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

Head-less and Tail-less.

Crisp. This single five letter word evokes many feelings and pleasant sceneries within us, only upon dwelling though. It may be the delicious crunch of a packet of chips, the refreshing atmosphere surrounding us or one of the many letter-assortments availed to emphasize an individual’s character, to name a few. I will portray this word in a completely new light in this essay, as that in relation to the broad canvas spanned by cyber-borders and its ilk. To initiate the discussion, let us take the case of Narendra Modi, the honourable Prime Minister of India. He ushered in a new paradigm of campaigning in the prelude to the Lok Sabha elections in 2014. Successfully wielding the weapon of social media, he lured the major demographic of India: the youth. That he won the election by a staggering margin is ample proof of what social media and in broader terms, what the Internet can do. The question being debated here is not the after-shocks of social media but the exploitation of the I...
Post a Comment
Read more

From stranger, to stranger.

Wow! It has been a long time since I blogged. A glance at the last post shows that two months has whizzed past and that I don't have a single post during that period. I hope to make amends for the involuntary hibernation by weekly posting from now. And so here goes the first of them. Trust. Every one of us trusts some individual in our passage towards higher echelons of life, don't we? But as we indulge in conversations with our peers, we find that some render trust generously while the rest waver under veiled gardens. Why is there a disparity when all of us are cut from the same fabric? The solution to this query lies under the oft-quoted answer "Our past experiences make us trust less!" So true, right? We meet a stranger on the road sharing our same taste and as the conversation proceeds (or not, depending on what our moms taught us!), we connect with them at a level that, in truth, cannot be quantified. Strangers on roads are not exactly potential candidat...
Post a Comment
Read more

Stop Ea'zh'th-qu'ack'ing!

I will bring to the fore two disturbing trends that plagued me whenever I stumble on it. These two are entirely unrelated. The first one being the pronunciation of the word "Earthquake" and the next being the sound that 'r' suffers in the tongues of Indians mimicking the Brits and the Americans. Yes, I agree there are other words pronounced wrongly but this particular word had the power to draw me in to a mode of introspection, albeit for weird reason. I have encountered gentlemen and women pronouncing the word as Earth-qu'ack'. They are not of a particular category. These gentlemen span the range of all the seven stages of life, yet most of them don't seem to be concerned that they spell the word in an embarrassing way. Maybe their teachers had pronounced it so, maybe they ignored the thorn in lieu of the bigger scheme, whatever might be the reason, I consider it  a blemish on their record, more so if they happen to be English lecturers. The correct pr...
Post a Comment
Read more