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Sonnet 29 | Overview of “Sonnet 29”

In the following essay, Bruce Meyer interprets “Sonnet 29” as a rhetorical demonstration of “how one reasons one’s way around circumstance.”

In the narrative of Shakespeare’s sonnets, “Sonnet 29” falls among the phase (sonnets 1-129) where the voice of the older poet, the voice of experience and good counsel, fights off challenges for a young man’s affections from another poet and from a dark lady. In this schema, “Sonnet 29” falls at a low, melancholy point in the apparent narrative. It is a complaint, in the true Renaissance style, where the persona dwells on a sense of loss—in this context, the possible loss of favor in the eyes of the young man....

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