Love Story Diction

“This love is difficult, but it’s real”, is a modern day lyric, from a modern day love song, “Love Story”, by a popular modern day musician Taylor Swift. Just as modern artists still do, Shakespeare tries to convey a message of support towards women and their appearances and circumstances. This poem skillfully uses selective diction through selecting specific words and phrases to influence the poem. Directing his sonnet to have more meaning, his diction is influenced to include symbolism. Additionally he selects these items for comparisons to create juxtapositions. He does all this to demonstrate and reaffirm how his mistress is not like other women. This is enabled through the pairs Shakespeare has chosen to compare in order to critique the

unrealistic ideal women. By writing this poem, Shakespeare tells people not to play into these societal notions and to ignore the people that play into this system. Through these comparisons, he is able to go farther than a simple critique; he ridicules these unachievable, comical qualities. Even today people like Taylor Swift, help spread this message, to paraphrase Taylor Swift’s song Shake it Off, even though, the players gonna play, the haters gonna hate, and the fakers gonna fake, true love transcends that, so all one has to do is shake it off. Through this poetry, Shakespeare tells people that it does not matter if people do not like or even hate that a person does have these unrealistic qualities. Furthermore, it is through this poetry that he tells people that true love does not derive from fake aesthetics that people use. Love transcends these fake, unrealistic and unobtainable notions of what is considered to be desirable in women. Even in modern times this message is still important to people in society. A person needs to move past these unrealistic notions that other people in society will follow. These unreachable qualities in a woman will always be unobtainable, but that does not mean love has to be.