Shakespeare

Xavier Harris English IV AP-2 K.Campbell 15 Dec. 2009 Sonnet 30 In the sonnet Shakespeare explains about his character’s past and describes the fact that he wasted the best years of his life. Our character in the story says that he lost many of his love ones. We can really tell that the character is very emotional. As the sonnet starts to open our character in the story is sitting in the park all alone in silent thought. At this point you can already tell the character is sitting alone in some sort of court probably the weather is very cloudy or some kind of depressing weather of some sort. Then in line two of the sonnet the court imagery is continued with “summon up”. Line two, summon up- as in summoning a witness. But there is also the meaning of summoning up spirits, as if remembrances of past were spirits which could be called back from the grave. Remembrance of things past- the phrase occurs in the bible also. Line three, I sigh the lack of many a thing sought, I sigh the lack of= in sigh for the absence of, for the fact that I never attained… Line four, And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste. Shakespeare uses the new/old contrast in two other so the freshness of his grief is contrasted with the age of his sorrows, which, to heighten his sense of despair, he resurrects. My dear time’s waste = the squandering of my precious time. Waste also conveys the meaning of destruction and barrenness. Line five, and then can I drown an eye, unused to flow. Then can I weep, from an eye which does not often shed tears. Drowning one’s eyes suggests copious weeping. Line six, for precious friends hid in death’s dateless night. Dateless in this sonnet probably means without end. Line seven, and weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe, and weep once more over the pain of one or more love affairs, though I have long since written off the sorrow associated with them. Line eight, and moan the expense of many a vanished sight, the expense = the cost. The phrase probably refers more to emotional loss than to anything else, although it does link with I believe line 3 if I’m not mistaken. I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, especially as sight had an archaic meaning sigh. Line nine, then can I grieve at grievances foregone. Grievances = griefs; injuries done to me; forgone = in the past, that have gone before. Also perhaps, because of the similarity of the words, with some of the meaning of fore done. Line ten through twelve explains how he has decided to stop weeping and now keep going on with life. Shakespeare here, as in many other sonnets, takes pains to construct a speaker possessing a multilayered self, receding through panels of time. We might give such temporal panels the names now, recently, before that, yet farther back, in the remote past. It is hard to construct a credible present tense self in the short space of fourteen lines; to construct a richly historical present and preterit. The speaker of sonnet 30 is he tells us a person who has long been stoic, whose tears have for a long time been unused to flow. In the situation sketched in the poem, he begins by deliberately and habitually making these tears flow again; he willingly for the sake of an enlivened emotional selfhood. I also noticed throughout the sonnet he kept repeating himself. The ingenuity of this sonnet has not prevented generations of readers from being drawn into its vortex. The increasing psychological involvement, as the quatrains proceed- I summon up…. Then can I….. then can I- acts as a present vertical emotional intensification balancing the horizontally broadening panorama stretching into further panels of the past. To be able to find pleasure in redo the summon griefs that were once anguishing indicates, in itself a loss of perceptual freshness. The credibility of the couplet depends on the probability that once the things summoned up in thought become very painful, the speaker will in reaction turn to the recent friendship with the young man at which event the u expected renewed pain of the speaker can be consoled. It is important that the consolation itself is expressed in the passive voice in one verb and intransitively in the other. It is in such simultaneous marshaling of temporal continuity, logical discreteness, and psychological modeling. So what I learned in this sonnet is that the character is very desperate and very lonesome because the loss of his friends