Shakespeare Sonnet William Shakespeare Registered

Shakespeare Sonnet

William Shakespeare registered 154 of his sonnets in 1609. A number of his sonnets describe love with its heart rendering anguish and worshipful adoration. Anyone who has loved someone for a period of time, however, realizes that this form of gut-wrenching blind, romantic love does not last forever. As the relationship continues, either it dies out because the initial physical feelings and fantasies disappear and reality sets in, or the couple begins to respect and love each other for other more long-lasting reasons. As the quote by the French writer Henri De Montherlant states: "We like someone because. We love someone although." In fact, in his sonnet 130, "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun," Shakespeare uses imagery, satire and irony to demonstrate the difference between idealizing women as goddesses and recognizing what actually makes women attractive and desirable for long-term.

Although the sonnet is written in the English rhyming form of ABABCDCDE, Shakespeare's argument of comparing idealized love to actual love is expressed in either one or two lines, almost as an essay with a thesis and rationale. The idealized female in the courtly poetry of Elizabethan England was the personification of perfection. Here, however, Shakespeare makes clear through his of satirical contrasts that his beloved has many human flaws. Unlike Petrarchan love sonnets that take idealization of women as far as it can possibly go -- almost absurdly so -- as in Petrarch Sonnet 16:

Blessed may be the day, the month, the year,

And the season, the time, the hour, the point,

And the country, the place where I was joined

By two fair eyes that now have tied me here.

And blessed be the first sweet agony

That I felt in becoming bound to Love,

And the bow and the arrows piercing me

By taking this approach, therefore, Shakespeare is breaking with tradition or the conventional approach, which makes the sonnet all the more memorable. The ironic twist is the play of what is to be expected to be said and what is actually said (or, going back to the argument, what is expected from love and what actually occurs): It begins: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more red than her lips' red"

From here the sonnet continues with a much less pleasing list of the qualities about this mistress, who is definitely very far from the ideal perfection noted in the Petrarchan sonnets. The distinction between the two sonnet approaches increases in the last of the couplets when Shakespeare makes his final argument and explains why he has been using such lesser quality comparisons all along: "And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare/as any she, belied with false compare."

In other words, is it not better to have the best of what is real beauty than to have something that is false and illusive? Today, such superficiality vs. The "real thing" is expressed this way: "It is what's inside that counts," or "Beauty is only skin deep."