Exploring Various Sonnets

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Poetry is a beautiful manner to express emotions, successfully accomplished by some of the finest writers in history. Best said by Robert Frost, “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” Infinite pieces of art have been created on love; life and death yet only some leave behind a mark. The never-ending pursuit to express the intense emotion of love is practiced best by Shakespeare in Sonnet 116 and Sonnet 130. The ageless essence of love is explored in Sonnet 116 while Sonnet 130 is an enchanting poem about the unrealistic expectations of beauty in love. However, with love comes tragedy. Projected beautifully in the poems “Death Be Not Proud” and “When I have Fears that I may Cease to be.” John Donne uses personification to bravely address the unsettling powers of Death, while, Keats in When I have Fears that I may Cease to be recognizes Death as an untimely nuisance taking captive his future accomplishments. Life is explored in What Lips My Lips Have Kissed by Edna Millay along with The World is too much with us by William Wordsworth composed this poem as an admirer of nature living in a materialistic world whereas, What Lips My Lips Have Kissed travels with a withered woman ruminating her past; two unrelated experiences yet a part of life. Poems abundant in passion, as such, helps convey difficult sentiments through words.

Ordinary beauty and compassion is of great importance to Shakespeare in Sonnet 130. He discards the customary metaphors and embellishment of conventional beauty and describes his mistress as a perfectly imperfect being. He disregards the accepted forms of splendor for she is nothing like it; her “eyes nothing like the sun,” coral is far redder tha...

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...sts” that “tap and sigh…and listen for reply.” Flashes of her youth’s escapades evoke a painful reality as mean turned to the speaker at “midnight with a cry.” Reminiscing, she addresses that “summer sang” in her once but now all that remains of her is a “lonely tree” in the wintertime. She cant seem to gather a sense of who she is, unable to name the “birds that vanished one by one.”

Exploring insightful poems by such great poets exposes emotions that are complex to describe, skillfully done in the above-mentioned poems. Shakespeare is the undefeated king of love poems, ranging from imperfect beauty to timeless love; John Keats and John Donne examine death in completely contrasting ways; Edna Millay and William Wordsworth analyze life and the self-created woe in their reflective poems. Thus, poetry effectively saunters on themes such as love, death and life.

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