Comparing Shakespeare's Sonnets 116 And 130

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Shakespeare's sonnets, 116, and 130, have an amount of things in common as well as things that differ. Diving into the format of it and what the sonnet means reveals these things. The thing that these two poems share the most in common, is the format. Both of these works of art, are 14 lined Shakespearian sonnets with 3 quatrains, with a heroic couplet at the end. Their rhyme schemes are A, B, A, B, C, D, C, D, E, F, E, F, G, G. The feet in the poems form iambic pentameters. That means that a series of five feet make up the lines. These feet are made up of an unstressed syllable and a stressed syllable. As Shakespeare dances from unstressed to stressed syllables, he tells a story of love, explaining what it is and what it means to love. However, both of these sonnets take apart different aspects of love and dive into a deeper illustration of them. In Sonnet 116 Shakespeare discusses the obstacles that love goes through, and how …show more content…

In all these things, she does not measure up. What society has deemed the perfect woman or “goddess”, is not her. But he still says “I think my love as rare as any belied with false compare”, as hers was (lines 13-14). She still is beautiful; a beauty that he would not change for the world. Society's image of a girl with “roses in her cheeks”, does not understand the love he holds for her and the love she is capable of returning(line 6). It would be wrong to compare her to such things because she is simply, incomparable. These things are so different that no woman has any hope of measuring up to them, but they don’t really need to. There is beauty in all woman, no matter how they compare. His love looks past any flaws and embraces them as part of who she is and who he loves. Shakespeare reinforces this theme when he states that he “never saw a goddess go”, but still knows how lucky he is to have a love like her (line

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