In “Sonnet XVII”, William Shakespeare writes of a dilemma that he is faced with as a poet. He exposes to the reader that he wishes to describe someone’s intense beauty but laments that if he did in fact describe this person people would dismiss him believing that he was lying or exaggerating the truth. Also, Shakespeare claims that there is no way he could ever be able to correctly capture all of this particular person’s beauty through words. As a result, he refuses to even attempt to describe this person to the reader as he is convinced that no reader would ever find truth in his words. On the surface, Shakespeare explains he wants to accurately describe the beautiful looks of the subject of the poem; however, his underlying reason for …show more content…
This paper will assert that this is Shakespeare’s ulterior motive in “Sonnet XVII” through the close analysis of the overall restrictiveness of sonnet poetic form as a whole, the ‘imperfect’ rhyme scheme in the beginning, and the volta or shift in tone that occurs between lines twelve and thirteen. In the first quatrain, Shakespeare defends his image as a poet immediately by using a metaphor to illustrate the restrictiveness of sonnet form. When he writes “but as a tomb” in line three, Shakespeare is using “tomb” as a metaphor for poetry and specifically sonnet form itself. As defined in the Oxford English Dictionary, tomb is referred to as “a chamber or vault”; Shakespeare is explicitly using this denotation of the word tomb to express his poetic confinement. His words are trapped in a tomb when he has to comply with the strict and constraining rules of sonnet form. This entrapment articulates his frustration with this binding form that is hindering his apparent desire to communicate the beautiful of the potential subject of the sonnet. Additionally, the word tomb possesses a