Critical Analysis of Shakespeares Sonnet free essay sample

In the third quatrain, he admits that, though he loves her voice, music â€Å"hath a far more pleasing sound,† and that, though he has never seen a goddess, his mistress—unlike goddesses—walks on the ground. In the couplet, however, the speaker declares that, â€Å"by heav’n,† he thinks his love as rare and valuable â€Å"As any she belied with false compare†Ã¢â‚¬â€that is, any love in which false comparisons were invoked to describe the loved one’s beauty. This sonnet, one of Shakespeare’s most famous, plays an elaborate joke on the conventions of love poetry common to Shakespeare’s day, and it is so well-conceived that the joke remains funny today. Most sonnet sequences in Elizabethan England were modeled after that of Petrarch. Petrarch’s famous sonnet sequence was written as a series of love poems to an idealized and idolized mistress named Laura. In the sonnets, Petrarch praises her beauty, her worth, and her perfection using an extraordinary variety of metaphors based largely on natural beauties. In Shakespeare’s day, these metaphors had already become cliche (as, indeed, they still are today), but they were still the accepted technique for writing love poetry. The result was that poems tended to make highly idealizing comparisons between nature and the poets’ lover that were, if taken literally, completely ridiculous. My mistress’ eyes are like the sun; her lips are red as coral; her cheeks are like roses, her breasts are white as snow, her voice is like music, she is a goddess. In many ways, Shakespeare’s sonnets subvert and reverse the conventions of the Petrarchan love sequence: the idealizing love poems, for instance, are written not to a perfect woman but to an admittedly imperfect man, and the love poems to the dark lady are anything but idealizing (â€Å"My love is as a fever, longing still / For that which longer nurseth the disease† is hardly a Petrarchan conceit. ) Sonnet  130  mocks the typical Petrarchan metaphors by presenting a speaker ho seems to take them at face value, and somewhat bemusedly, decides to tell the truth. Your mistress’ eyes are like the sun? That’s strange—my mistress’ eyes aren’t at all like the sun. Your mistress’ breath smells like perfume? My mistress’ breath reeks compared to perfume. In the couplet, then, the speaker shows his full intent, which is to insist that love does not need these conceits in order to be real; and women do not need to look like flo wers or the sun in order to be beautiful. The rhetorical structure of Sonnet  130  is important to its effect. In the first quatrain, the speaker spends one line on each comparison between his mistress and something else (the sun, coral, snow, and wires—the one positive thing in the whole poem some part of his mistress  is  like. In the second and third quatrains, he expands the descriptions to occupy two lines each, so that roses/cheeks, perfume/breath, music/voice, and goddess/mistress each receive a pair of unrhymed lines. This creates the effect of an expanding and developing argument, and neatly prevents the poem—which does, after all, rely on a single kind of joke for its first twelve lines—from becoming stagnant. Shakespeares  Sonnet 130  mocks the conventions of the showy and flowery courtly sonnets in its realistic portrayal of  his mistress. The last historian sonnet 130 satirizes the concept of ideal beauty that was a convention of literature and art in general during the Elizabethan era. Influences originating with the poetry of  ancient Greece and Rome  had established a tradition of this, which continued in Europes customs of  courtly love  and in courtly poetry, and the work of poets such as  Petrarch. It was customary to praise the beauty of the object of ones affections with comparisons to beautiful things found in nature and heaven, such as stars in the night sky, the golden light of the rising sun, or red roses. [1]  The images conjured by Shakespeare were common ones that would have been well-recognized by a reader or listener of this sonnet. Shakespeare satirizes the  hyperbole  of the  allusions  used by conventional poets, which even by the Elizabethan era, had becomecliche, predictable, and uninspiring. This sonnet compares the Poet’s mistress to a number of natural beauties; each time making a point of his mistress’ obvious inadequacy in such comparisons; she cannot hope to stand up to the beauties of the natural world. The first two quatrains compare the speaker’s mistress to aspects of nature, such as snow or coral; each comparison ending unflatteringly for the istress. In the final couplet, the speaker proclaims his love for his mistress by declaring that he makes no false comparisons, the implication being that other poets do precisely that. Shakespeares sonnet aims to do the opposite, by indicating that his mistress is the ideal object of his affections because of her genuine qualities, and that she is more worthy of his love than the paramours of other poets who are more fanciful. The poetic form uses standard Shakespearean  iambic pentameter, following the AB-AB/CD-CD/EF-EF/GG  Rhyme Scheme. â€Å"This sonnet plays with poetic conventions in which, for example, the mistress’s eyes are compared with the sun, her lips with coral, and her cheeks with roses. His mistress, says the poet, is nothing like this conventional image, but is as lovely as any woman†. [2]  Here Barbara Mowat offers her opinion of the meaning behind Sonnet 130; this work simply breaks down the mold in which Sonnets had come to conform to. Shakespeare composed a sonnet which seems to parody a great many sonnets of the time. Poets like  Thomas Watson,  Michael Drayton, and  Barnabe Barnes  were all part of this sonnet craze and each wrote sonnets proclaiming love for an almost unimaginable figure;[3]  Patrick Crutwell posits that Sonnet 130 could actually be a satire of the Thomas Watson poem â€Å"Passionate Century of Love†, pointing out that the Watson poem contains all but one of the platitudes that Shakespeare is making fun of in Sonnet 130