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Literary Explication Of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130

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Literary Explication When thinking of a love poem, one thinks of a cliché description of the speaker’s lover or maybe is an imaginative portrayal of love in a general sense. Love poems always have an exaggerating characteristic when describing something or someone. “Sonnet 130” by William Shakespeare, is a parody of love poetry; love is not always like it is illustrated in others contemporaries poems. The author of this sonnet uses the traditional English sonnet form, containing fourteen lines, written in iambic pentameter, and has an ABABCDCDEFEFGG rhyme scheme. The sonnet’s form is part of the parody because usually love sonnets writers use traditional sonnet forms, an example for this is Francesco Petrarch that is well known for his love sonnets written in Italian sonnet form. Shakespeare makes the contradiction between a traditional sonnet form and a non-traditional content of the sonnet. The content of this sonnet, a decretory description of the speaker’s lover, is very opposite to a traditional love poem’s content. In the first three quatrains of “Sonnet 130”, the speaker compares his mistress with various thing and tells us how she doesn’t measures up to them. In the last couplet the speaker changes …show more content…

Love poets seem to obsess with woman’s appearances, but Shakespeare mange to poke on that obsession, making this poem kind of a wakeup call on our image of beauty. As the speaker lightly mocks traditional poems and beauty images, he turns the theme to an illustration of true love, ending the poem on a sweet note. By turning the theme he goes from the person who he is mocking other poets to the poet he has mocked all along. This couplet also sends the message that even in a poem where he is mocking other poets he need to express his true feeling about his

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