Shakespeare's Sonnets William Shakespeare

The unique and extraordinary elements of dark beauty translate to an exotic alterity in the poets' eyes. The more obvious, and traditional, methods bestow the woman with godly attributes. Shakespeare first refutes this resemblance by underscoring...

Beauty, irrefutably, is a common theme throughout the Shakespearean sonnets. Generally, Shakespeare's love of beauty is expressed with regard to an undefined person, or muse. Nowhere is the beauty of Shakespeare's muse expressed more strongly than...

The swelling energy and particularization of imagery of season, time, and light both complement and counter the speaker's fading body in Shakespeare's Sonnet 73. Moving from metaphors of abstract bleakness to those of specific vitality and passion...

Germinating in anonymous Middle English lyrics, the subversion of the classical poetic representation of feminine beauty as fair-haired and blue-eyed took on new meaning in the age of exploration under sonneteers Sidney and Shakespeare. No longer...

In sonnet 146, Shakespeare presents the battle between depth and surface in different ways. The theme and message of the poem point consistently to a contradictory and difficult relationship between the inner and outer realms of a human being. The...

Many men in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries composed sequences of sonnets about women whom they loved. William Shakespeare's incomplete sonnet sequence is among the genre's most acclaimed. Most authors embellished their women's...

This sonnet is narrated by a man whose emotions are completely at the mercy of another. Its theme involves the vulnerability of the narrator's disposition and the power of love. Just when he reaches the lowest point of his depression, the...

Innumerable poems address the concept of love, with the written battle between positive love and negative love continuing to be waged today. Not surprisingly, there are not, nor would we expect many future poets to write, many poems that juxtapose...

The careful craft and design of poetry condenses the amount of text needed to convey information. This is true of all art, in that pieces are often qualitatively judged by how much they "say." Good works may carry one or two levels of meaning...

Shakespeare's sonnets 138 and 147 read like before and after accounts of a man's experience in leaving an unfaithful woman. Shakespeare's narrator first describes the almost masochistic way in which his speaker remains in a relationship with this...

In Octavio Paz's book The Double Flame, he describes three different categories of love that can arise between partners: sexuality, eroticism, and Love. The first category, sexuality, refers to the biological and instinctive urge to reproduce,...

The theme of Love’s constancy and everlasting nature permeates each line of Shakespeare’s 116th sonnet. Sonnet 116 “is about love in its most ideal form, praising the glories of lovers who have come to each other freely, and enter into a...

Both Rich and Shakespeare address the theme of true love in their respective poems Living in Sin and Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds. The subject matter of both poems deals with the nature of true love, various implications of which are...

William Shakespeare’s take on the passage of time seems consistently concentrated on its most destructive effects on the body. He obsesses over this ineluctable force across several of his sonnets, couching the passage of time with almost...

The subject of both Dennis Scott’s poem “Uncle Time” and Shakespeare’s Sonnet 19 is time and its erosive quality. Both refer to the concept as a capitalized entity, emphasizing its powerful and often destructive nature primarily by way of vivid...

Sonnet 130 By William Shakespeare is a rejection of the Petrarchan blazon rhetoric, made popular by Italian poet Petrarch in his Canzoniere, in which Petrarch idealizes the beauty of his love subject Laura through an anatomical analysis of her...

William Shakespeare’s 55th Sonnet and John Donne’s “The Canonization” are both poems that possess the same themes, anxieties, and cultural practices, thus illuminating the two poets’ experiences in early modern Britain. According to Sasha Roberts,...

In William Shakespeare's Sonnet 147, the speaker addresses his beloved using a metaphor, stating that his love is like an illness. However, he longs for the thing that keeps him ill, or in love. The fact that he compares his love to an illness...

William Shakespeare puts forth his definition of what makes love true in his untitled sonnet beginning with “Let me not to the marriage of true minds.” Shakespeare does not deny other views of love, but instead insists on a certain characteristic...

Shakespeare’s iconic sonnet 29 is a sonnet that embodies the superficial nature of humanity, both intrinsically and extrinsically. The sonnet begins with the speaker denouncing his current state, which is quite unfavorable, as he “beweep[s] [his]...

Both ‘How Do I Love Thee? (Sonnet 43)’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 116’ explore the ideas of love and romance in the traditional form of a sonnet. Whereas Browning writes about the intense love she felt towards her...

Though they were written centuries apart and in completely different societal conditions, Plato’s Phaedrus and several of William Shakespeare’s sonnets share distinct similarities. The more obvious, surface correlation is that they each describes...

“Love found me altogether disarmed,” declares Francis Petrarch in one of his highly acclaimed sonnets, referring of course to his dearly beloved yet unattainable Laura (Petrarch 2068). This is perhaps a bit of an understatement. Both Francis...

Honorable Mentions

The characters Prince Hal and King Henry in William Shakespeare’s drama Henry IV portray an unlikely father-son relationship. Shakespeare demonstrates Prince Hal's fate by associating him with consistent approaches of...