Monday, September 9, 2013

Sonnets 116 & 29

Sonnet 16
Let me not know any marriage of two in love with any objections. Love is not love if it changes when prompted to do so. Or changes when one decides to remove themselves. Oh no, it is a permanent thing that does not waver and is never shaken; it is the light that guides every ship, whose worth cannot be measured. Love cannot be measured by time, although time may fade physical looks such as rosy lips or cheeks. Love cannot be measured by hours or weeks, but lasts until the end of time. If I can be proven wrong by this, I have never written, nor has any man ever loved.

Sonnet 29
When my fortune has been disgraced and everyone has left me in my horrible state, I cry to God in heaven with no response, and look at myself cursing my own fate, wishing that I could be someone who possess more hope, better luck, such as man with many friends, someone who possess talent and skills and unconcerned with the things I’m interested in the most. Yet in these thoughts of despair, thoughts I most despise, I think of you and then my state begins to disappear from something depressing into something as heavenly as hymns sang to God. When I remember your sweet love, I feel so wealthy that I wouldn’t trade places with the richest kings.


Sonnet 116 is a poem that delves directly into the concept of love and its many descriptions and its final two lines gives this final statement of certainty concerning the nature of love described previously. Sonnet 29 on the other hand, sets up this juxtaposition between the speaker dissatisfaction and feelings of self-loathing towards himself and its feelings of love towards his lover. He spends majority of the poem stating that he is so unlucky that he even wishes to be someone else, but once he begins to reflect on his lover, he feels wealthier and happier than kings. Love is not even mentioned until the last two lines of the sonnet. I think that Sonnet 29 in particular connect with Elizabethian sonnets because of its use of exaggeration and also their way of speaking against themselves in order to woo its lover. Sonnet 116 uses great examples of exaggeration as well, but it does not seem to be directed at one particular person. I liked the shift near the end of Sonnet 29 because its contrast really reflected just how much he loved this person. No matter how disgraced or inadequate the speaker felt about himself, it compared nothing to the love he felt for his lover.

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