Sonnet 116 Need a One-Page

Sonnet 116 need a one-page proposal required for a future 7-page research paper using a minimum of six sources. The literature we are reading has some type of poetic form appropriate to its particular genre (literature before 1700). My paper should explore the poetic conventions or genres and their relationship to meaning. I chose to discuss the poetic imagery of William Shakespeare, Sonnet 116.

Sonnet 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

or bends with the remover to remove:

no! It is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come:

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved, never writ, nor no man ever loved.

William Shakespeare was as well-known for his poetry and especially his sonnets, as he was for the many plays and the characters in those plays that he created. His words took the best of the medieval past that so influenced writers of his era and combined them with his prophetic words of a wondrous future. It can be said of Shakespeare that he was the creator, if not the entire foundation of a genre still used today to express playful words of love, sexuality and romance as well as the pure nature of the world as seen through Shakespeare's eyes.

Of all Shakepeare's works, sonnets seem best to portray this word marriage from past and present. Not only do the words and style of the sonnet show this transition of time, but the era in which it was created was a great transitory time as well.

Gutenberg had invented the printing press over a hundred years previous, but the full benefits of that marvelous invention had just begun to be felt by the time Shakespeare arrived on the literary scene.