UNDERSTANDING SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

Sonnet 8

Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,Or else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,By unions married, do offend thine ear,They do but sweetly chide thee, who confoundsIn singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;Resembling sire and child and happy mother,Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing:Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,Sings this to thee: “Thou single wilt prove none.”

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Sonnet 8 by William Shakespeare empathizes with the subject, who is against the idea of marriage. The young man, the subject of the sonnet, is chided for choosing to be single. The poet uses comparisons with music and marriage, likening the "true concord of well-tuned sounds" to a marriage. It is appropriate that Sonnet 8, a sonnet of musical descant, is placed as the 8th sonnet, since an "eight" is a "true concord."[Shakespeare does this to emphasize the beauty and importance of having a family. The sonnet emphasizes the notion that the subject will not reach true harmony if he does not settle down with a wife and children. His life will be in discord if he chooses to continue being single. It is among the string of procreation sonnets written by Shakespeare. The procreation sonnets are sonnets 1-17. All share the theme of urging a young man to marry and have children, insisting they are key to a harmonious life.In line 6, "Unions" can have two different meanings: that which is blatant to marriage and the other referring to harmonies. The Oxford English Dictionary does not give this as a definition, but the closeness of union to unison keeps the musical connotation present in the reader’s mind. Then in line 8, "the parts that thou shouldst bear" still keeps the idea that music and family are one by saying a part that is played in the family, or with a musical instrument in an orchestra. "resembling sire and child and happy mother" in line 11 alludes to the Holy Family, Mary, Jesus, and Joseph as they were depicted as a happy family in multiple church paintings during the time this sonnet was written. The poet warns the subject against staying single in the last line, "‘Thou single wilt prove none.’" As a single person, a man will accomplish nothing.

Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets

SONNET 18 William Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer's lease hath all too short a date:Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimmed,

And every fair from fair sometime declines,By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,

Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

This question is flattering in itself as a summer’s day is often

associated with beauty.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate

Shakespeare, however, explains that his love’s beauty exceeds that of the

summer and does not have its tendency towards unpleasant

extremes:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,And summer's lease hath all too short a date

It should be noted that at the time the sonnet was written, England had not yet adopted the Gregorian calendar and May was considered a summer month. In the above quote, Shakespeare describes the fragility and short duration of summer’s beauty. The use of the word ‘lease’ reminds us of the fact that everything beautiful remains so for a limited time only and after a while its beauty will be forcibly taken away. 

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,And often is his gold complexion dimmed,

Shakespeare states that the sun, which he personifies and refers to as ‘the eye of

heaven’, can be too hot or blocked from view by the clouds unlike his ‘more

temperate’ love. 

And every fair from fair sometime declines,By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:

The repetition of the word ‘fair’ highlights the fact that this fate is

inescapable for everything that possesses beauty.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shadeWhen in eternal lines to time thou grow’st”

Suddenly (though it was foreshadowed a bit in line 8), the tone and direction of the poem

changes dramatically. Moving on from bashing summer and the limitations inherent in nature, the speaker pronounces that the beloved he’s speaking to isn’t subject to all

of these rules he’s laid out.

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

(As long as there are humans alive on this planet Your life and beauty will live

on through this sonnet)Shakespeare’s self-assured claim makes it possible to argue that the purpose of

the poem was not actually to pay a beloved person a compliment but rather

to praise oneself for poetic skill.

Speaker: The authorTone: Endearing , deep devotion for loverAddressee: The young man

Symbolism:

• “The darling buds of May” – the beautiful, much loved buds of the early summer

• “The eye of heaven” – Sun

Figure of SpeechMetaphor:

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”

Figure of SpeechMetaphor:"Thou art more lovely and more

temperate”

Figure of Speech

Anaphora:“So long as men can breathe, or

eyes can see,So long lives this, and this gives

life to thee.”

STRUCTUREIambic pentameter

the most common metrical pattern in poetry written in English, alternates weak unstressed and strong stressed syllables to make a ten-syllable line (weak strong/weak strong/weak strong/weak strong/weak strong).

Love Literature and Writing Time Man and the Natural World

THEMES

This poem is about a man who is at the end of his life. The narrator illustrates his old age in the first stanza: “When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/Upon those boughs which shake against the cold” (lines 2-3). He describes the end of fall and the beginning of winter in these lines. This “time of the year” (line 2) is when living things begin to die during the winter. Like the trees that slowly lose their leaves, the narrator is on his last leg of life.

The trees that have few or no leaves left on them are similar to the image in the fourth line: “Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.” Both the bare, ruined choirs and the trees are places where there once was life. This stanza is important to setting the sonnet with concrete, natural images, which allow the reader to understand that the narrator is aware that he will soon expire.

The first stanza makes an analogy between the narrator’s old age and the time of year just before winter. The second stanza similarly describes his old age through natural images; the second stanza, however, compares his condition to a time of day: “In me thou seest the twilight of such day/As after sunset fadeth in the west,/Which by and by black night doth take away,/Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest” (lines 5-8). The narrator is perceived as a tiny bit of light left in the sky before the darkness erases him. In the first and second stanzas, his death is described as eventual. Yet, in the first stanza, his death could have taken days (or weeks) to come; his death in the second stanza seems more urgent. He describes that he is going to be taken by the night (death), but within an hour or longer.

The third stanza, however, does not promote a temporary, metaphorical death. It describes a dying flame is extinguished by that which was its youth. This death seems much more literal, urgent and direct. It could be analyzed to show that the narrator’s coming death is a result of the way he lived as a youth, yet I am not sure about this idea. What is important to know about this stanza is that it makes his death not only seem more urgent, but more realistic.The couplet at the end of the sonnet is a direct statement to the youthful man (identified by “his” in the third stanza) that he is speaking to. These final lines state that because the narrator death is inevitable, others will love him more. This sonnet ends much stronger than it begins. Because of the structure of the sonnet, the narrator seems farther away the more one reads it. His death may be metaphorical, but the urgency of the sonnet doesn’t give the reader a chance to find out.

Analysis:

The sonnet's structure and its content back up each other. Examples:

- The three quatrains form one unit: They deal with what real love is not (cf. first and

third quatrain) and what it is (cf. second quatrain).

- A turning-point after the first quatrain is indicated by the exclamation "Oh no!" (I 5). It

introduces the speaker's explanation of what real love ~ like after he has described what

it is not.

- The couplet is separated from the rest of the sonnet with a full stop in l.12. It contains

the essence of the sonnet, the conclusion: If the speaker's comprehension of love is

wrong, he has never written anything and no one has ever loved anyone. As this it not

possible, it follows that his comprehension of love must be right.

• Shakespeare employs imagery to clarify his message.

SONNET 116

SONNET 130

REFERENCES

1.www.slideshare.net2.Wikipedia3.www.cummingstudyguides.com