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Shakespeare's Sonnets
To get us started, let's make sure we are on the same page. Hyperbole is a literary device that uses exaggerated language to get a point across. These hyperbolic claims are not meant to be taken...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Dickinson's poetry often expresses the quality of some past trauma that has been buried but still exerts a force upon the speaker, presented in a veiled or disguised form. In perhaps the most...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
While there is the apparent observation of the fourteen-line structure and rhyme scheme of the Elizabethan sonnet, the most salient literary techniques of Shakespeare's Sonnet LXVI are repetition...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shakespeare's sonnets are poems about love and beauty. In "Sonnet 116," he writes that "Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds." In other words, true love endures regardless of...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Some literary devices in Shakespeare's Sonnet 152 are as follows: Alliteration: Alliteration is using the same consonant at the beginning of words that are placed closed to each other. This creates...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
I can't of course write this essay for you, but I shall try to give you some ideas that will help you write the essay yourself. The main theme in both poems is the theme of love. In "Sonnet 18,"...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
In this sonnet, Shakespeare describes the eye and the heart as battling over who has the better right to the beloved. Is it the eye, which literally sees the outward form or beauty of the beloved,...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
One theme that cuts across Shakespeare's sonnets focuses on the immortality of verse. Shakespeare is constantly reassuring his beloveds that they will not die, because they will be remembered...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
The Italian, or Petrarchan, Sonnet is written in iambic pentameter. The sonnet consists of fourteen lines, separated into an eight line stanza and a six line stanza. The first stanza (with eight...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
The Elizabethan sonnet is also called the English or Shakespearean sonnet. The Elizabethan sonnet tends to contain messages of love (similar to the Petrarchan sonnet). The Elizabethan sonnet...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Good question; I have a couple of possibilities. First of all, it is perfect "textbook" example of a Shakespearean sonnet--the sonnet form that uses three quatrains of iambic pentameter...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
The phrase "the human spirit" is problematic. Insofar as the phrase "the human spirit" simply refers to the mental characteristics all humans have in common, it is overdetermined. The definite...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
If you are referring to William Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, it is written in iambic pentameter. This means that there are five metrical feet per line (pentameter) and each foot contains an iamb which...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shakespeare reveals a way to combat time's destructive force on life in "Sonnet 104." The speaker is addressing a loved one, commenting that no matter how much time goes by, age does not show on...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
A quatrain is four lines long. There are three quatrains in a sonnet, followed by three lines at the very end. In a Shakespearean sonnet, the first three quatrains set up a question or problem,...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shakespeare's preferred sonnet structure was so unique that it has a name of its own: the Shakespearean sonnet! In fact, Shakespeare did not invent the Shakespearean sonnet. It preceded him and is...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
To answer this question, one must first determine what the ABCD system actually is and how it functions. It's really a tool that functions to present, in simple terms, the rhyming structure of a...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
The sonnet is defined by its adherence to strict rules of structure, meter, and rhyme. In Elizabethan sonnets, we see a structure that contains three rhyming quatrains and a couplet, resulting in...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20 is a love poem in which the gender of the subject, who the speaker addresses, is ambiguous. The speaker has been assumed to be male. The sonnet includes numerous...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Consonance occurs in the alliterative sh- that occurs in lines 1, 3, 4 and 5 (shall, shake, short, shines) and again in lines 9 and 11 with the repetition of "shall." You can hear assonance in the...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Of the 154 sonnets that Shakespeare penned, only three (Sonnets 99, 126, and 145) do not fit into what came to be known as the Shakespearean sonnet structure. In this structure, there are exactly...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
In Shakespeare's "Sonnet 14," the speaker begins by saying that he cannot "pluck" judgement, or knowledge, from the stars, even though he understands astrology. He says he is unable to predict or...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Ah, isn't this poem great? This sequence of lines—this quatrain—should be read in the context of the entire poem. The first four lines say, there can be no barrier to true love. The next four...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shakespeare's sonnet 2 romantically centers on the temporal nature of beauty. The poet suggests that physical beauty, superficial and temporary, can live on through the gift of a child. William...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
In Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, the speaker in the poem talks about his fading life. Seasons are often used as symbols for times of life: Spring for youth, summer for life’s prime, autumn for age,...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
(All line citations are taken from the text available at the Shakespeare Online reference provided.) Question 1: Which of the following best describes the whole structure of the poem as a whole? A)...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
The first eight lines are the poet's frustrations and miseries of trying to perfect his craft. He both resents and envies the successes of others, at the same time revealing the various obstacles...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
In this angry sonnet, the narrator curses the Dark Lady he is in love with because she has also trapped the heart of the young man the narrator is also in love with. The narrator feels enslaved and...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
A pun used in “Sonnet 1” is a play on the word tender, meaning both young and money. A pun is a play on words. It often involves double meaning. In this poem, we have a young man being...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
In Sonnet 35: The first five lines are saying that the person the poem is addressed to should not feel bad -- everyone makes mistakes and all good things have bad sides (rose has thorns). In the...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
The chief device--which is an element of plot mechanism--employed in Shakespeare's Sonnet 20 is conflict. The poet loves the 'master-mistress' of his passion, but because, as the poem develops, we...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
William Shakespeare's Sonnet 55 explores the immortality of the subjects of poetry through the power of verse. Shakespeare uses precise diction to paint a destructive image of time. Phrases like...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
There is more to creating a Shakespearean sonnet than the sonnet being fourteen lines long. First, while Shakesperean sonnets are fourteen lines long, they must be written using three quatrains...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
This sonnet by Shakespeare talks of one incident that occurred between the speaker and his mistress where she said to him two words that destroyed his life. The words "I hate" were so strong and so...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
This sonnet explores the tremendous beauty of the object of Shakespeare's affection. The speaker chooses to emphasise his beloved's beauty through personifying nature as a woman in her own right...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
You can analyze a poem in a variety of ways by taking into account rhyme, meter, theme, subject, structure, etc. I always like to start with rhyme. "Sonnet 84" is a standard Shakespearean sonnet...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
I am assuming you are referring to Sonnet 2 by Shakespeare, no? When forty winters shall beseige thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
This sonnet belongs to a larger group of sonnets that are written to a young, aristocratic man. The speaker is madly in love with the young man and laments his indifference to their relationship....
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
The original sonnet form is named for the man who perfected it with his skills, making it his own—namely, Petrarch. He introduced the Italian (or Petrarchan) sonnet in Italy. In general, all...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shakespeare wrote the Sonnets to explore all aspects of love. In Shakespeare’s day, a sonnet was the quintessential expression of love. To capture the essence of love in all its forms in simple...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Sonnet 18 is of Shakespeare's most famous sonnets, and one whose themes and many quotes from it have been absorbed into the language, not least its famous opening line, "Shall I compare thee...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
The love described in "Sonnet 75" is undoubtedly extant; while it may not be that love of a poet for his patron as is conveyed in this particular sonnet, the expression of love that is written can...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Although this question is under the subject of Shakespeare's sonnets, the question itself seems to focus exclusively on drama. However, I will try to include an analysis of the sonnets also,...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Nothing escapes time. The only way to fight the inevitability of time is to procreate. And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence....
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Sonnet 29 is one of Shakespeare's most famous sonnets. It is a characteristic to be found in many of his sonnets that he deviates from the iambic pentameter lines at one turning point. In Sonnet...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Figurative language is meant to create a picture in the reader's mind as well as feeling the emotions of the pictures. Lines one and two compare a person to a summer's day which is a metaphor...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shakespeare's sonnet "To His Love" contains two of the most quoted lines in all of romantic love poetry. Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou are more lovely and more temperate. This poem...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
This sonnet is addressed to the beloved of the speaker, and contains his plea that she should not use her beauty and her "arts" to punish and inflict pain upon him. Clearly the poem depicts a...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
This sonnet by Shakespeare addresses the soul of the speaker, which, according to the speaker, is trying desperately to invest in this life and the here-and-now, even though this is futile, due to...
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
It was quite common to take vignettes from Greek mythology and write them into poems; authors were doing that long before Shakespeare's time. In fact, this and Sonnet 153 are actually attributed...
