Study of sonnets
Shakespeare presents love and lust as two very different things. Although one is the perpetrator of the other and both are kin, lust is presented as love’s darker cousin. The imagery used to depict love in Sonnet 116 shows how noble and altruistic the ideal of love is. Shakespeare presents it as unconditional in the line “it is an ever-fixed mark”, and assures the reader that it does not “alter when it alteration finds”. Shakespeare utilizes the natural imagery of the “tempest” to show that love is stronger than nature: it “looks on tempests and is never shaken”. Lust on the other hand is not so worthy. Shakespeare depicts the act of love as “th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame”. This is again an example of natural imagery: the barren wasteland is like an arid desert. But even when uncommunicated, this lust is dangerous. Unconsummated lust is given much emotive language and is labelled “murderous, bloody… Savage, extreme, rude” and “cruel” in Sonn
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Some common words found in the essay are:
, sonnet 116, love lust, love alters, age love, love sonnet, natural imagery,
Approximate Word count = 648
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)
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