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.
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.
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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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 the woman's beauty doesn't have, in a list. It is directly related to the repeated "And" in the quatrain before. Shakespeare directly writes that her beauty doesn't have the same faults that summer has, such as a "fair" that "declines". Shakespeare uses the form to express his ideas here, by separating the quatrains, and directly answering the previous quatrain with this one, to compare the aspects of the woman and summer.
The couplet suggests that the woman will live forever, metaphorically, for as long as people can read this sonnet. "So long" is at the beginning of both lines, to make it stand out. This may also mean goodbye, possibly because the woman has died.. Shakespeare uses the couplet well, to conclude a progressive argument here. The couplet is separated from the rest, and is about how she will be remembered, rather than actually describing her beauty.
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun
This sonnet is about Shakespeare's mistress, who isn't very beautiful, which Shakespeare admits, although he still loves her. Her ugliness is expressed by using a lot of similes, to compare her to the things that are commonly thought to make a woman beautiful, such as fair hair and "roses damask'd" in the cheeks.
This sonnet also uses the normal Shakespearean form. The layout of the poem is used well to compare the beautiful things to the mistress. The aspects of a common beautiful woman and the descriptions of the mistress are on alternate lines. The beautiful images are directly answered by the images of the mistress. This creates a very clear, direct contrast between them, and makes the mistress seem even less attractive. Because the sonnet is divided into larger sections than when using the Shakespearean form, longer, more detailed descriptions can be made of things, to create a slower moving, more thought-provoking, philosophical idea.
The three quatrains are quite similar, and contain similar images. The first quatrain introduces the meaning of the sonnet, with two short descriptions that compare beautiful images to the mistress. Unlike most of the comparisons in the sonnet, they do not consist of separate lines that answer each other, and instead, each description is just on one line. This is to quickly get the idea of the poem across, and to make the beginning light, and easy to start with. The line, which states, "black wires grow" on her head uses the metaphor of wires in a strange way. The main point of it is to show that her hair is black, which was not generally thought of as making a woman beautiful. At first, the image of the wires seems to imply that her hair is wiry, but it actually doesn't. It actually only means that her hairs would be wires if all hairs were wires. This may even be implying that her hair is not more like wire than usual.
The next quatrain uses the main technique of the sonnet to compare the mistress to the common beautiful woman. It has alternating descriptions of them, so the mistress' descriptions directly answer the others. Two of the most well know aspects that were viewed as beautiful at the time are used: rosy cheeks and sweet-smelling breath. The language is generally plain and easy to understand. Shakespeare states that his mistress' breath is not sweet smelling. His does this by comparing it to perfume. He does this strangely though. Instead of writing that all perfume smell better than her breath, he states "there is more delight" in "some perfumes". This seems to imply that most perfumes do not smell better than her breath, but it may be misunderstanding due to difference in the language used at the time and the language we use now. The second quatrain leads on from the first to make a distinction between the introduction and the main part of the poem, which puts across the principal meaning of it. This is how the form is used to create a progressive argument.
The third quatrain is similar to the second. It also contains descriptions of the conventional beautiful woman directly answered by descriptions of the mistress. The language is as plain as before. The second idea in it is a bit different to the other ones in the sonnet. Shakespeare writes that his mistress "treads on the ground", instead of being a goddess. This is probably a metaphor to reflect a mental aspect, such as her conscience. This part of progressive argument about how she is not perfect, starting with her physical appearance, moving on to her mind.
The couplet tells us that even though Shakespeare's mistress is not perfect in any way, he loves her. The form is used here to emphasise how unconditional his love is by building up a strong argument for how ugly she is, and then suddenly saying how he doesn't care.
William Wordsworth
Composed upon Westminster Bridge
(Early Morning)
William Wordsworth was part of the Romantic movement. This usually involved using plain language, unlike most poetry at the time, and addressing liberal political issues to do with the suffering of poor agricultural workers. He often celebrated nature, and wrote about landscapes. He believed in the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings being expressed in poetry.
Wordsworth's poems, including this one, use the Petrachan form, made up of an octave, rhyming: a;b;b;a;a;b;b;a, and a sestet, rhyming c;d;c;d;c;d.
The sonnet describes something very beautiful, which seems to be a city. It may contain suggestions about society. Because the city is man-made, it may suggest that man is capable of making very beautiful things; possibly even more so than nature. It may, though mean, that people are not like this, because the city is only made beautiful by the sun and the morning.
The octave seems to just be a simple description of a beautiful, physical thing. We are strongly made to believe that this is a city, because Wordsworth calls it "this city", and the tile contains "Westminster Bridge". It seems to be about how it is made beautiful by the morning. The reader is made to think this because Wordsworth mentions "the beauty of the morning", and "Early morning" is written in brackets under the title, as an alternative title. The language used in the octave is not at all difficult to understand. The way the form separates the sonnet into two parts is used here, to create a separate easy-to-understand introduction.
The sestet is more difficult to understand. It uses much more metaphorical language to describe the subject of the sonnet. The sestet still seems to be describing beauty, because Wordsworth uses images of beauty, such as "more beautifully steep". Wordsworth seems to be implying that the city in the morning is more beautiful than natural things such as a rock. The reader thinks this because Wordsworth writes that the sun did never "beautifully steep...valley, rock, or hill". One of the main ideas of the sestet is about the calm of the morning. Wordsworth suggests this in many ways, such as mentioning: "a calm so deep", "glideth" and "lying still". The calm is created because everyone is asleep in the early morning, and he expresses how he feels that everything is asleep by claiming that "the very houses" seem asleep. The sonnet form is used to create a section, which elaborates on the first, after the theme has been introduced.
Shakespeare and Wordsworth have shown how the power of the form can create deep, fluent ideas that have been remembered for hundreds of years, without the minimum amount of words, and that it can completely change the face of a poem to reflect the thoughts of a completely different style, of a completely different person, of a completely different mind.
