparison to a Summer’s day is, in his mind, perfection (Vendler, 120). However, in order to truly praise the woman, he must prove that she is "more lovely and more temperate" by deprecating the metaphor (Vendler, 121).
The only way for her to immortalize her beauty is to have children, who will be beautiful like her. As long as “eyes can see” they will see her in her children. All men will see this family and know of its ancestry. The “this” that “gives life to thee” may be their children. These eternal lines would grow in time, unlike the lines of this poem which will forever be a 14-line sonnet. Within Shakespeare’s sonnets as a whole this is a transition between the sonnets telling woman they should have his babies and the sonnets in which he tells how he is such a great poet. This poem is often seen as the first of his poem telling what a great writer he is, when it is really the last of his poems about having children.
In “Sonnet 18,” the theme is that what is written in poetry is everlasting; Shakespeare is talking about the beauty of a woman and saying that her beauty will never go away because he is putting it into a poem. He begins the poem by comparing her to a summer day, but then starts talking about how she is much more beautiful. He continues comparing a summer day to his true love and shows how she is much fairer throughout the whole poem. He says, for instance, “But thy eternal summer shall not fade, nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st.” Shakespeare is saying that his true loves beauty will never go away and that she will remain beautiful forever. However, in “Sonnet 130” the theme is more about appearances and how you can love someone, who might not be as beautiful. Throughout the poem, Shakespeare is trying to say the looks are not everything. The only thing he talks about is the way his lady looks; he does not mention her personality. For example, he says “I love to hear her speak, yet well I know that music hath a far more pleasing sound;
When examining the presence of time and certainty in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the best place to begin is with Sonnet 18. This is by far one of Shakespeare’s most famous Sonnets, and probably his most misunderstood by the common reader. Though this Sonnet seems to be a simple love poem on the...
Sonnet Twenty opens with the line “A woman’s face, with nature’s own hand painted.” This leaves us with the impression that the narrator, an unidentified young man, perhaps even Shakespeare himself, is describing a beautiful young woman. A woman so beautiful, in fact, that she has no use for cosmetics, because Nature personally took time to craft her. Nature is an artist and the object of our narrator’s affection, which the reader originally believes to be a woman, is her work of art, her canvas, so to speak. Continuing from this is the second line, “Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion”. This line contains our, antithesis—“master-mistress”—in that the pair of words are complete opposites. These titles of ranks suggest that the woman simply mesmerizes our narrator. She is the object of his love and sexual desire. In fact, the word “mistress” suggests that our narrator may be participating in infidel...
This sonnet is an anti-love poem that ironically shows how the fairness of a lady is contingent upon nature's blessings and her external manifestations. The Spenserian style brings unity to this sonnet, in that it's theme and rhyme is interwoven throughout, but the focus of her "fairness" is divided into an octave and a sestet. The first eight lines praise her physical features (hair, cheeks, smile), while the last six lines praise her internal features (words, spirit, heart). This sonnet intentionally hides the speaker's ridicule behind counterfeit love-language, using phrases like: "fair golden hairs" (line 1), and "rose in her red cheeks" (line 3), and "her eyes the fire of love does spark" (line 4). This traditional love language fills pages of literature and song, and has conventionally been used to praise the attributes of a lover; but this sonnet betrays such language by exhibiting a critique rather than commendation. This sonnet appears to praise the beauty of a lady but ironically ridicules her by declaring that her "fairness" is contingent upon nature, physical features, and displaying a gentle spirit, which hides her pride.
This themes of beauty is closely related to the overall immortality theme. Sonnet Eighteen is ultimately a response to the question posed in the first line. “The speaker answers this question in the negative, suggesting that the object of his affection is ‘more lovely and more temperate’ than a mere summer’s day. Though summer days are pleasant, they are neither perfect nor everlasting. Their finiteness and propensity for bad weather make them, the speaker argues, as poor comparison with the object of his affection (Napierkowski and Ruby).” The speaker’s use of ‘temperate’ spoken in three syllables is significant, because he will continue to praise the qualities of endurance and consistency over those of change. The speaker uses extreme to emphasize the beauty of the subject: ‘more lovely,’ ‘all too short,’ and ‘too hot,’ but at no point describes the subject’s actual physical features. We are never told any specifics about the subject’s appearance, instead we are told that their beauty is greater than that of a summer’s day and the sun. Then, the speaker gives us a twist by stating that the subject is not as good as a summer’s day, but even better. Shakespeare continues to reinforce this by listing the flaws of summer; the season that has ‘too brutish winds to shake the darling buds of May.’ We are also told how summer is ‘too short,’ thus enforcing an impending mortality in contrast to the immortality being extended to the subject who is being immortalized within the poem. Beauty can fade by chance or through the course of nature. The repetition of ‘fair’ highlights fate’s inescapable hold over everything that possesses beauty. The speaker reaffirms that his subject’s beauty will never fade, but will be preserved within this poem. This self-assured claim leads us to the point that this poem was not actually to pay a beloved a
In William Shakespeare’s sonnet “shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” the audience is introduced to a poem in which he himself goes into depth about the person he is infatuated with. The author does not give any type of hints telling the audience who the poem is towards because it can be for both male and female. That’s the interesting part about William Shakespeare’s work which is to second hand guess yourself and thinking otherwise. Making you think and think rational when you read his work. The sonnet “Shall I compare thee to a summers day” is one of his most famous and published poem. Shakespeare’s tone of voice at the commence of the poem is somewhat relaxed and joyful because he is going on talking about the person he is intrigued by. Throughout the passage Metaphors, similes and imagery can all be found in the poem itself
In the Sonnets, William Shakespeare expresses the different types of love between a young man and a dark lady. His sonnets briefly describe the importance of love, beauty, and the ravages of time. There are different figures of speech used throughout the sonnets such as, metaphor (an implicit or implied comparison between two things that have common characteristics between one another). In the introductory sonnets, Shakespeare portrays beauty to the young man and urges him to have children, so his beauty can be immortal. This leads to carrying on one’s beauty to leave a memory of an image. However, Shakespeare’s main focus was on the three themes: beauty, love, and the passing time; this demonstrates the importance of beauty from one person to another, by not letting beauty burn itself out through the passing time comes.