Skip to main content

Sonnet 18


Sonnets do not seem so dull suddenly. 





Most of us hate hot and sultry summer days, don't we? Well then. We should be intrigued to witness a minority group that is interested in them. To such a group belongs Shakespeare. Yes. The very same person who penned pearls of wisdom on the landscape of love, the agony of pain and the anti-ephemeral nature of reproduction.

Femininity is mostly associated with beauty. William ventures to an extent where he undermines the magnificence of the Sun illuminating Earth, and elevates the beauty of his love. However delve further into the sonnet and you will find a parallel story emerging. A story of the Sun's glory! Weaving both extremes into a single sonnet, he implores the reader to make a choice.

Persons who are and have been in love would relate the sonnet to a woman's beauty while the rest would relate it to the Sun. Note the lines 'Rough winds...short a date'. Winds of high velocity may obscure the brightness of the Sun, but only temporarily. Whenever he ventures to glorify Sun's magnificence, he applies caution immediately. The first half of this sonnet proceeds with caution, and to a love-experienced person, it offers an altogether different perspective. That of inspiration in the face of obstacles. That of failures which mars not the beauty of his love.

He begins the second half with the certainty that there will always be a decline in beauty at some instance in life. Through the prism of eternal influence, he marvels at the Sun and draws a parallel to his love's beauty. He emphasizes eternity (of both the Sun's and the lover's) with events that never can change (eyes which see or men who breathe). He also urges the reader to procreate. He has hidden this in plain sight! Read the line again "Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade"! Muse on those lines for a moment.

Reading Bard's works sure does offer a plethora of opportunities to uncover different angles of meaning to a statement, does not it? 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Afflictions of Romeo.

Now old desire doth in his death-bed lie. And young affection gapes to be his heir; That fair for which love groan'd for and would die, With tender Juliet match'd, is now not fair. You might be wondering why I suddenly came up with this stanza. This quartet is from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare has a queer style of hiding meanings in plain sight. In the above quartet, the interested yet somewhat casual reader would have noticed the meaning which he wished everyone to notice. Not many would notice that this stanza carries more than one meaning. I will try my best to elucidate both here. Let us assume that I had one of my 'Aha' moments (thanks to Kalid Azad), which spurred me to write this piece. Old desire might refer to the enmity or 'ancient' grudge that may be on the verge of dissolving, due to Romeo's intoxication with a girl from the opposing camp. Romeo wishes to follow up on this and ensure that such a situation never a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Insignificant but proud

The recent discovery(or not) of the Higgs Boson was an intense search which took roots 50 years before. The lab at CERN was commissioned only in 2010 and within two years of its inception, it has yielded fruits. Scientists at CERN are not even terming it an discovery, saying they have a long journey ahead of them to firmly establish the particle's identity. Even a 5 sigma, which means the fault will be one in  3.5 million chances , could not convince the scientists that it is indeed a Higgs Boson. This confirmation could take even longer since the lab is to be shut down for maintenance soon. The first part of the particle's name is after the scientist who initially hypothesized its presence, Dr. Peter Higgs. The second part is of much importance to us Indians. It is named after the INDIAN scientist Satyendranath Bose. This is indeed an achievement for India. The West often forgets us during  moments of world-changing discoveries but we have nevertheless played an ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Automation and thoughts!

Okay, so here goes a post after a long time. For my readers, assuming safely that there are quite a few residing in the poshest corners of the globe, the wait would have seemed interminable.   And that was just that. An illusion. The wait shall now be terminated. TL: DR à Bring in Automation at the workplace. Keep it out of every youngster’s reach till then. I have been attending an Automation course the past week. Before venturing into that, let me provide a background to my story. After entering the workplace and post months of training, 3 to be precise, I regained my spark of interest in programming, which hopefully will now be a raging fire. This caused a flurry of frantic browsing activity. Previously, I have never gone past 2 pages of Google’s results, and here I was, wading past 5 of all the crawling it threw up. I searched for the language that I should start feeding my fire of programming with. I searched for the limitations that every language had, I searche...
Post a Comment
Read more