Shakespeare Sonnet 116 Analysis I need an Exceptional English Writer to write and analytical essay. Instructions should be followed keenly and top quality work should be ensured. Please ensure that you follow all the instructions keenly please. Strictly no plagiarism and grammar errorsI have attached all the relevant documents below. Please read carefully. Week 1: Introduction, Organization, Assignments, Shakespeare and Blake
Welcome to Poetry, Pop, and Hip-hop! In your course schedule you’ll find our weekly
readings and assignments. This course highlights some of the best lyrics written over the past
500 years. We won’t stay in the distant past for long, but we will begin with a few of
Shakespeare’s sonnets this week. Techniques used by Shakespeare and Renaissance poets from
England, France and Italy before him are still used in pop and hip-hop today.
Before we get to Shakespeare’s sonnets 116 and 129, a few words about course organization and
assignments. This is a compressed course, which means that 14 weeks of material and
assignments are covered in 7 weeks. Please be prepared to work steadily and intensely. The good
thing is that lyrics are relatively short to read. Each week I will post lecture notes on Monday or
Tuesday and you will have a discussion board question to answer by Friday at 6 pm. This
weekly homework assignment asks you to write a short paragraph of at least three sentences
about the scheduled poetry or music. Discussion board allows you to talk online with fellow
students about our course material; it is good practice of your analytical and critical thinking
skills, which you will also use in essays. To use discussion board, click on it in the course menu,
then you will be able to read the question of the week. Click on the artist of the week, then after
considering the question (and perhaps writing a short draft paragraph of 3 sentences or more),
click on “create thread” and a textbox will open where you can write your response, then post it
by clicking submit at the bottom. I will not grade these until the end of the course. You can be
assured to receive 3% per post as long as there is some analysis, explanation, and no repetition of
other students.
Your first Analytical Essay will be due be the end of week 3 (May 24 at 6pm). It will be your
analysis of one poem from the course with no secondary source research. In this course, your
ability to analyze words, sounds, beats, rhythms, rhymes, imagery and metaphor is the most
important skill to develop. This essay of between 500 and 800 words is an analysis of a poem
covered in the first half of the course. Attend to the poetic form, such as sonnet, ballad, free verse
or prose poem, to give some examples. How does the poem’s form affect content?
When explicating your chosen poem, analyze some poetic techniques as they affect meaning. For
example, you might consider rhyme, meter, rhythm, alliteration (consonance and assonance),
metaphor, imagery, symbol, personification, poetic voice, agency and theme. No matter which
techniques are discussed, the success of your essay depends on how coherently your analysis
builds a clear and well-supported interpretation of the poem.
This essay is an analysis of one poem, which is your primary source and only source. No
secondary sources or research is to be used in this essay. Your critical thinking, analytical and
writing skills are the basis of evaluation. (We will develop research essays later in the course.)
Online Presentation
Each student will prepare an online presentation on one artist’s lyrics. You are free to choose any
poet, songwriter, singer, lyricist, or band that you like. The presentation will be 8-10 minutes
when viewed online. The focus of the presentation is lyrical analysis. One poem or song is
usually enough. Please include lyrics, analyze them, and provide some cultural context (but don’t
use too much background biographical material). You may use any type of visual medium that
will work, and that I can post for the class (whether it is a document or a link). You may use
PowerPoint, Prezi, Adobe, or a video format. You can choose a poet or lyricist who is on our
course addendum, or you can select your own artist. The order of student presentations will be
chronological. For example, if you choose a poet from a previous century, you will present early
in the course, whereas 21st century songs will be featured in the final weeks of the course. I
encourage some of you to present on a classic poet or artist so that you can finish your
presentation early, and so that we don’t have too many presentations loaded near the end. We
should have no more than three people present on a chosen artist, so send me an e-mail soon so
that you can present on your top choice. The deadline to sign up for your presentation is on
Tuesday, May 14. Please send me an e-mail at angus.cleghorn@senecacollege.ca – all
assignments are to be submitted to me by e-mail. The presentation will be worth 20% of your
grade, and will be evaluated on clarity, organization, level of interest and engagement, lyrical
analysis and cultural context.
William Shakespeare’s Sonnets 116 and 129
Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets on love, life, passions, problems and mortality. I won’t
generalize or historicize the sonnets this week; all we need to know for close readings are the
techniques, meanings and forms of the poems. A sonnet is a 14 line poem with a definite rhyme
scheme determined by the last word in every line. Shakespeare’s sonnets follow this rhyme
scheme: abab cdcd efef gg. The rhyme structure has 3 quatrains of 4 lines and 1 rhyming couplet.
You can find little books of Shakespeare’s sonnets at libraries and bookstores, but for our course
convenience and economy, we will use online sources, such as Open Source Shakespeare:
https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/sonnets/sonnet_view.php
SONNET CXVI (116)
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
a
b
a
b
c
d
c
d
e
f
e
f
g
g
I suggest that you read the poem aloud a few times to let it work its magic. Afterwards, you can
consider what it means … explore its ideas and themes. Then pay close attention to interesting,
curious or puzzling imagery (look up any words you don’t know; for example, a ‘wandering
bark’ is a ship trying to navigate the sea, not a lost, howling dog). You can interpret the poem as
you like; the success of any interpretation depends on how well you can support it by explaining
how the words, sounds and images lead to your thoughts. I will not generalize about the degree
of ideal love in this poem; it’s debatable. However, I will examine how love is put in jeopardy by
the formal techniques of the poem.
In addition to the rhyme scheme, sonnets are written in iambic pentameter, which is Latin for 5
iambic beats per line. Each iambic beat has 2 syllables so there are usually 10 syllables per line:
/
/
/
/
/
Love al/ters not / with his / brief hours / and weeks,
The 5 forward slashes are placed above the 5 hard stresses of the iambic pentameter beat. Notice
that the regular beat of this line emphasizes the steady perseverance of love. The poet is saying
that love does not change through time, and he demonstrates it with a steady beat. Most of the
lines in the poem are regular iambic pentameter. See the steady rhyming couplet at the end,
which ties it altogether with a neat argumentative beat.
However, there is a fair amount of doubt expressed in this poem. Shakespeare loosens up the
firm statements about love through irregular rhythmic beats:
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Count the syllables in the first and third lines there. Although love is said to be “fixed,” when it
“looks on tempests and is never shaken,” the word “shaken” finishes the line with an eleventh
syllable. Unlike the next line that metaphorically has love firmly guided as “the star to every
wandering bark,” the stormy tempests are supposedly “never shaken,” yet the eleventh syllable
unsettles the beat count with “worth’s unknown” in the third line, which is about trying to
measure the height of a guiding star. Notice that this value’s measurement is in question since
when “his height be taken,” the word “taken” again has an eleventh syllable rhyming with
“shaken.” The syllables in rhyme physically disrupt their very statements. It appears that
Shakespeare’s rhythm, his sound pattern works ironically against love’s fixity.
This is no accident. The poet creates dramatic battle between ideal love and time’s wreckage:
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come:
In these lines alliteration is at work with the imagery. Alliteration is the repetition of sounds to
create sense. There are two types: assonance for vowels, and consonance for consonants.
Luscious “though rosy lips and cheeks” appear extra flush and juicy due to the assonance of ‘oh,’
‘y,’ and ‘ee.’ Notice too how “cheeks” finish with a contrasting ‘ks’ sound that then resounds in
the consonance of the next line: “sickle’s compass come.” Say it out loud. If you count the
“cheeks” with it, that’s 4 ‘ck’ sounds plus 4 ‘s’ sounds. It’s like a slasher horror film. A sickle’s
sharp edge is used to cut grass. In this case, “though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending
sickle’s compass come:” Time makes a bloody mess of Love’s youthful face.
And yet he “bears it out to the edge of doom.” When you read over the final rhyming couplet
again, do you find the poet’s argument to be successful? What is his point exactly in the end?
Sonnet 129 contrasts 116 as a poem of lust. I will not go into the same detail, but explain a few
meanings and techniques so you can explore the poem.
SONNET CXXIX
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
The first line refers to a Renaissance idea that “the expense of spirit” is a “waste of shame” when
a lover acts upon lust only, as in a one-time sexual encounter. It’s a waste of human spirit to
degrade oneself in a lustful act of sex, the poet writes. In addition, “the expense of spirit” refers
to ejaculation, as if it’s a shameful waste.
Shakespeare continues to lay waste with a long list of adjectives and adverbs. Notice that this list
has a staccato rhythm; it’s very abrupt and has very abbreviated flow. When a line of poetry has
rhythm interrupted by punctuation, it’s called caesura. Most lines except the fluid first one have
caesura (contrast this with three caesuras in the flowing sonnet 116). The first line in 129 extends
its rhythm into the second line (there is no punctuation at the end of the line). This rhythm is the
opposite of caesura as it is not cut, and this rhythm is called enjambment. So when Shakespeare
writes “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame / Is lust in action,” the enjambed lines show the
flow of sexual jam “Is lust in action” (pardon the crudeness).
Next we will read and discuss William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience:
Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul from 1789 and 1793.
We’re zooming ahead to 1789, the year that the French Revolution began. After much bloodshed
and heads chopped off at the guillotine, France formed a democratic republic based on the
Romantic ideals of Rousseau – liberty, equality and fraternity. (These ideals from the
brotherhood did not include women in the democratic scope of human rights. Read Mary
Wollstonecraft’s essay A Vindication of the Rights of Woman if you are interested.) However, the
French democracy and the American democracy established in 1776 influenced British Romantic
writers such as William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to call for
British reforms to corrupt collusions between the state monarchy and church.
In Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, you will read some exemplary poems
that show how Blake challenged what he saw as England’s dark, polluted corruption (for
example, slavery, child labour abuse, orphan abuse by church and state, industrial pollution,
natural ruin, prostitution). He battled the dark soul of the country, which he also observed as the
experienced soul that every adult develops, with poems of innocence. Romantic artists value
children immensely because they are born good (this idea comes from Rousseau). Kids gradually
get corrupted by their institutions (Rousseau also explains how institutions such as family,
church, school, government, employment corrupt us. Learning is corrupt in this formula, which
means than innocence is a pure and natural state, ie. naked and vulnerable). Blake’s
“Introduction” clearly shows how pure water is stained, and so Blake shows that his writing is
part of both innocence and the experience of corruption. “The Lamb” innocently reads like a
child’s nursery rhyme. Readers often pair some of Blake’s Songs of Innocence from 1789 with
Songs of Experience that he wrote three or four years later to make a double collection. “The
Lamb” contrasts with “The Tyger,” (old original spelling) and in “The Tiger” we read of a fierce
predator who hunts prey (“The Lamb”). Notice also that there are two poems called “The
Chimney Sweeper” that provide innocent and experienced versions of the same lyrical story. The
same goes for “Holy Thursday.” However, not every poem has a correlative. In The Songs of
Experience, “London” stands alone a tour de force, and perhaps Blake’s most complete and
succinct critique of England, which alternatively the poet later described as “that green and
pleasant land” in his church hymn entitled “Jerusalem.”
Blake grew up Catholic and then spent most of his poetic career re-writing the Christian Bible.
Blake was a working class Londoner who quit school to become an apprentice engraver. His
poems are not just poems. He engraved them on copper plates and made prints (which you can
easily find on the web; several images, designs and colours for each song). So when we read
them as poems we are simplifying his multi-media art.
Look also at the simple rhyme forms of the Songs of Innocence. They are ballads comprised of
quatrains with rhyming couplets, or alternating rhyme. In The Making of a Poem: A Norton
Anthology of Poetic Forms (which is on library reserve at the front desk), the editors Mark
Strand and Eavan Boland define ballads:
– a short narrative, usually in four-line stanzas with distinctive and memorable meter
– rhyme scheme starts with abab or abcb [it can also be aabb]
– subject matter is communal stories of lost love, supernatural happenings, or recent events
– poet uses popular and local speech, often dialogue as well to vividly convey the story
The ballad came to poetry from song, and it is found in every language, country and culture
(Strand and Boland 74). The ballad as we know it comes originally from the 14th and 15th
centuries. Each line has four stresses (beats), or alternatively four and three. “The music builds
from verse to verse often making a hypnotic narrative” (76). It uses everyday speech. We hear
ballads in the majority of pop music from Bob Dylan to Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey to
Adele, Leonard Cohen to David Bowie, Led Zeppelin to Guns n’ Roses, Public Enemy to
Kendrick Lamar, Anderson Paak to Daniel Caesar. They can be sappy and melodramatic like
Celine Dion, or tough and street smart like Eminem. Check out the lyrics of your favourite songs
to see if they are ballads. There are Lyric apps that can help with this:
https://www.mobileappdaily.com/2017/18/07/5-best-lyrics-app-you-must-try-for-your-musiclove
I really like the Genius website because it breaks down lyrics effectively and includes
background context for enriched learning.
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
. . . .
I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.
– from Song of Myself
Every time I shake mud off my boots I think of Walt Whitman. He is the soil of America. A
critic named Sandra Gilbert called him “the father of American poetry.” His legacy is immense
and crosses almost all boundaries. The first book on Whitman was called The Good Grey Poet
with reference to his grey beard that made him look like father time. He preferred to publish his
books with an image of himself and no name on the cover. He was a healer in the American Civil
War who went around to wounded and dying soldiers reading them the Bible and his poetry. He
was a revolutionary who did not use many traditional rhymes or write in tight stanzas. His long,
unruly lines led the British to reject him as “an American roughneck” who took a hundred lines
to say what Shakespeare could say in ten. Expansionism in his poetry with its catalogues of
information on every subject matched his expansionist politics of the American 19th century – he
considered Mexico and Canada to be part of America. He wrote poems for President Lincoln
(who signed the Emancipation Proclamation to abolish slavery in 1864 near the end of the Civil
War) like “O Captain! My Captain,” which American schoolchildren are told to memorize. He
has bridges, schools and statues, even a cliff in Ontario’s Bon Echo park named after him. And
yet The Good Grey Poet more recently became known as The Good Gay Poet, for he struggled
with whether to hide or reveal his homosexuality in his lifetime. He loves everybody; this is
evident in Song of Myself, but the erotic passages with male lovers are more intense and
convincing – he finds God through gay sex in one of them. So Whitman is a hero in the gay
community as well as in the patriotic heartland of the USA. If you would like to see a wellrounded hour-long documentary on his life and poetry, try this from Voices and Visions (PBS):
https://www.learner.org/catalog/extras/vvspot/Whitman.html
Whitman’s style of poetry is unique because it is a form of free verse (without rhyme) made
before the better known free verse poems of the early 20th century. Begin with “I Sing the Body
Electric.” The title alone embodies one of Whitman’s foundations – the body’s electricity, the
sensual and nervous impulses running through every organ, is brought into poetry here,
contradicting Victorian repression. The end of the poem, its last canto or section, is a catalogue
of adored and indiscriminate body parts. In the beginning of the poem, we can become
accustomed to Whitman’s signature style. It is one of reciprocity:
1
I sing the body elect…
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