Love and Sonnet

Shakespeare’s Sonnets How many of us understand William Shakespeare’s Poetry? Shakespeare uses complex figurative language along with metaphors and similes to paint pictures in reader’s minds about love, history, and his personal experiences. Between Sonnet’s 29, 116, and 130, sonnet 116 is the best a conveying its theme. Sonnet’s 29 and 116 have two very different themes, ones about depression and the others about love. To start off with, sonnet 29’s theme is about a man who is deeply depressed about his personal life and surroundings. “When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes I all alone beweep my outcast state” (1-2). The speaker is emotionally depressed and has been having bad luck, he also envies what others have and he doesn’t. While the speaker in Sonnet 29 talks about being depressed and sad, the speaker in Sonnet 116 speaks about how true love is immortal and unchanging. “Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom” (11-12). Basically Shakespeare it trying to tell the reader that love can withstand anything and will last forever if it really is true love. Out of these poems I believe that Sonnet 116 does a better at conveying its theme because the simplicity of the poem and how relatable it is. Sonnet’s 116 and 130 have a more relatable theme than sonnet 29 and 116 did. Sonnet 116 is about true love and how it will last if it truly is true. Sonnet 130 has a distinctly humorous tone, it’s about the speaker’s wife and how he still loves her despite her looks. It has a simple message: the lady’s beauty cannot be compared to the beauty of a goddess or to that found in nature, for she is just a mortal human being. Quotes like “I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground” and “My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red” explicitly state that the speakers mistress is not a goddess but yet he still loves her nonetheless and she is just as extraordinary as any woman described with such exaggerated or false comparisons. These two sonnets share an almost identical theme of love, Shakespeare stated in both poems that it doesn’t matter what someone may look like or act like, true love will always come true and it will last. Sonnet 116 is the best at conveying its theme from sonnet’s 29, 116, and 130. In comparison to other sonnets, sonnet 116 strikes readers as relatively simple. The metaphors are reasonably transparent, and the theme is quickly and plainly apparent. The lines of sonnet 116 are often quoted as Shakespeare’s definition of love.