Response To Shakespeare's Sonnet 57

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Connor Hanley Mr. Magdalenski English II Honors 9 February 2012 Response to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 57 Shakespeare’s Sonnet 57 is a poem that portrays the speaker as very devoted toward the listener. It can be deduced that the person to whom the speaker is speaking is probably someone that the speaker is infatuated with. The poem follows the rhyme scheme ABABCDCDEFEFGG, the sonnet consists of three four-line stanzas followed by a couplet, and punctuation used at the end of each line is intended make the poem flow nicely when spoken aloud. Each of the stanzas has a different purpose. The first stanza concerns the speaker’s devotion to the listener, and it is here where the speaker provides an image of his servitude, using key words such as “slave” and “services.” The second stanza mainly conveys that the speaker claims that he is not affected by the absence of the person to whom he is devoted. The writer uses lines such as “Nor [I] think the bitterness of absence sour” to show that the speaker is not phased by the absence of the person he is supposedly devoted to. However, in the third stanza, the speaker ironically changes his tone to one of jealousy towards the person he is speaking to. The speaker basically claims that he doesn’t think about the listener in his absence, but then later in the stanza contradicts this by saying that he is slightly jealous of the people who enjoy the listener’s company while he is away. The speaker’s tone of admitted jealousy reveals his true feelings of devotion toward the person he is speaking to. In the poem, Shakespeare uses words such as “slave” to portray just to what degree the speaker is devoted to the listener, and this evokes images of a person’s unwavering devotion to their master. The love the speaker has for the listener is ultimately confirmed by the ironic discrepancies between the speaker’s second and

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