The beloved in Sonnet 130 is described in an unappealing manner, and yet, because of his honest depiction of her the poet-speaker considers his love to be true. The sonnet suggests true, authentic feelings can only be expressed when traditional conventions are set aside. This essay will examine the various technical features used by Shakespeare to emphasise this theme. The discussion will also consider the context in which the sonnet was written. It is immediately clear that Sonnet 130 challenges traditional concepts of romantic love.
The analysis of Sonnet 116 With poetic repetition and figurative language, Shakespeare in Sonnet 116 discusses and demonstrates his perception of love which is steadfast when confronting any difficulties. This sonnet is divided into four parts——three quatrains and a couplet employing the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. From the strong rhyme pattern and rhythm, we are directly aware of Shakespeare’s emotional praise for true love and his intensely criticism on false love. In the first quatrain, Shakespeare initially straightforward declares his stand on true love with a powerful negative sentence “Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments.” Then he employs parallelism to display how false love shows: every time when it confronts impediments or temptation, it will depart away. In the second quatrain, Shakespeare vivifies true love to make it pictorial through simile.
Romeo is a great reader of love poetry, and from the beginning we could see that his portrayal of love for Rosaline seemed that he was trying to act out what he had read about. When Juliet first meets him, she says that he ‘kisses by th’ book’, meaning that he kisses by the rules. This shows that Romeo’s kiss is proficient but lacks originality, and this is also reflected upon by his personality. When Romeo meets Juliet, Rosaline instantly vanishes from his mine, and in fact Juliet is far more than just a replacement; Romeo’s love for her is far deeper, more authentic and unique than the clichéd puppy love for Rosaline. Romeo’s love matures in course of the play, from a shallow desire to intense, profound passion.
It is clear appearance isn’t everything. In Sonnet 18 the speaker says that as long as the poem is still being read then the beauty of it still lives, which shows that poetry can preserve love and is immortal. Sonnet 147 is a poem that’s starts describing a beautiful person but ends but saying that she is basically the devil. This supports the poem’s theme: appearances isn’t everything. The speaker was deceived buy her beauty and soon came to realize that one doesn’t just judge someone by someone’s beauty and that person’s personality counts too.
He realizes that his mistress is not perfect but despite this he is able to accept her for who she is, and come to love her. Even though throughout the poem he feels the need to comment on all of her imperfections he continues to use “my mistress” signalling that perhaps there is more to it then he hints at. He mocks love in the beginning, but as time goes on he slowly becomes more conformed to the love poems of the time period. The opening line of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 is an unexpected simile “My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun”. We might normally expect poets, especially those of Shakespeare's time, to praise the women they love by telling us that their eyes do shine like the sun.
Sonnet 130 uses imagery, tone, metaphors and hyperbolas to paint an insipid unflattering image of a woman for which he appears to be in love with despite this portrayal. The use of a mocking chiding tone by Shakespeare in this sonnet was a gentle side-swipe at the love poems written by other contemporary authors at the time. These poems were clichéd, sentimental and sappy creations that portrayed the ideal woman as one of exceptional beauty comparable to gods like Venus and Morpheus. This exaggeration was especially true for Sidney’s Sonnets Astrophil and Stella, which Shakespeare took special aim at. While the poetic devices and techniques used by Shakespeare creates secondary themes of physical appearance, women, femininity, literature and writing, the main overarching theme of his sonnets is love, be that for the dark lady or the young man.
According to The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry, Shakespeare’s poetry has “set the benchmark for achievement in artistic expression” (ed. Cheney 2007, p.2) due to his “mastery of poetry’s idiom and form” (ed. Cheney 2007, p.2). Shakespeare, in his love sonnets, has re-written classical Petrarchan conventions of a discourse of love to create his own format of sonnet poetry. Shakespeare’s sonnets eighteen to one hundred and twenty six – the central sonnets of the compilation- give a discourse on homoerotic desire and love, a deviance from the introductory section’s homosocial discourse between the patron and poet.
The poet makes his point clear from the first line that true love always perseveres, despite any obstacles that may arise. He goes on to define love by what it doesn’t do, claiming that it stays constant, even though people and circumstances may change. Love never dies, even when someone tries to destroy it. Rather than being something that comes and goes, love is eternal and unchanging. The poet compares love to the North Star, which never moves in the sky and guides lost ships home.
This enables him to present the experience of first love as more intriguing and romantic. He is giving the reader something to relate to. He also quotes many symbols related to love in the poem such as ‘heart’ and ‘flowers’. In the line ‘I could not see a single thing’ he is emphasising that he is truly ‘blinded’ by love and he is experiencing the common symptoms of ‘first love’. The reader can relate to these symptoms and the text could compel emotions relating to love from the reader.
In 'Sonnet 116', Shakespeare presents his ideas about what love is, with reference to romantic love. We can deduce that he writes of romantic love through the phrase "Let me not... admit impediments", which is reminiscent of marriage vows. Shakespeare outlines his definition of love through a series of images, which is developed through his use of the sonnet form. First of all, Shakespeare believes that love in its truest sense is unchanging. He writes, "love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds".