![]() ![]() My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. That music hath a far more pleasing sound I love to hear her speak, yet well I know It was part of the courtly tradition of love to declare (and believe) that the goddess whom one adored had virtually no human qualities. Its message is simple: the dark lady's beauty cannot be compared to the beauty of a goddess or to that found in nature, for she is but a mortal human being. In the traditional world of sonneteering the beloveds breath smelled sweeter than all perfumes. It is also one of the few of Shakespeare's sonnets with a distinctly humorous tone. Very few online sonnet generators allow you to enter your own words for use in the poem. Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. Sonnet 130 is a pleasure to read for its simplicity and frankness of expression. I have seen roses damasked, red and white,Īnd in some perfumes is there more de light If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun Ĭo ral is far more red than her lips' red Whoeer keeps me, let my heart be his guard Thou canst not then use rigor in my jail. Prison my heart in thy steel bosom’s ward, But then my friend’s heart let my poor heart bail. Here is Sonnet 130 by William Shakespeare. A torment thrice threefold thus to be crossed. Sonnets are written in iambic pentameter, so the scansion is made easy because the lines have five feet with a pattern of unstressed, stressed syllables. While I nodded, nearly napping, sudden ly there came a tapping,Īs of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. Over many a quaint and curious volume of for gotten lore, Once up on a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, It’s as if Shakespeare were analysing his list of woes in a methodical way, like a bookkeeper this is not some disordered remembrance of past ills, but the action of an orderly and organised man who, for all his rational mindset, cannot get over the bad things that have happened to him in the past.When spring comes 'round with her colorful wand One of the most notable things about Sonnet 30 is Shakespeare’s use of financial terms from accounting: ‘dateless’, ‘cancell’d’, ‘expense’, ‘tell o’er’, ‘account’, ‘pay’, ‘losses’, and ‘restored’ are all borrowed from the world of accounts, but to these we might add ‘dear’ and ‘precious’, which – under pressure from these other words – come to take on a monetary flavour. But if Shakespeare simply thinks for a short while about the young man, then all of his sorrows are banished, and he is made happy again. It’s as if he’s paying for these past wrongs now for the first time, when in fact he’s already done so many times over in the past. he’s already chewed them over many times and been made sad by them. It is a traditional English love sonnet, which is divided into three quatrains and a concluding heroic couplet in the end. Most sonnets are written in iambic pentameter. ![]() Then he is made unhappy again by insults and slights he has received in the past (that are dead and buried), and he can add up his list of woes as though they’re recorded in an accounts book. The Shakespearean sonnet often has the poetic turn a little later, usually after all three quatrains (4 line stanzas) are finished. He weeps for his friends who are now dead, for unrequited love that has long since been banished from his mind (until now, anyway) he also weeps for things which he can no longer look upon and enjoy. In summary, Shakespeare tells us – and the Fair Youth to whom he addresses Sonnet 30 – that when he starts to think back over his life, he begins to feel down when he reflects how he has failed to achieve the things he wanted, and has wasted so much time. This, and that opening line’s reference to ‘the sessions of sweet silent thought’, set the trend for Sonnet 30: it’s a poem of quiet contemplation, less ranting or frenetic than the previous sonnet. The second line may be familiar to some readers as the title of one of the English translations of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (although in fact, Shakespeare himself was quoting the phrase: it’s found in the Wisdom of Solomon, a book from the Old Testament Apocrypha: ‘For a double griefe came upon them, and a groaning for the remembrance of things past’). Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,īut if the while I think on thee, dear friend, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,Īnd with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:įor precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,Īnd weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,Īnd moan the expense of many a vanished sight: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought ![]()
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