Response Paper: Sonnet Analysis
Introduction
Due to its greatness in adapting to different requirements and purposes, the sonnet has become popular among different poets, and rhymes are quickly strictly followed. Fuller (2017) argues that it is a perfect poetic style for expression or elaboration of a single thought or feeling in its short length of fourteen lines in iambic pentameter. This analysis extensively examines three sonnets from William Shakespeare, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser. Because of its short length, sonnets are easy to manage for both the reader and the writer and gives the ideal setting for poets to explore strong emotions.
Sonnet One Analysis: William Shakespeare
Shakespeare posits that we want beautiful, more attractive people in the world and uses flower metaphor to speak about the preservation of attractive people through generations. Through the sonnet, he brings up the theme of time power by alluding that everything beautiful will eventually lose its beauty and die, thus the importance of reproduction (Sakaeva & Kornilova, 2017). Shakespeare indicates that he is too self-consumed to start thinking about his own family as the young man need not think much about himself. However, if an attractive person like this young man does not reproduce, he is wasting his opportunities and gives. In his final words, Shakespeare is telling the young man that if he does not reproduce, his beauty will eventually die and will regret wasting it.
Sonnet Two Analysis: Sir Philip Sidney
In this sonnet, Sidney’s lyrical voice prompts the wish of transmitting his love into writing with the reflection that writing will enable him to make a love show. However, he knows that it will never outweigh Stella’s passion, and he can do nothing but express his love and desire for her. He further believes when Stella reads his writings, she will be deep acquainted by his love, and he may win the grace of her attention if she pities him. It shows his courtly love in a medieval tradition where his desperation for love watches Stella, his love from far. Furthermore, his final lines are essential as they get deep into two things, the divine influence of lyrical voice when writing and that the lyrical voice constructs his literacy and poetic consciousness (Bates, 2018).
Sonnet Three Analysis: Edmund Spenser
Although Spenser employs figurative language such as synecdoche and allusion, the most common form throughout the sonnet is the personification (Bates, 2018). While the poem is written for a woman, his choice to direct words to the sonnet instead of the woman enables him to describe the qualities she has in finer details vividly. He wishes the poems will be happy when he hands them to her as the woman will not only hold his life in her hand but also deal with the poems in soft love bands. He hopes that the woman will look and his poems and eventually see that he loves her even though she does not love him. If his lyrics win, he will care for nobody else but his poems and his woman.
Conclusion
According to Fuller (2017), Sonnets share common characteristics of fourteen lines broken into quatrains, a strict rhyme scheme, and are written in iambic pentameter with ten beats per line and made up of alternating stressed and unstressed sounds. The three sonnets contain a two-part thematic structure entailing a question and answer, a problem and a solution, proposition, and reinterpretation along their fourteen lines and a turn or Volta between two parts.
References
Bates, C. (2018). Synecdochic Structures in the Sonnet Sequences of Sidney and Spenser. A Companion to Renaissance Poetry, 276.
Fuller, J. (2017). The sonnet (Vol. 25). Taylor & Francis.
Sakaeva, L. R., & Kornilova, L. A. (2017). Structural Analysis of the Oxymoron in the Sonnets of William Shakespeare. Journal of History Culture and Art Research, 6(5), 409-414.
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