Free Essay: Analysis of Sonnet 3 Sonnet essays

Analysis of Sonnet 3 Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest Now is the time that face should form another, Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother. For where is she so fair whose unear’d womb Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry? Or who is he so fond will be the tomb Of his self-love to stop posterity? Thou are thy mother’s glass, and she in thee Calls back the lovely April of her prime; So thou through windows of thine age shalt see Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time. But if thou live remember’d not to be, Die single, and thine image dies with thee. Shakespeare begins this sonnet by telling him he should realize, because of his aging, that it is time to produce a child, for is he does not, he cheats the world, mother earth, who then becomes an unblessed mother. The “mother” also refers to the mother of the would be child–she then being unblessed from the lack of a child. 5-6: ‘What part of her, physicall or emotionally, keeps you from friuting her womb through procreation [an act that comes with marriage]?’ 7-8: ‘(If not that reason), are you so narcissistic that you will bring the end of your family to the tomb?’ He is also referring to the mother of the would be child–she is unblessed by the lack of a child. 9-10: ‘You are a reflection of your own mother, and she sees in you her youthful beauty’. 11-12: ‘You shall see, through the memories of your past,that these are your golden years’. The couplet sums up the three quatrains in saying ‘You will only be remembered in your own lifetime and not posthumously; for if you die without an heir, all memory for future generations of you is gone’.

Free Essays On Shakespeare’s Sonnet 5

Analysis of Sonnet 5

Those hours that with gentle work did frame

The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell

Will play the tyrants to the very same,

And that unfair which fairly doth excel:

For never-resting time leads summer on

To hideous winter and confounds him there,

Sap check’d with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,

Beauty o’ersnow’d and bareness everywhere:

Then were not summer’s distillation left

A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,

Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor ir nor no remembrance what it was.

But flowers distill’d, though they with winter meet,

Leese but their show: their substance still lives sweet.

This sonnet is fairly easy to read and understand, but there are a few subtle ways Shakespeare makes it more interesting. First, the “which” in line 4 seems to mean “that”, but a pun arises when read aloud allowing “witch” to be replaced. This is definitley an option when referring to “Those hours,” significant of time, as seeing time as a witch. Shakespeare does not hold time in such high regard, and therefore we get a slightly altered reading of line 4: ‘and that unfair witch hastens your increasing age by fair means’. In this reading, time is both fair and unfair, much recieved as a child getting his deserved punishment. 5-6: ‘”Never-resting time” always forces summer into winter, where summer is unhappily detained’; 7-8: ‘Where,the sap is encroached with frost, and the leaves of the tree have vanished, beauty being overly-covered and barren everywhere:’. 9-12: ‘At that time summer was remembered through perfumes, (but) beauty’s effect [the scent] was subsided through the perfumes [the scent is there, but the aesthetics are gone], and there was no remembrance what it really was’.