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Shakespeare's Sonnets

by William Shakespeare

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Themes of Shakespeare's Sonnets 27, 31, 33, and 40

Summary:

Shakespeare's Sonnets 27, 31, 33, and 40 explore complex themes of love, longing, and personal reflection. Sonnet 27 deals with separation and longing, as the speaker's imagination overcomes physical distance to connect with a beloved. Sonnet 31 focuses on immortalizing lost friends and lovers through poetry, keeping their love alive. Sonnet 33 uses weather metaphors to depict inner light and acceptance of life's cloudy periods. Sonnet 40 addresses love and betrayal, emphasizing forgiveness and enduring friendship despite infidelity.

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What is the theme of Shakespeare's Sonnet 27?

The main theme of the sonnet is love or longing for the presence of one physically absent. The sonnet begins with a description of the hard physical labor of travelling during the day. It describes how tired the narrator is after a day of travel. However, the narrator is unable to sleep because he makes a second journey at night, not with his body but with his mind. In his mind, he travels to see his beloved and that image he encounters in his mental journey illuminates the night and turns exhaustion to joy.

This narrative leads to a second theme of a mind/body dichotomy, in which physical separation and its sadness are overcome by the ability of the imagination to make present things that are physically absent. In this way, love can triumph over separation.

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What is the theme of Shakespeare's Sonnet 27?

The theme of Shakespeare's sonnet 27 is that the speaker's body and mind work equally hard. First, the speaker's body by day does the physical hard work of traveling, which the narrator says leads to, "limbs with travel tired."

But the mind works just as hard at night. Behind his closed eyes, the speaker's imagination flourishes. The speaker's thoughts now travel on a "pilgrimage" to the beloved. The beloved dangles in the traveler's thoughts like a jewel against the "ghastly night." This sight makes the night beautiful.

In this light-hearted sonnet, Shakespeare ends on a couplet in which the narrator complains he can get no rest between the work his limbs do by day and his mind by night.

An important theme that emerges is that imaginative work is just as hard as physical labor. An active mind, full of thoughts and images, gets tired.

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What is the theme of Shakespeare's Sonnet 27?

Sonnet 27 depicts a person who goes to bed after an exhausting day of travel. Despite his exhaustion, he is unable to sleep, as he imagines a person far away whom they long to see. This would be agonizing, as he desperately craves sleep, and is saddened by the fact that he cannot be with the one he longs for.

But his lack of sleep is more than compensated for when he imagines the image of his friend in the night. His "soul's imaginary sight" presents the image "like a jewel hung in ghastly night." This image, though imaginary, makes the night beautiful, though he still longs to be with his friend.

Two prominent themes in this sonnet are separation and longing—he is overcome by a pain created by a powerful desire to be with his beloved. Another is imagination itself, a theme he pursues in many of his dramas. He is able to make the night pleasant only because the image of the one he loves appears in his mind's eye. The theme of sleep is present in Sonnet 27 as well. This appears in several of his other sonnets as well as some of his comedies (A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example) and his tragedies (Macbeth).

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What is the theme of Shakespeare's Sonnet 27?

A very meditative poem, Sonnet 27 discusses the theme of reminiscense and seperation. The poem depicts the narrative who is wise awake and deep in his thoughts during the night. The worries and thoughts that are preventing him from falling asleep are from seperation from his beloved one. The nostalgia and the feeling of missing someone is clearly portrayed throughout the sonnet.  

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What is the theme of Shakespeare's Sonnet 40?

The themes of this sonnet, and of the two that follow, are both love and infidelity.  The thematic question posed by the poet is "How should I react when I am betrayed by my friend?"  The person of "youth" mentioned in the poem has begun an affair with the poet's mistress - this relationship is explained further in sonnet 41 - and the poet is reacting to it.  Despite the disloyalty, the poet is proclaiming his love for the youth.  Love encourages humans to give of themselves, and the poet is encouraging the youth to take all he has.  The youth is his friend - although the poet is angry, the love he has allows him to forgive.  He encourages the youth to take everything he himself has, but insists that they remain friends.

This sonnet follows the theme of love that echoes throughout them all.  Shakespeare explores the meaning of true and lasting love, suggesting through various poems that it is not held back by time or beauty, that is the work of deep friendship and not just attraction.  Sonnet 40 shows this by displaying how it can survive betrayal.

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What is the theme of Shakespeare's Sonnet 33?

The Poetry Foundation website categorizes Shakespeare's Sonnet XXXIII under the following categories--Living, love, landcapes and pastorals, time and brevity, nature, relationships, and "realistic & complicated" poetry. Just looking at that list, we can infer that the true message of this poem, and hence the theme, involve more than just musings about the weather.

Take a glance at the eNotes reference for this poem, which provides a nice modern language paraphrase to help us navigate Shakespeare's riddle. The essential verse to understand when deriving this poem's theme is "Even so my sun one early morn did shine" (9). While the first two quatrains deal with literal weather--sometimes the sun is just beautifully shining and then the clouds come and cover it up without warning--this new section of the poem goes into metaphorical territory. Shakespeare is now talking about "his sun," which was shining just like the real one. We can interpret this to be an inner spirit, positivity... the "light within", so to speak. The sonnet goes on to compare the natural world with our inner light: sometimes that gets clouded, too.

The final couplet reveals the theme we are meant to derive from all of this (and, by the way, the last two lines of a sonnet are typically supposed to contain the main revelation of the poem). They read "Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;/Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth" (13-14). In other words, it's ok that sometimes our spirits (the "suns of the world") can't shine to the fullest. Since the sun itself can be clouded over, we shouldn't love our own selves less because of intermittent "cloudy" periods in our lives. Clouds will pass, and we will shine again!

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What is the theme of Shakespeare's Sonnet 31?

The speaker of the poem immortalizes his lost friends and lovers through his poem. His poem is the "heart" that keeps love alive in that the love between him and his friends will forever be recorded in his poetry. The poet thought his dead friends and lovers were lost forever to him when he cried at their funerals, but his poem is a grave (metaphor) that lets him keep them alive. The love his friends felt for him, and the love he felt for his friends, now live in his poetry. His poem is where their love for each other resides.

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