Patterns of Consolation in Shakespeare's Sonnets 1-126 | Absence and the Consolation of Alternation (Sonnets 43-56)
Absence and the Consolation of Alternation (Sonnets 43-56)
The breach between the speaker and the young man, explicitly described in sonnet 42, drives the lover to adjust his consolatory strategy according to the reality of a separation that he can no longer deny. Connected sonnets find consolation in the alternating states of mind provoked in the speaker by the beloved's absence or presence. Finally, as in the previous group of poems, other sonnets within this group undermine the illusions upon which the consolations depend.
Sonnets 44 and 45 both lament the unbridgeable distance between the lovers, working as a pair to find consolation in the lack of consolation itself. Sonnet 44 explains sorrow in physiological terms; as in the Neoplatonic sonnets, the two lovers share one being, but here that being consists of one set of elements (earth, water, air, and fire) that suffer division during times of absence. In these terms, the very fact of inconsolable...
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