Patterns of Consolation in Shakespeare's Sonnets 1-126 | The Consolation of Isolation (Sonnets 87-93)
The Consolation of Isolation (Sonnets 87-93)
Having addressed the loss of love by redefining absence as death, Shakespeare's speaker once again redefines the terms of his argument. This short but closely linked string of poems anticipates not death but abandonment, and the lover finds good reasons for the anticipated farewell as well as good reasons for the beloved to hate him. But his consolatory techniques prove unsatisfactory, and the final two sonnets of this group locate the ultimate consolation for loss of love in the speaker's isolation from reality. He states that he will live in a self-deceiving world of illusion, never acknowledging the lost love.22 These poems reveal the speaker's desperate state and so explain his willingness to accept a consolation that he knows to be based on an illusion.
Sonnets 87-91 prepare for the lover's decision to live in a state of self-deception. The speaker relies on typical argumentative strategies,...
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