Overview of Sonnet 8
When incorporating thematics to Shakespeare's Sonnet 8, we are dealt with a youth's
failure to marry and to have children is continued. A lesson is drawn from his apparent sadness in
listening to music. Music itself is concord and harmony, similar to that which reigns in the happy
household of father, child and mother, as if they were separate strings in music which reverberate
mutually. The young man is made sad by this harmony because he doesn't submit to it. In effect
it admonishes him, telling him that, in dedicating himself to a single life he makes himself
worthless, a nothingness.
By breaking down the sonnet into a close reading, the thematics can be better discussed
and simplified. Lines one and two first off present the question of, you are yourself like music to
listen to, so why respond to it sadly? Why is it that when there is music to listen to, you are
saddened by it? These questions pose the weird problematic idea of why a person who is so
framed as to appear perfect by the observer, rounded and harmonious as a piece of music, should
be made sad by listening to the music. Within lines three and four we are still posed by the idea of
of not loving the music the youth listens to. Furthermore, poking at the simplistic thought that
this youth takes delight in that which cause pain, irks him, and/or annoys him. Why does he like
the things that he really doesn't like? Within the first quatrain beginning in line five, we begin to
see that sweet harmony of music reprimands him. I say this because he destroys, by remaining
single, the harmony which would accompany him as a married man, also destroying the concord
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of music by not playing his part. Moving on to line thirteen, there is an excellent analogy that the
youth is someone in his own right plus a member ...