Sonnet_53

Sonnet 53 Sonnet 23 This sonnet demonstrates Shakespeare's great ability of playing with words. According to him a person is tongue-tied when he has either too much or too little to say. He illustrates his idea by giving an example of an unperfect actor who forgets his lines on stage and more curiously, some fierce thing whose heart is weakened by the weight of his own strength. This use of paradox adds intensity to the sonnet and lays the foundation for the following quatrain. The first quatrain is like the silence before a storm; the way it is presented suggests that there is more to come. The actor and the beast are summoned to serve only as analogues to Shakespeare's double-edged analytical presentation in quatrain 2 of love's agonized lack of words: So I, for fear of trust, forget to say The perfect ceremony of love's rite, And in mine own love's strength seem to decay, O'ercharged with burden of mine own love's might. The persona here compares him to the characters beckoned in Q1. In a passage such as this, the distance between the composing author and the fictive speaker almost vanishes, as it is very easy to imagine that sonnet, own, love's, line, persona, love, way, tongue-tiedness, strength, speaks, sestet, quatrain, perfect, octet, mine, first, fear, beloved, words, very, trust, speaker, shakespeare's, seem, say, rival, persona's, person, might, idea, heart, expressed, decay, ceremony, actor, writing