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William shakespeare poetry essay
Shakespeare's treatment of love in sonnets
William shakespeare poetry essay
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A Ritual to Read to Each Other by William Strafford, and Shakespeare’s sonnet are about very different kinds of romance. The fact that these two writers lived hundreds of years apart is evident in their poetry. Although the themes of both poems are similarly dark, Stafford talks about modern social issues, while Shakespeare brings up the issue of love itself. The two poems contrast more than the compare.
Henry Frank Lott is a working-class poet, whose writing focuses on the everyday lives of people in the laboring class. His sonnet’s shift when he writes about a lover, who makes his days brighter, but also, reveals an inner battle. His work turns dark once more when the relationship is over. After it ends, Lott feels scorned by love, and refuses to write about love again, claiming why write about common topics such as love when there are harder topics to write about. After this, infused with nature imagery, his sonnets portray a love for freedom from the oppression of society, and the longing for the laboring class to advance from simply working and dying.
It has been said that “beauty is pain” and in the case of this poem, it is quite literal. “For That He Looked Not Upon Her” written by George Gascoigne, a sixteenth century poet, is a poem in which the speaker cannot look upon the one he loves so that he will not be trapped by her enhanced beauty and looks. In the form of an English sonnet, the speaker uses miserable diction and visual imagery to tell the readers and his love why he cannot look upon her face. Containing three quatrains and a rhyming couplet at the end, this poem displays a perfect English sonnet using iambic pentameter to make it sound serious and conversational. This is significant because most sonnets are about love and each quatrain, in English sonnets, further the speaker’s
The verses structure and poetic technique notable, particularly in the use of a refrain of ‘thou art fair’, enclosing the love comparisons and giving them further significance and intensity. The framing effect is furthered by the addition of ‘all’ to the end refrain, giving a sense of conclusion to the bridegrooms feelings. The difference in description of the first comparison ‘thou hast doves’ eyes within thy locks’ compared with the rest of the passage, where the body part appears first, and the metaphor second, is also interesting, as if the bridegroom speech’s structure develops after the first comparison and his way to express his love becomes more concrete. Further inversions can be seen in the order of features described. Gianni Barbiero suggests the order is ‘poetic, not logical’.
In Romeo & Juliet, author William Shakespeare shows the idea that there is a dark side to love; this becomes clear to readers when it is used within the families and the star-crossed lovers affection. Romeo and Juliet’s love story is filled with dark concepts, from compliments to tragedies. When Romeo sneaks into the Capulet house he uses admiration to get Juliet outside, “It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,” (Shakespeare 2.2.3-4). He compares Juliet to the sun; then saying she should come outside to light up the darkness.
In the age of Romanticism, using nature to express ones feelings was one thing that poets loved to do. Focusing on the “London” by William Blake and “Mutability” by P.B. Shelley, one will see the comparison of how both authors used nature and emotion to depict the situations and experiences that they saw during this time. But meanwhile, the emotion and comparison to nature is not always positive, neither is it always negative and in these two poems one can see the differences. Romanticism was a period of time in the 18th century where literary movements was such an ideal trend in Europe. For the most part romanticism was about individualism and human emotions and not so much about power of the hierarchy over the population.
This Elizabethan sonnet by George Gascoigne is a tortured self-confession of one “He” who “looked not upon her.” Gascoigne effectively illustrates the speaker’s paradoxical feelings for a woman through a series of literary devices such as extended metaphors, imagery, and alliteration, developing an easily identifiable conflict between the speaker’s desire for his lover and fear of being hurt again. The first stanza introduces us to the central paradox of the poem: why does the speaker “take no delight” in ranging his eyes “about the gleams” on his lover’s beautiful face? To answer this question, the speaker employs two extended metaphors that vividly illustrate this conundrum.
Compare and contrast essay The two sets of poems share the same topic which is living through war, but they have different tones, diction, settings and symbols. Poetry set one views war as a way of gaining honor while set two claims that it’s a waste of lives and all these opposing ideas are due to the different timeline. Tone and diction are one of the most important elements in poetry, because tone is the general character or attitude of a place in a piece of writing, while diction is the choice and use of words and phrases in speech or writing. They can be simply differentiated in general terms as the way or style of speech of a person and the different pitches expressed due to the different emotions being experienced by him/her during speaking which I will go further in detail by the end of this essay.
Looking at your list of first sentences, assess whether the paper moves logically from one topic to the next. This is a hard question to answer. To be honest, I am not sure how logical should look like in this case. I think it does move logically; I feel like there is a connection between all the sentences, but I am just not
He employs several literary devices in this poem which include: simile, hyperbole, satire, imagery and metaphors to create a lasting mental image of his mistress for the readers. The language used in this sonnet is clever and outside of the norm and might require the reader to take a second look. The first 3 Stanzas are used to distinguish his beloved from all the
In these short poems, the authors utilize particular rhetorical techniques and methods to reflect the speakers’ personality and motivation. Therefore, presenting the speaker becomes the main focus of the authors. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 and Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” both poems reflect the speakers’ traits through monologue, figurative language, and symbolism. However, these two speakers’ personalities are different due to their attitude toward their beloved. The speaker in Sonnet 18 is gentle and delighted but frustrated because the ideal metaphor comparison of summer is not perfect for describing his beloved; the poem thus suggests that the way you love others reflects how you feel about yourself.
As a result, this theme further contributes to the theme of undying love and everlasting beauty. “Sonnet 71” possesses a tone of a morbid nature while “Sonnet 73” replays one which is more bittersweet. Indeed, the dissimilarity in tones between these two sonnets and their contribution to undying love and everlasting beauty is largely connected to Shakespeare’s diction, use of figurative language, and imagery. Firstly, word choice primarily distinguishes whether the sonnets will have a positive or negative tone. The
In the first quatrain, the beautiful image of a woman usually created during a romantic poem (i.e, having red lips, pure skin, silky hair) is parodied as he portrays his mistress as plain and not following normal beauty regulations. An example of this begins in the first line when Shakespeare states that his “mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun” (1). Contrasting standard romantic poetry, Shakespeare immediately sets the tone to be perceived as negative by insinuating that his mistress’ eyes do not shine. Every line in this quatrain includes a direct comparison like this which begins by describing something beautiful to be compared to, then shifts the tone to express that she is unlike that characteristic. For example, he begins line 2 using the language of “coral” to describe her lips, but the tone is shifted when he says that
VEDANT VASHIST YEAR 10 ENGLISH CLOSE READING- POETRY Poetry is a type of writing in which the outflow of emotions and thoughts are expressed by writers in rhyme, comparisons and representations. Poetry has been used for a significant long time to show humor, romance and to impart feeling to others, for example, it could be about something interesting, exciting that happened on your approach to class and you want to recall it. In now days, poetry has been used as lyrics as a part of the subject matter of the song. The song "just the way you are" by Bruno Mars and the poem “Sonnet 130" by William Shakespeare are a piece of poetry.
This theme is basic spirit of all sonnets of him. His treatment of love has something divine quality. “His love is ideal love and surpasses the love of Dante for his Beatrice and the love of Petrarch for his Laura. Nor could Mrs. Browning, in her sonnets, written much later and addressed to her husband, equal Shakespeare’s ardor and fervor.” 5 It is classical
