Write a study of the sonnet, looking at examples by two different poets writing before 1900, showing how they use the form to express their ideas. You should include at least two sonnets written by the same poet. Accompany this with a sonnet of your own.

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Write a study of the sonnet, looking at examples by two different poets writing before 1900, showing how they use the form to express their ideas. You should include at least two sonnets written by the same poet. Accompany this with a sonnet of your own.

The sonnet form is a poet's most valuable tool. It creates distinctions between parts of the sonnet, and allows whole concepts and ideas to be made with just the layout, without any words. The aim of this essay is to establish an understanding of the different styles and forms of sonnets, to discover how they are different and how they are the same. I will study two of Shakespeare's sonnets, and one by William Wordsworth.

William Shakespeare

The Shakespearean sonnet form is made up of three quatrains, a couplet. The rhyming scheme is: a;b;a;b;c;d;c;d;e;f;e;f;g;g. The rhyming couplet is useful for creating a particularly bitter, poignant, or thought-provoking point. Because the rhyming scheme involves a lot of alternating between two sounds, two things can be easily compared by them directly answering each other, better than is possible with the Petrarchan form, and descriptions of two things can be easily alternated between, to break each description into smaller pieces.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

This sonnet is about the beauty of something or someone. It seems to be a woman, whom Shakespeare loves or admires, and how her beauty has no faults. Her beauty is expressed by comparing it to summer. Similes are used very frequently. Sometimes the woman is directly compared to summer, but sometimes, different aspects of them are described with similes.

The sonnet uses the conventional Shakespearean form,. Different ideas are contained in each quatrain and the couplet, and are separated from each other, because lines in the same idea rhyme with each other, and not with lines from other ideas. Because all of the ideas have their own separate parts, and are after one another, a progressive argument is created, by the different ideas responding to each other, and building on each other to make other points.

The idea in the first quatrain is simply how beautiful the woman is. This is expressed by introducing the simile of summer. Shakespeare writes this as a question to show how he is not sure whether he should compare her to summer. He does this because he is implying that it is not fit to describe her, and she is more beautiful than it. This is a strong expression of her beauty because he describes her as "more lovely and more temperate" than summer, which is generally thought of as the most lovely and temperate thing in the world. The form is used to create a progressive argument because this is a logical introduction to introduce the main point to the argument.
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The second quatrain continues the idea about summer's imperfections. Two adjacent lines both begin with "And". This is to emphasise how many imperfections there are. The form is used here to make a separate list here of the bad points of summer, to be later compared with.

The third quatrain is about how, unlike summer the woman's beauty does not, and will not, fade or decline. Instead, he implies that instead of declining "in eternal lines to time", her beauty "growest". Two adjacent lines in this quatrain begin with "Nor". This is to emphasise how many imperfections ...

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