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Elizabethan era influences in Shakespeare's works
Shakespearean sonnet critical analysis
Shakespearean sonnet critical analysis
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Show how Shakespeare writes about time, love and poetry in these sonnets. (Sonnet 18, 73, 104).
William Shakespeare is probably the most well known writer in the English speaking world. His plays have become classics and have been translated into many languages. Who doesn’t know the story of Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet?
Shakespeare’s unique styles of writing and passionate poetic verses are the factors that make him distinctive of the writers of his era. One of the things that make him so exceptional is the way he makes words flow by blending their rhythms and at the same time creating perfect quatrains.
“Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed:
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed.”
Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets’ combine the themes of love and time.
These sonnets tell the story of a couple who are in love but have been separated for three years.
Although the story inside the sonnets can be summarized in a couple of lines, Shakespeare makes the meaning of one word extend to a stanza making clear the art of writing a sonnet.
It is not easy to understand a sonnet the first time you read it. Each verse needs to be examined in order to completely understand the essence and significance of every single word.
“Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.”
This quatrain from sonnet 104 shows the way Shakespeare wrote about time. He didn’t just use straight forward words but change in nature and seasons to represent time and at the same time given the sonnet a more nostalgic mood. The three beauteous springs that have turned to autumns and the Aprils to Junes represent the three years that have past since the moment he last saw his lover.
The narrator also describes his lover as being prettier and more perfect than a summer’s day and that his love was so pure that could never die.
“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate”
“Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead”
It says that her art was lovelier and more constant than a summer’s day as summer ends each year but her beauty is eternal.