Essay: Analysis of Sonnet 11 Sonnet essays

Analysis of Sonnet 11 As fast as thou shalt wane so fast thou grow’st In one of thine from that which thou departest, And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow’st Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest: Herein lives wisdom, beauty, and increase; Without this, folly, age, and cold decay: If all were minded so, the times should cease, And threescore year would make the world away. Let those whom nature hath not made for store- Harsh, featureless, and rude-barrenly perish: Look, whom she best endow’d she gave the more; Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish: She carv’d thee for her seal, and meant thereby Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die. 1-2: ‘As fast as time takes hold of you, you do grow (in attributes) as you leave one of yourself [an heir] behind’; or, more generally, ‘if you’re persuing two things, drop one and you’ll increase in that aspect that much more’. 3-4: ‘And the children to whom you (would) have given life, you can call your own (self) when you stray from youth’. 5-6: ‘Within children (procreation) resides wisdom, beauty and increase (of a good life), however, without children, you are prone to folly, aging and the rest of your life without warming love (of children)’. 7-8: ‘If everyone acted as you do in not bearing children, generations would be no more, and the [or your] world would die within (your) sixty years’. 9-10: ‘Let those people who Nature decides shall not have heirs perish, because they are “harsh, featureless, and rude”‘. 13-14: ‘She has you as a stamp (for sealing wax, not the wax itself), and meant for you to reproduce more of yourself through children, and not to let yourself die without not doing so (because life is everlasting through children)’.

Free Essays On Shakespeare’s Sonnet Sonnet 107

Analysis of Sonnet 107

Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul

Of the wide world dreaming on things to come

Can yet the lease of my true love control,

Suppos’d as forfeit to a condin’d doom.

The mortal moon hath her eclipse endur’d,

And the sad augurs mock their own presage;

Incertainties now crown themselves assur’s,

nd peace proclaims olives of endless age.

Now with the drops of this most balmy time

My love looks fresh; and Death to me subscribes,

Since spite of him I’ll lime in this poor rhyme

While he insults o’er dull and speechless tribes:

And thou in this shalt find thy monument

When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.

This has been an important sonnet in trying to date the sonnets. Several words and phrases have prompted readers to ponder on the year it was written, ranging from 1588 to 1603. The main areas of concentration rely on the following: 1) the “eclipse” of the “mortal moon,” in line 5; 2)who the “sad augurs” are and their “presage,” in line 6; 3) allusion in lines 7 and 8, and if “confin’d doom” is in refernce to a certain event and which event that is. Of these, the most supported responses to 1 are: the Spanish Armada, 1588 (Butler, Hotson); the Queen’s Grand Climacteric , 1595-6 (Harrison); the Queen’s illness in 1599-1600 (Chambers); Essex’s rebellion in 1601 (Tyler); the Queen’s death in 1603 (eg. Massey, Minto, Lee, Beeching); a lunar eclipse, 1595 (O.F. Emerson); or an eclipse of the Queen’s favour (Conrad). Answers to the second problem relate closely with the first, that is, with the addition of a fear of civil war as a result of Elizabeth’s death and also the usual forecasts of political (and other) disasters that were forecasted from the eclipse. The third problem cites the confidence seen in lines 7 and 8,a dn therefore the overshoot of the proclaimed disasters. The fourth seems to refer to the imprisonment of some specific individual, eg. Southampton, who was released after James I accession to the throne.

1-4: ‘Neither my own fears nor the foreshadowing of worldly disasters can control the extent of my only love, supposing [invented by fears] that it is a “confin’d doom.” Lines 4 and 5 evoke a sense of death, saying that all will eventually die, and reading line 6 with stresses on “augurs” and “own” gives the sense that the prognosticators jeer their own predictions due to time being so joyous.