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Shakespeare's Sonnets

by William Shakespeare

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Literary Devices in Shakespeare's Sonnets

Summary:

Shakespeare's sonnets employ various literary devices to convey themes and emotions. In Sonnet 73, he uses simple metaphors and similes, often drawing from nature and everyday life, to depict aging and mortality. Sonnet 12 relies on metaphor, personification, and sound devices like alliteration to illustrate the passage of time and the inevitability of death, urging procreation as a form of defiance. Sonnet 20 explores conflict and punning, presenting a complex interplay of gender and desire. Sonnet 152 uses legal language, repetition, and rhetorical devices to express disillusionment and betrayal in love.

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What literary devices are used in Shakespeare's sonnets?

By far the most common literary devices used in Shakespeare's sonnets are metaphors and similes. Another common literary device is poetic conceits, but it is Shakespeare's metaphors and similes that have made them nearly immortal, as he himself suggested. He had a gift for figurative expression, and he knew it, and he used it in his poetry and in his plays. A striking characteristic of Shakespeare's metaphors and similes is that they are almost always simple, natural, unpretentious, common, ordinary, familiar, one might even say "democratic." He did not have an academic education like many contemporary poets. He had "small Latin and less Greek," as Ben Jonson said of him. So he made a virtue of necessity and refrained from drawing on classical literature for his comparisons. Instead he drew on nature and on everyday sights. The one sonnet that best illustrates Shakespeare's simplicity is Sonnet 73.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

He evokes the images of trees with yellowing leaves and totally bare trees shaking in the wind; twilight; night; a dying fire. He compares birds singing in the trees to people, perhaps children, singing in church choirs. 

Each of the three stanzas in this sonnet contains a metaphor within a metaphor. It is these that make this particular sonnet so remarkable. In the first four-line stanza the poet compares his time of life and his physical appearance to late fall, when the trees are almost totally bare. Then he compares the leafless boughs to ruined choirs—the part of the church behind the altar in which the choir sings. An example of a poetic conceit is his saying that the boughs shake against the cold. He is suggesting that they are cold because they are naked, while in fact they cannot feel the cold but are shaking because of the wind.

In the second four-line stanza, the poet compares his time of life and his haggard appearance to the twilight time of day, a time when the sun has set but a little light remains in the sky. Then he compares the coming on of night to death.

Finally, in the third four-line stanza he compares his condition to the glowing remains of a fire. Then he compares the ashes of the metaphorical fire to a bed on which the fire is slowly dying and will eventually be consumed by its own ashes. Each of these three stanzas contains a metaphor within a metaphor, and yet all the images are easy to visualize because they are all so familiar and unpretentious.

Sonnet 73 is crowded with metaphors, but in some of Shakespeare's other sonnets he is frugal with imagery. He uses one single image which is all the more striking because it stands alone. There is little difference between a metaphor and a simile. Perhaps Shakespeare's most dazzling simile is to be found in his Sonnet 29, which begins with:

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state...

He dwells on his melancholy thoughts until he suddenly remembers the paramour to whom this sonnet is addressed.

Yet in these thoughts, myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven's gate....

The image is of a common skylark, but we visualize it leaving the ground in one line and soaring all the way up to heaven in the next. The alliteration and consonance of "S" sounds is profuse and suggests a real outburst of joyful singing which contrasts with all the gloomy thoughts that went before. The "S" sounds are contained in "arising," "sullen," "sings," "hymns," and "heaven's."

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What literary devices are used in Shakespeare's Sonnet 12?

Shakespeare utilizes a number of literary devices in this poem, which is concerned with the inevitable passage of time. He makes particular use of metaphor and personification in order to convey his theme.

For example, in the opening line he invokes a metaphorical "clock" which ticks out the passage of time in terms of human (and other) lives. In the final stanza, he uses a different image to depict Time, personifying him as a creature carrying a metaphorical "scythe" with which he cuts down everything that lives, and against whom we can have no defense.

Shakespeare emphasizes the universal quality of Time's power over the beings of earth by also ascribing human-like qualities to non-human entities, such as "brave day" which is overtaken by "hideous night," and "lofty trees" which are "barren" of leaves due to the fact that time has turned summer into winter. Shakespeare's imagery pertains to flowers and trees inevitably dying away; he parallels these with the "beauty" of the person he is addressing, who must also wander into "the wastes of time". These wastes are metaphorical, but the word choice is a pun, making the reader consider how far a person's beauty is inevitably "wasted" when Time takes it from him.

This is an idea to which Shakespeare returns over and over, lamenting the fact that time has the power to take away all beauty—except that which has been inscribed in his poems, and therefore will have some measure of immortality forever.

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What literary devices are used in Shakespeare's Sonnet 12?

Shakespeare uses the literary device of an extended metaphor or comparison in this sonnet. He compares human mortality both to day turning into night and to the change of seasons. Day, Shakespeare's narrator observes, sinks into "hideous night." Here, night is not beautiful but ugly and frightening, as is death. Likewise, the narrator watches as the leaves die and fall from the trees. He also sees summer's green grass either mowed down to make hay ("girded up in sheaves") or covered up with snow as if in a grave. All of these images remind him that his friend will also die. He compares his friend's life to the cycle of day and night as well as to the cycle of the seasons to make the point that it is natural that all things must pass, but are also reborn.

Shakespeare also uses the device of repetition, for example, repeating the word "brave" twice. It appears in both line two and the sonnet's final line and connects those two lines. "Brave" in both contexts means not only to be courageous but to challenge something. Just as day challenges night (the sun will rise again), so must the narrator's friend challenge death—in his case by having a child that will carry on life.

The poem also employs antithesis, the juxtaposition of opposites. Summer's green is "borne on the bier" of winter. A bier is the frame on which a corpse or a coffin is carried to the grave. The word "borne" means carried, but it is also a pun on the word "born," which means birth. Summer will be (re)born on the corpse of winter, life and death intertwined.

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What literary devices are used in Shakespeare's Sonnet 12?

Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds. In a sense, the act of rhyming is a use of assonance. But assonance is usually cited when vowel sounds are repeated in a line. For example, in the second line, "brave day" repeats the long 'A' sound. In the 13th line, "Time's scythe" uses assonance and links the two words, thus emphasizing how quickly time passes en route to one's death. 

In the third line, the violet is "past prime." This is an example of using plosives and alliteration with the repetition of the letter 'p.' Plosive consonants such as b, p, t, d, and k have sharp, stopping sounds. Here, the 'p' is used for emphasis about how the violet is in decline. Again, the effect is to startle the reader and make him/her aware of the quick passage of time. The plosive sounds happen quickly. This is useful in emphasizing the quick passage of each second. 

Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds. It is more broad than alliteration because alliteration only refers to repeating the first letter of successive words. So, "past prime" is alliteration and consonance. Alliteration is a kind of consonance. In this sonnet, Shakespeare relies mostly on alliteration ("green all girded") and ("Borne on the bier"). 

Shakespeare uses the imagery of nature in decay to stress the passage of time. He uses these images to illustrate how quickly a life passes. Since nothing can stop Time, the only way to live on is by having children ("breed"). 

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What are some literary devices in Shakespeare's Sonnet 20?

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 see that the person addressed is a young man, the poet-lover must love in vain - specifically, without physical cosummation. The womanliness of the young man - a (presumably) feminine face and a woman's 'gentle heart', moves the poet-lover to passion. Here we encounter another conflict: the idea that because the beloved is a man, he does not possess what the poet regards as the negative, less lovable traits of feminine nature: falsehood, guile, and infidelity. Instead the beloved is morally as well as physically desirable because of, not in spite of, his manhood.

Nature is personified as a female force who, in creating the perfect being, 'fell a-doting' and has decided that she will create a man rather than a woman, and by 'addition' - very obviously the man's penis - has thus defeated the lover in his desire.

The poem ends with a pun: a play on words in which we understand 'prick'd out' as a gardening term, meaning the process of preserving the best and strongest plants to grow and flourish, together with the more colloquial/bawdy sense of 'prick' to mean penis. Thus we are back with conflict: the young man's body is for women to enjoy, although the poet  - 'mine be thy love' -  assumes that the young man returns his affection, and there appears to be more than a hint of conflict in the desires and affections of the beloved.

There are a great many puns in this poem; puns on meaning, and puns we can hear. Puns are devices by which the poet loads apparently simple lines with layers of suggestion. Note the word 'hue' - a man in 'hue' (meaning colour or tint) may well simply refer to the young man's male aspect or appearance, but 'all hues in his controlling' would suggest the word in its sense of 'value' and 'form': the young man commands the desires of those women and men who desire him. While we do not know for certain how the word 'hue/hues' was pronounced in Shakespeare's time (especially in the matter of the pronounced 'h') but if you say the line aloud, you can probably hear 'use' - with a meaning here of sexual employment - or even 'yous'. (See also Sonnet 82, where use and hues figure prominently.) Similarly, consider 'nothing' as 'no thing' - ie, no penis: the lover's 'purpose' is a woman, who possesses 'no thing'.

This sonnet has been much debated as a clear admission of Shakespeare's homosexuality. While this, or at least his bi-sexuality (which seems more likely here) is probably the case, the conflict remains within the context of the poem itself: a courtly love poem which by tradition was addressed by a languishing lover to an unattainable lady: usually she was married.  This sonnet enlarges on the older tradition - Shakespeare takes the ideal of the unattainable lady and, by making his subject male, makes him literally inaccessible.ShakesS

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What are some literary devices in Shakespeare's sonnet 152?

The literary elements in Shakespeare's Sonnet 152 work together to establish a tone of outrage that effectively ends the relationship with the "dark woman," who is the subject of the preceding sonnets in this series.

First, the speaker leans not on language of love in this sonnet but on the formal language of law. On one hand, he tries to justify all the feelings he has held for this woman and all the ways he has tried to change her into the woman he desires her to be. Yet his efforts have fallen short; in fact, they have failed each other in this relationship. Thus, he is left weighing out the efforts versus the outcome, judging his own failings—and hers. The language is passionate on the side of this judgement, with the speaker noting that

But why of two oaths’ breach do I accuse thee,
When I break twenty? I am perjur’d most;
For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee

While he realizes that she has broken oaths to him (a much more formal language than, say, "promises"), he has committed perjury in all his "oaths" that were given only to mislead her. Thus, he removes himself from any form of intimacy through this language.

There is also a pun in the final rhyming couplet, depending on which text you use:

For I have sworn thee fair: more perjured eye,
To swear against the truth so foul a lie.

The "eye" here is sometimes replaced by "I" in other texts, which is worth a note. But in this version, the speaker plays on the word "eye," meaning both that his eyes have deceived him in believing that this lady is fair and that he ("I") is more perjured by testifying to her fairness when it was so clearly a lie.

Also worth noting is the use of end stops in all lines except the first line. Most of these come in the form of visually hard punctuation, such as colons, semicolons, and exclamation points. Thus, the speaker visually pounds his frustration into the lines, demanding that each line of justification be heard and considered, the pause giving time to process the legalities of this relationship.

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What are some literary devices in Shakespeare's sonnet 152?

Sonnet 152 is highly rhetorical in tone, opening with anaphora and parallelism (e.g., "In loving," "In act," "In vowing") and repeating other key words (e.g., "forsworn") and patterns (e.g., "new faith," "new hate," "new love") with intricate formality. While Shakespeare's sonnets often use legal language, it is particularly abundant here. "Forsworn" is used four times, as is "oaths." "Truth," "faith," "vows" and "perjured" are all used twice; "swear" or "swearing," three times. This gives the poem an insistent, dogged quality, as of a lawyer exhaustively pleading a point.

The long, flowing lines of an eloquent speech in the law courts are further suggested by the three sets of feminine rhymes, making six of the lines eleven syllables in length. There is further rhetorical repetition and grammatical parallelism in such phrases as "deep oaths of thy deep kindness" and "thy love, thy truth, thy constancy" (which is also an ascending tricolon). Although the word "blindness" is not capitalized in most editions, the notion of giving eyes to blindness may be regarded as a form of personification.

This is the antepenultimate sonnet in Shakespeare's sequence, succeeded only by the two Cupid sonnets, which have an entirely different tone. It can therefore be regarded as the legal, rhetorical, public summing-up of the entire sequence, and the literary devices and diction employed are entirely appropriate for the purpose.

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What are some literary devices in Shakespeare's sonnet 152?

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 a rhythmic effect. In the final couplet of the sonnet, the "sworn" in the second-to-last line is alliterative with the "swear" in the last line, while, similarly, the "fair" in the second-to-last line is alliterative with the "foul" in the final line.

Antithesis: Antithesis is balancing contrasting words against each other. Shakespeare does this repeatedly: "new hate" contrasts with "new love," for example, "enlighten" contrasts with "blindness," and "fair" with "foul."

Apostrophe: Apostrophe is addressing an absent person as if present, or addressing abstract or inanimate objects. In this poem, the speaker is addressing his lover, with whom he is deeply disillusioned. We know this because in the first line he says "in loving thee" Directly addressing someone who is not present can add emotional intensity to a poem.

Parallelism: Parallelism is repeating a similar grammatical structure for effect: Shakespeare writes: "thy love, thy truth, thy constancy."

Repetition: Repetition adds emphasis to certain words and lends a sense of rhythm. Shakespeare repeats "swear," "oaths," "sworn," "vows," and "perjured," building up the idea of a contract violated.

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