Comparing Love in Shakespeare's Sonnets

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Poetry about love has traditionally been expressed using the Sonnet form. From the Petrarchan, or Italian, form through to the English form; sonnets offer a tight, compact form enabling the poet to express focused and thus more powerful views about the universal theme of love. Sonnet 30 by William Shakespeare and Song by Edmund Waller are no exception. Shakespeare and Waller’s treatment of love and mood are completely different, however. Shakespeare’s mood in Sonnet 30 is of personal confession while his treatment of love is a tool to forget pains in the narrator’s life. Edmund Waller’s mood in Song is of affection and the treatment of love is expressed through the man’s affection towards the woman. In Sonnet 30, the writer’s tone is one of personal confession, through which he gives the reader a glance into his own contemplations of inner grief and sorrow. The couplet tie is “friend”, which acts as the element that sways the tone of the sonnet. In the first quatrain, the author writes of how his pleasant thoughts are interrupted by negative memories of the past, namely, the lack of what he sought. Although these are thoughts of the past, they cause him to lament his current condition. In the second quatrain, he delves further into his depression, shedding tears in memory of his friends whom he lost to death, and for whom he has spent significant time mourning in the past. In the final quatrain he writes of grief using imagery of a business transaction, saying that he has already paid what was due in sorrow, but in these sad recollections he must again pay for the absence of his friends with grief. However, the couplet assuages the sorrow felt by introducing peaceful thoughts of the author’s friend, so much that “sorrows end”. Sonnet 30 is at the center of a sequence of sonnets dealing with the narrator's growing attachment to the fair lord and the narrator's

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