Shakes Poems Irony and Juxtaposition

Shakes Poems

Irony and Juxtaposition in the Works of William Shakespeare

Though William Shakespeare is most famous primarily for his plays and secondarily for his sonnets, he also wrote a fair amount of other poetry that, while not perhaps reflecting the true extent of his genius and talents, nonetheless show the adroitness Shakespeare possessed in manipulating thoughts and language. Many of his poems contain surprising twists, or conclusions that seem to resist and even run directly counter to the tone and initial thrust of the poem in a way that is often surprising and is always dryly ironic. This is a purposeful device that Shakespeare uses in order to make his points that much more profound and powerful. In this paper, I will argue that through the use of imagery, diction, metaphor, and the essentially human qualities of his speakers, Shakespeare creates poems that are all the more emotionally and intellectually powerful for their seeming contradictions.

One of the clearest examples of this comes from his collection of sonnets. In "My Mistress Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun," Shakespeare introduces a speaker that at first seems to be insulting his mistress, the subject of the poem. The poem is not directed at its subject, as many of Shakespeare's sonnets are (with one example examined later on), but rather the point-of-view of the poem is that of the speaker talking to a third party about his lover. It is difficult at first to pin down the tone of the poem, too; it appears as though it is crass and demeaning based on some of the imagery the speaker uses to describe his mistress, such as the "black wires" sprouting from her head or the breath that "reeks" from her mouth. Yet a closer examination of all of these images, colored of course by the turn in the poem that comes at the very end of the sonnet, reveals a very different intent and meaning.

The poem is essentially a list of Elizabethan hyperbole for the description of a beautiful maiden, with the constant reminder from the speaker that his mistress does not possess the qualities being listed. The word choice for this, such as "reeks" for the breath and "treads" for describing how she walks, make the mistress seem not simply unworthy of such hyperbole, but downright homely. The final couplet, however, turns the entire poem on its head: "And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare" (lines 13-4). Rather than a jovial, rueful, or downright degrading tone, the speaker here is full of sincerity; it is not that his mistress is unworthy of hyperbole, but rather that she and her love are worthy of nothing less than a true and honest appraisal of them. Shakespeare skillfully turns what at first seems insulting into one of the most heartfelt and honest love poems imaginable.

There is no small amount of irony in the way that the speaker of the poem plays with the listener, nor in the similar way that Shakespeare tricks his readers. It points out our own foibles in love while exalting Shakespeare's/the speaker's, and praises where it seems to mock. A somewhat opposite shift is achieved in a shorter bit of verse from Shakespeare's pen, "Take, O, Take Those Lips Away." In this much bleaker and much shorter poem, the speaker begs or commands that the lips and eyes of his lover, as a synecdoche for the lover him- or herself, be taken away. The specific parts used to symbolize the lover as a whole are made especially important in the poem; the lips "so sweetly were forsworn" and the eyes were "lights that do mislead the morn" (lines 2; 4). There is a definite purpose and direction here, wherein the speaker feels as though he were beguiled by the lover's false promises.

A typical poem of this type might go for the obvious shift, and end with a "but I still love you" line or two, and at first Shakespeare seems to follow this route. His use of the word "But" at the beginning of line five seems to signal a shift in the tone and perspective -- or at least the thinking -- of the speaker. The full line, "But my kisses bring again," at first does not diminish the seeming typicality of this poem's ending, until it is realized that the "But" doesn't mean "although" or "however" in this case, but rather "only" (line 5). The speaker only wants his kisses, his vain seals of love, back from his lover. It is a far more intellectually playful and emotional cutting twist that Shakespeare introduces than what is first perceived. The speaker is banishing the beguiling corporeal elements of his love and lover, while demanding the intangible yet supreme markers of that love back.

The supreme poignancy of this poem is achievable in part due to its more open form, which allowed Shakespeare more freedom in composing the thoughts as they might spontaneously erupt from a speaker. His sonnets, however, remain at the pinnacle of his poetic prowess, and the regularity of the fourteen lines of iambic pentameter never fails to be put to excellent intellectual and emotional use. "My mistress eyes..." is one example of this, "Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments" is a very different but also engaging example. In this standard Shakespearean sonnet (consisting of three quatrains, each with an independent interlocking rhyme, and a final heroic couplet, all in iambic pentameter), the twist in the poem is not as much intellectual as it is in the form of the poem itself -- the thought stays consist, but the sounds of the poem's words change significantly.

There is a great deal of alliteration and consonance, especially in the first two quatrains of the poem, with the letter "m" and the "sh" and "s" sounds, as well. This lends the poem a rather garbled or even mushy quality, which becomes onomatopoetic given the content of the poem. The speaker is listing the many things that will fail to outlive his lover, to whom the poem is addressed, and it is in the description of these things that the muddled and mushy sounds are so prevalent. They are almost non-existent, however, in the final couplet of the poem: "So, till the judgment that yourself arise, / You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes" (lines 13-4). There is a prevalence of "z" sounds (despite the letter "s" making it), and the shift from the unvoiced "sh" to the voiced "th" is similar in its effect. The lover being addressed in the sonnet -- and the sonnet itself -- is more solid and more evocative than the muddled monuments to whom he or she is being compared.

The overall quality of the poems described above makes it easy to discuss them in a group; the effects that Shakespeare achieves in each of the pomes is to completely draw the reader into one mode of reading, and to switch this up at the end forcing a reexamination of the entire piece and a reappraisal of exactly what the poem is about, and what its comment means. This can be somewhat more difficult to tease out of the verses Shakespeare wrote for song, but it is evident in them nonetheless. In one song beginning "When icicles hang by the wall," the speaker (or singer, as the case may be) describes a bleak wintry landscape with very little about it that is at all forgiving. The end of each verse, however, introduces a warmer visions, and a safer and more welcoming refuge from the cold.