The Facts on File Companion to British Poetry Before 1600

See also ENGLISH SONNET; PERSONIFICATION; SHAKE- SPEARE, WILLIAM; SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS (OVERVIEW). FURTHER READING Jungman, Rob ...

been created for a woman’s sexual use, or the beloved could have been created to be a woman. Unfortunately, while she was creati ...

costly); military (like a cannon replete with too much gunpowder); emotional (fearing that he has been entrusted with too much r ...

least content with his own talents which he once pre- sumably enjoyed. It seems as though there is nothing that can remove the s ...

night of death, the sadness of past love affairs, and pleasant memories of the past. The speaker uses the legal phrase long-sinc ...

period, it was commonplace that the sun symbolized masculinity, in opposition to the feminine moon, and it was often tied to the ...

The third quatrain shifts into legal terms. To the “sensual fault” of the young man, the speaker “bring[s] in sense” (l. 9), a p ...

same place, yet some people will be immortalized while others are forgotten. See also ENGLISH SONNET, SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS (OVE ...

Horace. Similarly, Renaissance “ruins poetry,” by EDMUND SPENSER and others, provides “mortal rage” with connotations of civic s ...

or continue to exist in the future. This couplet con- tains two verbal paradoxes. The fi rst—that black may be bright—is an esp ...

likely before the beloved since he is older. Addition- ally, the speaker suggests that the beloved’s love will grow stronger sin ...

Shakespeare’s sonnets: Sonnet 80 (“O, how I faint when I of you do write”) WILLIAM SHAKE- SPEARE (1599) In Sonnet 80, the speake ...

expression. While all the other muses produce impres- sive-looking “comments”; he produces a sonnet. See also SHAKESPEARE’S SONN ...

net teases its audience with a surface that cannot be penetrated. See also SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS (OVERVIEW). Marjory E. Lange Sh ...

embedded. It also incorporates a bit of weather-wise folk wisdom: It was common to assert that a windy night promised a calm day ...

had relied on, by claiming the young man is singularly loved by “all men,” regardless of their humor. The consequences of this r ...

an unasked question. Thus, it is only the image of love that “dwell(s),” in the beautiful face (l. 10), and those “looks” produc ...

they recall the embodied pleasures that seem, by con- trast, to make time go by so quickly. Early on, Sonnet 97 marks this tempo ...

words reveal his contradictory state of mind and echo and emphasize the winter-spring binary in this and the SONNET before it. T ...

fl ower presumptuous enough to have appropriated not only the beloved’s color but also the fragrance (“to his robb’ry had annex’ ...