Living to Die
“Love is the emblem of eternity: it confounds all notion of time: effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end.”
~ Germaine De Stael
In William Shakespeare’s Sonnet #73 [That Time of Year Thou Mayst in Me Behold], the main theme of an approaching and inevitable death is applied. Moreover, this theme is being explained to a loved one in order for her to embrace and cherish her love for him while he still breathes. Beginning with the first quatrain, Shakespeare compares his age to that of autumn which stands for his advancement of years. Furthermore, in the second quatrain, Shakespeare elaborately compares his aging to a sunset, which is right before night, or in Shakespeare’s case, death. In the final quatrain Shakespeare further compares his life to the life of a fire, which burns bright at the beginning but eventually dies out and turns to ashes. The point of the final couplet is to have the reader realize that the entire sonnet is written to his lover; in order to symbolize the way that Shakespeare feels that she views him in natural terms. Furthermore it shows the undying nature of love present between them, which cannot die along with his death.
In the first quatrain, Shakespeare metaphorically compares himself to a tree in the season of fall. The season of fall is symbolic because it represents a transition in time, right after spring and summer when life is full of energy, and right before winter when everything is dead and ceased to be. He goes on to say 'That time of year thou mayst in me behold when yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold"(579). Shakespeare uses conceit to elaborately compare his furtherance of age to the aging tree in the fall. Just as the tree is helpless and naked to the elements, Shakespeare is naked and helpless in the hands of time. Furthermore, Shakespeare portrays the fact that his death is inevitable.
In the second quatrain, Shakespeare seems to say death comes like night, dark and quiet, like a thief, stealing when we sleep. Moreover, the speaker compares his age to the late twilight, "As after sunset fadeth in the west," and the remaining light is slowly extinguished into the darkness. Meaning, death will come, without question. The sun setting could also be regarded as the sun going to sleep, which plays on the last line of the quatrain, "Death's second self, which seals upon rest.
The concept of “mortality” (l. 1) is immediately foregrounded in the sonnet, with a significant enjambment on the word itself. So, from the outset, the speaker draws attention to his mortal state, which implies both life, an existence, and an eventual absence of that life. By then concretizing the abstract “mortality,” combining it with the word “[w]eighs” (2), the speaker produces a reification of mortality as an object weighing down on him; thus, a concept implying an absence, mortality, becomes an entity which affects him. The existence of an eventual absence of life, death, produces his turmoil.
The idea of “Outliving Oneself” depends on the concepts of trauma and most importantly the self, in a situation where said trauma obliterates the self for an indefinite amount of time. Brison presents the self in three interwoven parts: the embodied self, the self as narrative, and the autonomous self. Any of these parts of self depend largely on the individual’s society, culture, and interactions with other people. The embodied self represents the self in conjunction with the physical body, which our society separates from the self, to intimate a soul or personality, and also assigns genders to certain traits. Trauma dissolves this separation of body and mind because violence brings the traumatized to face their own mortality. They have to see their body as an object because their assailant treats it as an object. Trauma is so damaging because the self cannot exert any power whatsoever; the interaction between the assailant and the victim, essentially a social situation, robs the victim of a voice, because the assailant ignores it, a personality, because it is of no consequence to the assailant, and a self, because the assailant uses the body as an object, and the body plays a more central role in the interaction than the self does. Brison quotes Cathy Winkler in saying a rape is a “social murder,” because the rapist’s part in the interaction defines the victim through their actions that take away the victim’s sense of self. Any control that the victim felt over their body gets taken from them by the rapist. The consequences of this trauma include a loss of control over physiological functions, such as emotion and incapacitation from anxiety; the body and mind are out of balance, which leads the victim to be stigmatized by societ...
He’s just like everybody else when they come to America. On his first week in school, he starts out having no friends until Wei-Chen comes along. Even then he rejects him because he wants to be friends with anybody that’s decent and not a FOB. Eventually, he starts befriending him realizing he’s the best chance he’s got and they turn out to be best friends especially when Jin likes Amelia. “You think she likes him(Yang 94).” This quote shows that Jin accepted Wei- Chen as a friend and as a friend he asks him for advice. From then on, the two become inseparable even in the end there’s still that small spark in them. Moreover, Jin becomes really insecure about himself and whether or not he’ll be accepted by Amelia. This turns out to be a crucial point in his life where everything he has learned about his culture gets tested. For example, Jin becomes Danny the ‘typical white boy’ that everybody likes in high school. Jin still gets rejected by Amelia and her friend Greg is the cause of it which causes Jin to be selfish. “TODAY WHEN TIMMY CALLED ME A… A CHINK, I REALIZED… DEEP DOWN INSIDE… I KIND OF FEEL LIKE THAT ALL THE TIME. “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! (Yang 187-188)” This text reveals that Jin got tired of waiting for Amelia and that he took his friendship with Wei- Chen for granted which ended their friendship. When Suzy said that it triggered Jin into
However, something that in no way can be ignored is that “About 75 percent of the 1.2 million Americans who divorce each year eventually remarry.” So this is something that will somehow affect not only at the society level, but also will affect the individual that the only thing they want is to start a quiet life than they had before, creating families of different backgrounds that when they getting together this will create another household in a vast society.
This 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.
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 love described in this sonnet is a dangerous, obsessive, and possessive love. Fenghua Ma states “the love that appears in Shakespeare’s early works takes on a bright and optimistic look” (Ma 920). Following Shakespeare’s early works, he transitioned to a period focused primarily on themes discussing tragic love. In a sense, the development of the theme in Sonnet 75 could be compared to Shakespeare 's career. The beginning of the sonnet discusses how essential the narrator 's lover is to his life. However, as the sonnet continues, the positive, optimistic view of love disappears, just as Shakespeare 's themes transitioned from optimistic views of love to tragic love throughout his career. On certain days, the narrator describes that he is over satisfied by looking at his lover excessively, but on other days, he is deprived of not having seen his lover at all. Shakespeare writes, “Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day, / Or gluttoning on all, or all away” (Shakespeare l.13-14). The narrator is admitting to having an obsession and unhealthy relationship with his lover. He either sees too much or not enough of his
The third, and final, metaphor is when Shakespeare is comparing himself to the fire. Shakespeare beautifully states, "In me thou seest the glowing of such fire that on the ashes of his youth lie, as the deathbed whereon it must expire, consumed with that which it was nourished by" (568). . As the fire is dying so is Shakespeare.
In Hamlet’s first soliloquy (ll. 1.2.129-159), Shakespeare uses a biblical lexicon, apostrophes, and depictions of corporeal decay to show Hamlet’s preoccupation with the fate of a person after death.
Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare is widely read and studied. But what is Shakespeare trying to say? Though it seems there will not be a simple answer, for a better understanding of Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, this essay offers an explication of the sonnet from The Norton Anthology of English Literature:
In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, also known as “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” represents and discusses the love and beauty of his beloved. Also, the speaker refers to his love more sweet, temperate, and fair than all the beauty that he can see in nature. He also speaks how the sun can be dim and that nature’s beauty is random: “And often is his gold complexion dimm’d / And every fair from fair sometimes declines” (6-7). At the end of the poem the speaker explains that they beauty of the person that is being mentioned is not so short because, his love with live as long as people are still reading this sonnet. The beauty of his beloved with last longer than nature, because although nature is beautiful flowers and other things still have to die: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see / so long lives this and this gives life to thee” (13-14) Also, the speaker is comparing his love to a summer’s day, but does not really say anything specific or that the qualities given to his beloved are more superior to a summer’s day, which can allow the reader to understand that his beloved can stay young, beautiful, and never going to die.
Sonnet 71 is one of 154 sonnets written by William Shakespeare, and although it may rank fairly low on the popularity scale, it clearly demonstrates a pessimistic and morbid tone. With the use of metaphors, personification, and imagery this sonnet focuses on the poet’s feelings about his death and how the young should mourn him after he has died. Throughout the sonnet, there appears to be a continual movement of mourning, and with a profound beauty that can only come from Shakespeare. Shakespeare appeals to our emotional sense of “feeling” with imagery words like vile, dead, be forgot, and decay, and we gain a better understanding of the message and feelings dictated by the speaker.
“Such ‘unnatural’ tendencies have an intimate relation to genius, and what we call ‘genius’ is, exactly, the awareness, and expression, of planes, or dimensions, beyond the biological and the temporal. That is why Shakespeare’s Sonnets are so deeply concerned with the problems of time, death and eternity” (Knight, 69-70). Maybe Shakespeare knew that true literary genius existed in the study of the relationship man has with death and certainty, so he pointed his writing in this direction for literary immortality. Maybe yet he was simply fascinated with death in general, and his genius shined through in his writing. Regardless of his motives, it is clear that Shakespeare was at some level fascinated with time and its overwhelming destructive powers. This fascination was evident in almost all of Shakespeare’s works, but most notably in his Sonnets. Not only did Shakespeare realize the fragility of life, but he found a way to overcome the universe’s inevitability with poetry. Although most of Shakespeare’s Sonnets are dedicated to a certain young youth, this dedication is only a front to carry on one of Shakespeare’s greatest concerns; the certainty of time and death. With the use of the written word, Shakespeare found a way to overcome the power of time and immortalize all that he loved, whomever and whatever that may be, inside the power of his ink.
While Shakespeare and Spenser have their own sonnet forms and different rhyme schemes, the topics in which they write about in “Sonnet 18” and “Sonnet 75” possess many similarities. A major theme in both of the sonnets is the idea of immortal love. Both sonnets straightforwardly mention the idea of love eternalizing, defying all of time, and conquering all obstacles. Spenser unmistakably mentions that “whenas death shall al the world subdue, our love shall live, and later life renew”. Correspondingly, Shakespeare declares that his and the subject’s love “shall not fade,” but continue to grow. When it comes to a matter of love defying time, both sonnets remain in synchronization, expressing that even with death, love will go on and remain forever, through poetry and memory. Spenser conveys his lover as one who “shall live by fame”, because through “[his] verse [her] virtues rare shall eternalize”. Evidently, Shakespeare believes that as history writes itself, he and his subject’s love will become one with time because “when in et...