Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true… | Poetry Foundation A Sonnet Response paper expressing your interpretation and reaction to it. I am most interested in having you “figure out” the sonne
ENG 2750 | Shakespeare: Comedies, Histories, Poems | Sonnet Response Instructions | 3
Shakespeare: Comedies, Histories, and Poems
Sonnets: Reading Schedule and Responses
Notes on Writing Solid Sonnet Responses:
Read all assigned sonnets & then select one for the response.
Read the footnotes carefully.
Prepare a Paraphrase (your own words, line by line “translation” of what the poem means). Important: the paraphrase is a separate, pre-writing activity to make sure you understand the first level (sometimes called the literal level) of meaning in the poem. They will be due one week before the actual Response is due.
On first sonnet reading experience, I notice that many people have a very skewed view of this level of meaning. Poems do not simply mean anything you think the words conjure in your mind. Instead, the poem is a function of the context of all the lines together. Some lines will be key phrases, of course, while others will be restatements or intensifiers of the content of other lines.
Think of the three quatrains and the couplet as discrete units. Observe whether the poem’s theme or mood changes from one to the next (often the couplet will reverse the entire direction of the previous 12 lines).
Take notes on these aspects of the sonnet:
Theme: Shakespeare often has a larger theme in mind even when a sonnet seems to be ostensibly a love poem. Many sonnets are about the inexorable effects of Time; many are meditations on death and mortality as central to the human condition; others examine various human weaknesses and shortcomings: lust, anger, envy, desire for earthly status; still others trace the good and bad of human romantic relationships and friendships, delving into topics such as loyalty, betrayal, motive, and opportunity.; and finally, an often overlooked theme is that Shakespeare is often directly addressing the theme of poetry itself and whether it is capable of telling the truth about beauty and whether it confers a kind of immortality on the poet.
Mood: Most sonnets, through the judicious use of word choice and other poetic effects, create particular emotional landscapes. Often these are what we would today term “negative” feelings, such as despair, resignation, nostalgia (which in the original Greek means “the pain of remembering the lost past”), and so forth. Pay attention to possible mood points in the sonnet (there may be more than one) where the mood alters or even reverses.
Word Choice: Obviously the very words Shakespeare chose for these poems are the decisive factors in the creation of theme and mood. Words, at the sonnet level especially, carry very specific and often unconscious connotations and you should think carefully and write about all of the key words in the sonnet that leap out at you. Here is where you should also explore techniques like rhyme and alliteration.
Metaphor & Simile: This the second or deeper layer at which the sonnets work and Shakespeare employs several techniques. He often develops a much-extended metaphor (like the seasons, for example) as a way of expressing truths about the human condition. Other times he may be playing with overused figures and metaphors by complicating them, reversing their common associations for us. Make sure you follow a metaphor through its full development in the poem. Look also for the way word choice actually builds a metaphor. For example, in Sonnet 30, he consciously uses a number of legal, judicial, and financial words to create a metaphor for human memory and life that puts his life up on trial, so to speak.
Historical & Social context: the footnotes will help the most with this; look for situations where word choice and metaphor tell us something about Shakespeare’s time.
Personification, puns, & figures of speech: Although these three things seem like metaphors, they are separate techniques. Shakespeare will often take a concept or an inanimate thing and give it a kind of being (usually signaled by capitalizing it as a proper noun): this is especially true for Death and Time. Puns are not always obvious and may involve the fact that words have more than one meaning (especially in a slang style). Figures of speech will be both obvious to us (because Shakespeare invented the figure we still use) or will be explained in the footnotes (many of these are of a sexual nature and not easily observed by modern readers).
Now write your interpretation showing how all or even several of these techniques and aspects of the sonnet brings about the meaning(s) that you discerned in your paraphrases. Please keep in mind that Shakespeare will often have several layers of meaning. A poem about love may actually also be about poetic immortality; another about friendship will conceal yet reveal the anxiety of not being part of a higher social class. Caution: don’t always assume that you have to sniff out some kind of hidden meaning; instead, be very conscious of the fact that Shakespeare’s primary mode of operation was high irony. That is, he is often aiming for an effect that is primarily opposite to his surface meaning. Look, for example, at the couplet at the end of Sonnet 42, where the emotional “relief” expressed is ironic in the extreme.
For a personal aspect to your response, just talk informally about why you chose these sonnets and how you feel they relate to your personal experience.
A Final Note: Although 600 words is the minimum for this assignment, I often find that students who are willing to develop a longer and more fully realized interpretation do the best work. It doesn’t help your cause to choose what appears to be the easiest sonnets in the batch and then generalize about them in a vague manner. The more detailed, concrete, and specific you can be, the stronger your interpretation will also be!
