SONNETS

SONNET 18-116-130

The most beautiful part of a literature lesson. I hate literature. Classics, plays … all are boring reading, exception of poems. I think just intelligent people can read poem which is read from generation to generation, so I regard poets more than anyone else.

These 3 sonnets are the best known and well-loved of all 154 sonnets.

Sonnet 18- is also one of the most comprehensible in language and intent. The speaker compares his beloved with summer, and he praises the beloved’s beauty. He says everything will decline, but your beauty will decline. He makes the beloved eternal; moreover, he is using a grafting metaphor in 12^th line. Grafting is a technique used to join parts from two plants with cords so that they grow as one. Thus the beloved becomes immortal.

SONNET 18

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 dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;
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. 

Sonnet 116- is about love in its most ideal form. It is praising lovers who have come to each other freely, and enter into relationship based on trust and understanding. The first quatrain says what love is not (changeable), and second quatrain says what it is, and third quatrain says more specifically what it is not. The couplet informs the speaker’s certainty. The couplet the speaker says if he is mistaken about the constant, unmovable nature of perfect love, then he must take back on his writings on love, truth, and faith.

SONNET 116

 Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark, 
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks 
Within his bending sickle's compass come; 
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, 
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 

Sonnet 130- is possibly an allusion. The speaker claims that we may be able to measure love to some degree , but this does not mean we fully understand it. Love’s actual worth cannot be known. It remains a mystery. In final couplet, the poet declares that, if he is mistaken about the permanent nature of perfect love, then he must take back all his writings on love; moreover, if he has judged love inappropriately, no man has ever really loved, in the ideal sense that the poet professes.

SONNET 130

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
   As any she belied with false compare.