Shakespeare's Ideas About Love in His Sonnets
The two sonnets Shall I Compare Thee and Let Me Not are by William
Shakespeare. Love is the main theme of both sonnets. Shall I Compare
Thee is written for Shakespeare's love, and it is more personal and
cheerful. He takes apart the greatness of a summer's day and compares
it to the subject of the poem, but the subject (whom we assume is a
'she') is always more divine and she is the most beautiful thing he
has ever seen. The sonnet states that the subject is "…more lovely and
more temperate…" than the finest summer's day. Let Me Not is a
philosophical interpretation of love, and implies that this is what
love should be like. In the end Shakespeare almost dares the reader to
challenge him about what he has written and declares that if he is
wrong then "…I never writ, nor man ever loved." The aim of this essay
is to illustrate how Shakespeare express' his ideas about love in
these two sonnets.
Shall I Compare Thee and Let Me Not are typical Shakespearean sonnets.
They begin with twelve lines of quatrains then ends with a rhyming
couplet. There are four lines to each quatrain, and three quatrains
before the couplet. The quatrains rhyme every other line. The first
quatrain of Let Me Not states that true love can never change: "…love
is not love which alters when alteration findes…" In the second
quatrain he uses the term "wandring barke" to discuss how love guides
the lost and the lonely. Even though we get old and die, true love
will sustain is what the third quatrain is about when he says, "…love
not alters not with his breefe houres and weekes but beares it out
even to the...
... middle of paper ...
...this by saying "Thy eternall Sommer shall not
fade" and makes it more romantic. The beauty of summer reinforces her
beauty in the poem, because she is so much more beautiful than a
summer's day and he is admiration of her beauty.
Both poems convey love in different ways. Shall I Compare Thee is more
light hearted and romantic and is mainly about confessing how much
love he has for a certain woman. Let Me Not however is more serious
and philosophical but also romantic in the way that he is stating how
love should be, what love is, and what love is not. I prefer Shall I
Compare Thee to Let Me Not because Shall I Compare Thee is more
cheerful and happy and the love that he claims to the person in the
sonnet is passionate. Let Me Not is about love in general, Shall I
Compare Thee is to a lover and is the ideal love poem.
Romeo and Juliet’s first meeting is very poetic and metaphorical in the play. Their encounter occurs at the Capulets’ party in the evening. Romeo sees Juliet and immediately falls head over heels for her. Once he comprehends his feeling of love for her, he speaks of his admiration for her, praising, “Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight,/ For I ne’er saw true beauty till this night” (1.5.59–60). Romeo then walks over to Juliet at the end of the dance, and him and her begin to exchange words in beautiful sonnet form. While he professes his love for her, he compares himself to a pilgrim and depicts Juliet as a saint, explaining that if he kissed her it would rid him of his sin. Juliet counters and tells him, “For saints
Lust and Love in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 and Campion’s There is a Garden in Her Face
William Shakespeare's sonnets deal with two very distinct individuals: the blond young man and the mysterious dark-haired woman. The young man is the focus of the earlier numbered sonnets while the latter ones deal primarily with the dark-haired woman. The character of the young man and a seductive mistress are brought together under passionate circumstances in Shakespeare's "Sonnet 42." The sexual prowess of the mistress entangles both Shakespeare and the young man in her web of flesh. This triangular sonnet brings out Shakespeare's affection for both individuals. His narcissistic ideal of delusional love for the young man is shown through diction and imagery, metrical variation and voice, contained in three quatrains and one couplet.
represented in the play, too. In this term paper I will try to give a
William Shakespeare was an excellent writer, who throughout his life created well written pieces of literatures which are valued and learned about in modern times. One of his many works are 154 Sonnets, within these Sonnets there are several people Shakespeare “writes to”, such as fair youth, dark lady and rival poet. Sonnet 20 is written to fair youth, or in other words a young man. The idea of homosexuality appears in Sonnet 20 after the speaker admits his love towards the young man.
Sonnet number one hundred sixteen and number one hundred thirty provide a good look at what Shakespeare himself defines as love. The former describes the ever-enduring nature of true love, while the latter gives an example of this ideal love through the description of a woman who many call the “Dark Lady”. Through the combination of these two sonnets Shakespeare provides a consistent picture of what love should be like in order to “bear it out even to the edge of doom”(116, Ln: 12). To me the tern “maker” used by Sir Philip Sidney to describe the poets first and foremost duty would refer to the creation process, which produces the end text. The discourse of the poet is to take an emotion or event they up to that point was purely felt, and make it into flowing words, which in turn reproduce the initial emotion. The poet is therefore a “maker” of poems as well as emotion. This emotion would not be present however if the poet were not human experiencing the ups and downs of everyday life. Therefore I feel that the poet is first and foremost human, and therefore susceptible to human needs, feelings, and emotions, and secondly a maker.
Holy Sonnet XV deals with the question of reciprocal love that runs throughout Donne’s religious poetry. The Sonnet is an address of the speaker’s mind to the speaker’s soul; it is a meditation on the Trinity and man’s relationship to God. The poem’s form and the multi-layered conflation throughout expound upon the nature of the Trinity. The theme of humility in reciprocal religious love or receiving and understanding God’s glory (as Donne understood it) runs throughout the poem. This allows the speaker’s soul to understand his own need for humility in order to love god fully. Donne uses the Sonnet form cunningly in this poem; the formal divisions of the Sonnet reflect the trinity, with three four-line sections, while the inner workings of the poem expound upon God’s love for mankind and the need for humility. The poem’s rhyme scheme is abba/abba/cddc/ee. This formally divides the poem into three four part sections that move from the spiritual to the physical downward through the Trinity, increasing tangibility with regard to the physical and allowing the speaker to achieve a closer relationship with God through Christ.
John Donne and William Shakespeare are each notorious for their brilliant poetry. William Shakespeare is said to be the founder of proper sonnets, while John Donne is proclaimed to be the chief metaphysical poet. Each poet has survived the changing centuries and will forever stand the test of time. Although both John Donne and William Shakespeare share a common theme of love in their poems, they each use different tactics to portray this underlying meaning. With a closer examination it can be determined that Donne and Shakespeare have similar qualities in their writing.
Where poems were not explicitly dedicated to the addressee their identity could still be found in the poem's verse, such as in Sidney's Astrophel and Stella:
In Elizabeth Browning’s poem ‘Sonnet 43’, Browning explores the concept of love through her sonnet in a first person narrative, revealing the intense love she feels for her beloved, a love which she does not posses in a materialistic manner, rather she takes it as a eternal feeling, which she values dearly, through listing the different ways she loves her beloved.
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.
has the gentle heart of a woman but is not inconsistent as is the way
Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 is a sonnet much different than the normal love sonnets of that time. A well-known re-occurring them in Shakespeare’s sonnets is love. Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 can be interpreted many different ways. Sonnet 130 describes what love is to Shakespeare by making the poem a joke in order to mock other poets. In sonnet 130, Shakespeare spoke of a courtly love. Shakespeare goes against the usual style of courtly love writing in this sonnet. “In comparison to Petrarch’s Sonnet 90 and Shakespeare’s own Sonnets 18 and 20, Sonnet 130 is a parody of courtly love, favoring a pastoral love that is austere in its declaration, yet deep-rooted in sincerity” (Dr. Tilla Slabbert 1). Sonnet 130 mocks the men who use the traditional
Almost four hundred years after his death, William Shakespeare's work continues to live on through his readers. He provides them with vivid images of what love was like during the 1600's. Shakespeare put virtually indescribable feelings into beautiful words that fit the specific form of the sonnet. He wrote 154 sonnets; all of which discuss some stage or feature of love. Love was the common theme during the time Shakespeare was writing. However, Shakespeare wrote about it in such a way that captivated his reader and made them want to apply his words to their romances. What readers do not realize while they compare his sonnets to their real life relationships is that Shakespeare was continually defying the conventions of courtly love in his writings.
Shakespeare's Exploration in Sonnet 2 of the Themes of Age and Beauty. Look closely at the effects of language, imagery and handling of the sonnet form. Comment on ways in which the poem’s methods and concerns are characteristics of other Shakespeare sonnets you have studied. The second of Shakespeare’s sonnets conveys an argument the poet is. making somewhat implicitly to a subject whose identity is hazy and unknown to the reader, even in retrospect.