William Shakespeare and His Sonnets

Reading and analyzing Shakespeare’s Sonnets is both entertaining and confusing at the same time. I think these sonnets are so from real life that every reader can make comments as they see or feel them while they are reading. At some point, I can say that I believe sonnets provide us with various comments from different lives and aspects, so maybe this is why Shakespeare chose subjects from real life in his works. In this writing, I decided 2 sonnets that impressed me a lot and I wanted to analyze them from my own perspective.

SONNET 23

In this sonnet, we can see there’s a simile. In the first and second quatrain, the speaker describes himself as an inexperienced actor on the stage who is too excited and fearful to say his lines. This simile refers to his inability to confess his love out loud. He wants to confess his love deeply, but his love is too overwhelming to speak, he’s melting down his love that’s why he’s afraid to forget what he wants to say. In the third quatrain, he decides writing is the best way to express his feelings to his beloved one. In the couplet, he says, ‘’ O learn to read what silent love hath writ / To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit’’ (Shakespeare 23). When I read these lines, I felt how powerful art truly is. He says to his beloved one that he should learn how to read silent love; it means, he should read his writings and see his love for him which he can’t say out loud because he confesses his love through his poem, he speaks with his art. When I saw the simile of an ‘actor’ in this sonnet, I thought it might be related to Shakespeare’s personal life. He was also an actor, and he knew the feeling of being on the stage for the first time. I think he might have felt the same way being an amateur actor and a lover as they both have to express themselves with speaking, but they both forget what to say with the burden of excitement and the fear of being on the stage or confessing his feelings in front of his love for the first time.

SONNET 35

I suppose this sonnet is one of the strongest sonnets which have an inner emotional conflict of the speaker. He knows what is right, but he doesn’t want to accept it and it ties him up in knots. He starts by saying he’s not sad anymore about the bad things that his loved one has done in the past, or he might do in the future. He’s aware that he’s been betrayed, but he’s still making excuses to forgive his love. In this sonnet ‘The Youth Fair’ is not as innocent as in Sonnet 20 as he stained this relationship with betrayal. However, the speaker is so in love that he tries to forgive his/her by saying all men can make mistakes and even he says he’s a man who makes mistakes with these lines: ‘’All men make faults, and even I in this / Authorizing thy trespass with compare / Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss’’ (Shakespeare 35). It seems to me he’s kind of criticizing him/her and himself like; ‘’Yes you made mistakes and I make mistakes too by trying to forgive a person like you who betrays to his/her lover.’’ He himself knows it is a mistake to forgive him/her, but he’s blinded by his beloved one’s beauty and love so that he’s saying all beautiful things in this world have flaws with these words: ‘’Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud’’ (Shakespeare 35). In the end, he blames himself because he’s the only one who let him/her have a place in his life so he’s the only guilty person and, he deserves the bad things his lover had done since he let him/her do them with loving him. From my standpoint, he’s trying to cover up his lover's mistakes by making himself the actual guilty one. In the couplet, he’s aware that his love is being used but he consents to it and keeps loving him/her as well as he forgives all mistakes that his lover has made because he/she deserves to be tolerated no matter what he/she has done, or might do.

Shakespeare’s sonnet tells us how intense human emotions can be, and how real they are. In these 2 sonnets, we see the excitement of a lover who is declaring his love for the first time, we see the burden of being crushed under his own emotions and what kind of inner conflicts this love causes within himself. Shakespeare presents human nature most beautifully with his possibly own experiences – although it’s not certain – to the reader. As a matter of fact, from my perspective, these two sonnets are not only about love, they’re also about how someone can lose their self-respect by being blinded by love.