William Shakespeare's Sonnet 106

             In Sonnet 106 by William Shakespeare, the poet of the sonnets is praising her lover by telling him how extraordinarily beautiful he is. She tells him that the great poets of old could not describe him because they could only guess at his beauty, but the poets of her time could not describe his beauty because they didn't have the skill to do so (Longman). Shakespeare seems to be trying to immortalize his love and defy time by creating his lover's likeness in a poem that will last forever.
             Sonnet 106 conforms to the standard format of 14 lines concluding with a rhymed couplet and is written in the natural meter of iambic pentameter, lending them a stress pattern that approximates English language speech. The poem is set in the larger set of the two groups of sonnets (the larger set is Sonnets 1 through 126), and is addressed by the poet to a beloved young man. The 126 poems addressed to the young man comprise a deliberate sequence. The theme of love and infidelity is dominant in the larger grouping and this theme is interwoven with motifs of beauty, immortality, and the ravages of time and with lyrical hints about poetry's power to immortalize the beloved (Mabillard). Sonnet 106 is a perfect example of Shakespeare's attempt to "immortalize the beloved". By comparing his lover to someone the great poets of old always dreamed of, but could never conceive the beauty of. He lends his lover an air of immortality through art using his lover's beauty as a source of inspiration for great poets (Webmaster). Supposing one of the then modern poets had indeed captured the lover's beauty in verse, the lover would have undoubtedly been immortal, and maybe Shakespeare is questioning the validity of undying love by denying the lover the skill to describe him. However, this defiance of time and the attempt, at least, to immortalize his lover in the form of a sonnet, shows a continuation of the theme of time, which is a prevalent force in Shakespeare's...

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William Shakespeare's Sonnet 106. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 07:45, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/5304.html