Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Sonnet 138 shakespeare analysis
Analysis of William Shakespeare
Essay on shakespeare's sonnets
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Sonnet 138 shakespeare analysis
Justifying Mutual Deceit in William Shakespeare's Sonnet 138
A common conception of William Shakespeare’s poetry entails complex language and hidden meanings. Shakespeare is famous for his ability to author a web of images that creates layers of interpretations and understandings. In Sonnet 138 however, Shakespeare is more direct in describing his relationship with his lover by avoiding imagery and metaphors, explaining to the reader that this seemingly unconventional relationship is indeed justified. Shakespeare constructs a persona of the speaker in a way that establishes a casual and conversational relationship with the reader. This allows for an open disclosure of the mutual hypocrisies between himself and his lover while leaving his steadfast candor to convince the reader that Shakespeare’s affirmations concerning love are acceptable. Shakespeare’s elimination of imagery allows for a reliance on diction that he takes advantage of by selecting words with double meanings, creating a reflexive manner about the poem for the reader to explore. Shakespeare conveys the meaning of the poem, that mutual deceit is compatible with love, with the seemingly straightforward language that connects the reader to the speaker while forcing the reader to think twice about certain words that deepen the surface understanding.
As in all Shakespearean sonnets, the structure of the poem plays an important role, as the three quatrains and final couplet often represent transitions in tone, language and meaning. However, Sonnet 138 differs from the norm as the first two quatrains do...
... middle of paper ...
...as such a connection with the speaker and wants to understand the speaker’s situation, Shakespeare justifies the hypocrisies on the surface of this love scenario. The speaker takes hold of his audience in an inviting conversational manner that forces them to appreciate what he has to say. As the speaker asserts his knowledge of the way love works, the reader agrees because the speaker articulates every word for the explicit purpose of reader understanding. The speaker’s honed and efficient language makes the reader hang on every word, creating realizations in the puns with several words that deepen the meaning of the poem and better illustrate to the reader that seeming truth, mutual deceit and love can exist in harmony.
...ive more information into themselves than into their subjects, and it is presumed that Shakespeare is no exception. At the time he wrote this, Shakespeare clearly felt hopeless to love, which is evident in the themes of the play, the scenes that occur, and the motivations of his characters. His personal interpretation was that hate wins, but that isn’t always true in the real world. People all interpret the world differently, and while Shakespeare’s outlook was negative, not all view it so. Some people would argue that in real life love wins, showing the importance perspective can play, and the fact that the outlook often has more effect than the events themselves, and that interpretation is up to the individual.
Sonnet 130 is Shakespeare’s harsh yet realistic tribute to his quite ordinary mistress. Conventional love poetry of his time would employ Petrarchan imagery and entertain notions of courtly love. Francis Petrarch, often noted for his perfection of the sonnet form, developed a number of techniques for describing love’s pleasures and torments as well as the beauty of the beloved. While Shakespeare adheres to this form, he undermines it as well. Through the use of deliberately subversive wordplay and exaggerated similes, ambiguous concepts, and adherence to the sonnet form, Shakespeare creates a parody of the traditional love sonnet. Although, in the end, Shakespeare embraces the overall Petrarchan theme of total and consuming love.
"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal [but] which the reader recognizes as his own." (Salvatore Quasimodo). There is something about the human spirit that causes us to rejoice in shared experience. We can connect on a deep level with our fellow man when we believe that somehow someone else understands us as they relate their own joys and hardships; and perhaps nowhere better is this relationship expressed than in that of the poet and his reader. For the current assignment I had the privilege (and challenge) of writing an imitation of William Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 87". This poem touched a place in my heart because I have actually given this sonnet to someone before as it then communicated my thoughts and feelings far better than I could. For this reason, Sonnet 87 was an easy choice for this project, although not quite so easy an undertaking as I endeavored to match Shakespeare’s structure and bring out his themes through similar word choice.
"Sonnet 144." The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th ed. Vol. 1. Eds. M. H. Abrams,
Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night revolves around a love triangle that continually makes twists and turns like a rollercoaster, throwing emotions here and there. The characters love each another, but the common love is absent throughout the play. Then, another character enters the scene and not only confuses everyone, bringing with him chaos that presents many different themes throughout the play. Along, with the emotional turmoil, each character has their own issues and difficulties that they must take care of, but that also affect other characters at same time. Richard Henze refers to the play as a “vindication of romance, a depreciation of romance…a ‘subtle portrayal of the psychology of love,’ a play about ‘unrequital in love’…a moral comedy about the surfeiting of the appetite…” (Henze 4) On the other hand, L. G. Salingar questions all of the remarks about Twelfth Night, asking if the remarks about the play are actually true. Shakespeare touches on the theme of love, but emphases the pain and suffering it causes a person, showing a dark and dismal side to a usually happy thought.
When he writes "And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare as any she, belied with false compare." (lines 13-14) in the final couplet, one responds with an enlightened appreciation, making them understand Shakespeare's message that true love consists of something deeper than physical beauty. Shakespeare expresses his ideas in a wonderful fashion. Not only does he express himself through direct interpretation of his sonnet, but also through the levels at which he styled and produced it. One cannot help but appreciate his message of true love over lust, along with his creative criticism of Petrarchan sonnets.
Shakespeare’s story, Love Labour’s Lost, focuses the story on the endearing lust of men. Women are a powerful force, so in order to persuade them men will try to use a variety of different resources in order to attract the opposite sex. Men will often use their primal instincts like a mating call, which could equivocate today to whistling at a woman as she walks by. With the use of lies to tell a girl what she wants to hear, the musk cologne in order to make you appear more sensual, or the cliché use of the love poem, men strive to appeal to women with the intent to see his way into her heart. William Shakespeare is a man, who based on some of his other works, has a pretty good understand and is full of passion for the opposite sex. Nonetheless, whether it had been honest love or perverse lust, Shakespeare, along with most men, aimed to try to charm women. With keeping this understanding of Shakespeare in mind, his weapon of choice, to find his portal way into a woman’s heart, was his power of writing.
Shakespeare's Sonnet 138 is one of his sonnets about the Dark Lady. Dark both in appearance, and in her actions, she is once again the subject of the sonnet. The speaker is the lover of the Dark Lady. Whether the speaker is married to her or not is not completely clear. Based on lines regarding age “...she knows my days are past the best” (6), it seems that they have been together for a long time, but not necessarily married. The sonnet doesn't sound like the speaker is talking to anyone, but rather musing to himself. When reading aloud, the sonnet sounds like it could a soliloquy, simply the speakers saying his thoughts out loud to himself.
Also love today includes sex unlike courtly love. If a man kept pursuing a woman today to marry him and she continued to refuse the man would most probably give up on her, dissimilar to the courtly lover that would keep on trying. Shakespeare mocks the idea of courtly love in his play in his use of language, the characters and how they go in and out of their roles of courtly love. I aim to look at the plays moral, philosophical and social significance. Also I will analyse Shakespeare's stagecraft and appeal to the audience and to look at the patterns and details of words.
Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 well fills and fits the three quatrains and single couplet of the Elizabethan sonnet. We can be sure there is no doubt to believe that some of Shakespeare's sonnets, like Sonnet 73, were well known and he was surely placed at the head of the dramatists and high among the non-dramatic poets. As Bender and Squier claimed (75), in the sixteenth century, Shakespeare is England's greatest playwright and the best of the Elizabethan sonneteers.
From the works of William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser it is clear that some similarities are apparent, however the two poets encompass different writing styles, as well as different topics that relate to each other in their own unique ways. In Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” and Spenser’s “Sonnet 75”, both poets speak of love in terms of feelings and actions by using different expressive views, allowing the similar topics to contain clear distinctions. Although Edmund Spenser’s “Sonnet 75” and William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 18” relate in the sense that love is genuine and everlasting, Spenser suggests love more optimistically, whereas Shakespeare focuses on expressing the beauty and stability of love.
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.
The love that a person has for someone is not the same for other people. They can look at their love through nature or just by their beauty. Shakespeare has the ability to explain his love for someone by using nature as a reference. Looking at two of Shakespeare’s sonnets 18 and 130 explore the differences and similarities between one another. In Sonnet 18 and 130, both show Shakespeare’s knowledge in developing his love and respect.
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 fourteen line sonnet is constructed by three quatrains and one couplet. With the organization of the poem, Shakespeare accomplishes to work out a different idea in each of the three quatrains as he writes the sonnet to lend itself naturally. Each of the quatrain contains a pair of images that create one universal idea in the quatrain. The poem is written in a iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Giving the poem a smooth rhyming transition from stanza to