The Sonnets of Shakespeare

Sonnets 116 & 64

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 talks of how true love will never die if it is indeed true, and that no situation should be able to shake it’s hold if it lies in truth. He states that even if death becomes your lover then it will not matter for your love will still prevail even after his/her death and will forever remain. Love is “an ever fixed mark” (line 5) that remains through the good and the bad, and conquers time as true lovers may even remain in love even after death. A true love will forge itself strong and last until the very end of time when love would cease to be no more, and if this is untrue then love does not exist and no person has ever truly loved. The tone of this sonnet is about the ideals of love and romance, and is deeply rooted within the understanding of what true love is actually like. Clearly, Shakespeare had a very insightful perspective on what true love is like and I would venture to say he himself had this kind of love. As for the sentence structure, most of the sentences begin on a new line and then end at the end of a line except for the very first sentence, which begins at the first line and ends in the middle of the second. I do not believe that this sonnet has a connection to Pinsky’s ideas about Elizabethan sonnets due to the fact that it is not addressed to a woman, nor does it try to seduce a woman with flattery or the tale of how pained he is to be without her.

Contrary wise, Sonnet 64 is about death and how time is the bringer of it. Shakespeare says that through his own eyes he has seen death and decay even in non-living things such as a crumbling tower, or the erosion of the sand upon the beach. As he has seen this, these things have taught him to understand that death befalls everything – even if it is merely in the form of decay. Because of this he came to see that “time will come and take my love away” (line 12) and that there is nothing he or any person can do to stop such a thing. In the volta he confesses that this notion frightens him as he does not wish for his lover to die and weeps at the thought of losing that love. The tone of this sonnet is very foreboding and melancholy as we see the reality of life come to the forefront of his mind through his writing. The sentence structure for this sonnet has every new thought begin on a new line and all of the punctuation that dictates these separate thoughts are placed at the end of the lines (except for in the volta). This sonnet also does not seem to have a connection to what Pinsky believes an Elizabethan sonnet to be as it is not a sonnet that woos a woman, nor is it a sonnet that is for the purpose of courting. This sonnet actually defies Pinksy’s ideas about Elizabethan sonnets as it is not one to flatter nor make another happy through beautiful words, but is one to express the sorrow of death in life, as well as the sorrow of knowing that time will one day take love away from you.

I personally chose these sonnets because they were conflicting in nature to one another – one being about the joys of love in life and the other about the sorrows death brings to lovers. However, I find it interesting that in Sonnet 116 Shakespeare says that love will never die, but in Sonnet 64 it seems to be contradictory to this fact as he writes about how it is upsetting to know that one day love will be taken away. What does this say about Shakespeare’s writing? Do we think that his sonnets are fleeting within a moment as he writes them, or are they contradictory for a reason?

I do have a question about Sonnet 20 as this sonnet was particularly confusing to me. Part of me wants to say that this sonnet is about a woman who Shakespeare cannot have because she is a beautiful lesbian and only wishes to court other women, however I’m not quite sure about this. Another part of me wonders if this sonnet is about a woman who falls for a gorgeous man and therefore Shakespeare is cheated out of having her, however there are a few confusing lines in the sonnet that I struggled with. Therefore, my question is what is this sonnet really about? Or at least what is the most common interpretation of it?