Shakespeare’s Sonnets
& Love
 Shakespeare???
18 “Shall I Compare Thee to a
Summer’s Day”
116 “Let me not to the marriage...”
 from Romeo and Juliet
 Elizabeth Barret Browning 43 “How do I
Love Thee? Let me count the ways!”
 Poems on Love & Related Themes
Image source 1. 2
Shakespeare?
 Shakespeare Uncovered: Hamlet with David
Tennant 8:50; soliloquy 15:45; versions 23:41
Anonymous (2011; about Edward de Vere,
17th Earl of Oxford, an Elizabethan courtier,
playwright, poet and patron of the arts)
Shakespeare in Love [later]
Outline
 Sonnet
18 “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s
Day”
116 “Let me not to the marriage of true mind”
 from Romeo and Juliet
 from Shakespeare in Love
 How do I love thee, let me count the way...
 Kahoot.it!!!
Sonnet -- A logical argument
 “A sonnet is fundamentally a dialectical construct
(辨證過程) which allows the poet to examine the
nature and ramifications of two usually contrastive
ideas, emotions, states of mind, beliefs, actions,
events, images, etc., by juxtaposing the two against
each other, and possibly resolving or just revealing
the tensions created and operative between the
two.” (source)
Sonnets: Subject Matter
1-17
• urge a
young
man to
get
married
and have
babies
18 -126
127 - 154
• human mortality
and immortality
of poetry
• The
dark
lady
sequence
• (e.g. 130
“My
mistress'
eyes are
nothing
like the
sun” )
• e.g. 18 --Shall I
compare thee to a
summer's day"
• e.g. 116 -- Let me
not to the marriage
of true minds
Admit
impediments)
154
altogether
Sonnet: Its Metrical Form
Meter: iambic pentameter
abbaabba
3 major types:
cdcdcd
(& variations) ; e.g.
 Petrarchan,
Ozymandias
an octave + a sestet
 English/Shakespearean
 Spenserian
ababbcbccdcdee
abab
cdcd
efef
gg
3 quatrains + a couplet
Sonnet: Its Logical Form
Petrarchan = an octave + a sestet
 A. Octave: Subject, proposition, problem
 B. Sestet: Turn, resolution
English/Shakespearean
 3 quatrains’ elaboration of a theme
 a couplet (punch line 妙語)
 Two parts with a [turn] in the middle,
and/or punch line at the end.
18 “Shall I Compare Thee to a
Summer’s Day”
Two Kinds of Summer
Summer –corn, artichoke, eggplant
Giuseppe Arcimboldo (about 1527-1593)
source
Starting Questions
 How is summer described in this poem?
(with figurative language, action, sound/sense.)
 How is summer different from the “thou” in
the poem?
 What are the functions of repetition in this
poem?
 What is the real object of praise in this
poem?
18. “Shall I compare thee to a
summer's day?” by Shakespeare
Spondee
Images of decay;
Repetition &
contrast?
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
/Rough/winds /do/ shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;
(trim: To make neat, or to adjust or balance a ship)
* Summer – temporary (with a lease), sun = the eye of heaven, with a face
* Decay by chance or messed up (untrimmed) by nature= regular sometimes,
chancy and irregular sometimes
“Shall I compare thee to a
summer's day?” by Shakespeare
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his
shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
1. ow’st – own, possess
2. This – the poem
“Shall I compare thee to a
summer's day?” by Shakespeare
1st reading:
只要汝長存與我詩中。
汝比夏日更美﹐更溫和﹐更長久﹐
Poetic device:
Hyperbole: thou grow’st in these eternal lines =
eternal summer
repetition: Every fair from fair
See contradictions in the next slide
Apparent Contradictions
Summer vs. Eternal Summer
1) Thou art more lovely and more temperate
2) Thy eternal summer
1) Summer’s
images of beauty
1. the darling buds of
May
2. Sun= the eye of
heaven, sky = gold
complexion
3. every fair
2) transience or
violence:
1. Rough winds shakes
2. summer's lease . .. too
short a date
too hot the eye of heaven
[Sun’s] gold complexion
dimm'd
3. Fair declines from fairness
Actual Similarities and Ambiguities
in Stanza 2
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
1. Two “Nor’s” – made possible by the poem;
2. That fair thou ow’st vs. every fair from fair; “ow’st” = grow’st
 You owe your immortality to this poem
As always, the closing couplet is the punch line which
not only defines the meaning of the whole poem,
but also provides richer meanings.
This = Sonnet 18, the Grecian Urn?
the painting of the last duchess ?
Image source
Howard Moss (1922-1987)
"Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day"
Who says you're like one
of the dog days?
You're nicer. And better.
Even in May, the weather
can be gray,
And a summer sub-let
doesn't last forever.
Shall I compare thee to a
summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and
more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the
darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all
too short a date
Dog days = (三伏天 )
Sub-let – 分租 allow some one to rent a room
which you are renting from someone else  who is the first tenant?
Howard Moss (1922-1987)
"Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day"
Sometimes the sun's
too hot;
Sometimes it is not.
Who can stay young forever?
People break their necks or just
drop dead!
Sometime too hot the
eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold
complexion dimm'd;
And every fair from fair
sometime declines,
By chance or nature's
changing course
untrimm'd
Howard Moss's
"Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day"
But you? Never!
If there‘s just one condensed
reader left
Who can figure out the
abridged alphabet,
After you're dead and gone,
In this poem you'll live on!
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair
thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou
wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou
grow'st:
So long as men can breathe or
eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives
life to thee.
Condensed: reduced in length, thickened; reader: (讀者﹐讀本)
abridged alphabet （節錄字母﹚– cell phone literature?
Is immortality ever guaranteed? Even literature can be
forgotten or ignored.
Kahoot.it
1. Key in pin code
2. Group no. & Your name
Sonnet 116 –
What are the opposing forces?
Sound effects? And ambiguities?
Sonnet 116 : Starting Questions
1. What is the main idea? Why can’t the marriage of
true-minded people be stopped?
2. “Love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds” –
What do the two “love’s” mean? And “alter” and
“alternation”?
3. What kind of love “bends with the remover to remove”?
4. What patterns can you find in terms of its use of
words (repetition) and rhymes, its alteration between the
positive and the negative?
5. What do you think about the punch line? Are there
ambiguities?
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Language for Romantic Love:
Marriage, alter/altar
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Eternity: Fixed mark = lighthouse;
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Star
Rosy lips and cheeks
Oh no! It is an ever fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come. (his =?)
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, (his =?)
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Notes: “Fixed Mark” Father Time
Mark = sea mark, lighthouse
God of Time (with a Sickle): Saturn
(or Chronos), the Roman Deity of
Time and an ancient Italian Corn God
known as the Sower (image and info
source); the sickle is “bending” in two
ways (its shape, its impact)
 love as a star: 1) love provides
direction for those who are searching
or lost; 2) its height is known, but not
its true value (limitless).
Structural Pattern of Negations
1. 1st quatrain: what love does not do
2. 2nd quatrain: “o, no!” what love is
3. 3rd quatrain: alteration between what love is
not and does not
4. Couplet: the final stake of both writing and
love
5. Q: can the changing circumstances be denied?
Structural Pattern & Ambiguities (2)
1) “Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.” = 1) admit = allow; 2) Let me not
admit only?
2) What love does not change?
3) Oh no!
4) Love is the star …”Whose worth's unknown”
5) “rosy lips and cheeks” comes within Time’s
“bending sickle's compass.” (range, an instrument
used for navigation)
6) Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
(whose =?)
7) “I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”
Two Kinds of Love
True Love
Changeful Love
Circumstances
Unchanged
Unmoved
Alters,
bends to move
Alteration
Remover
Compared to “fixed
mark” (lighthouse) and
north star
Storm
Lost ship
Not Time’s Fool
rosy lips and cheeks
shows aging signs
Time with his sickle;
Does not alters
his brief hours and
weeks;
Edge of doom
True love = people’s
love = my writing
Ref. A Critic says—Do you Agree?
[In Sonnet 116] the chief pause in sense is after the twelfth line.
Seventy-five per cent of the words are monosyllables; only three
contain more syllables than two; none belong in any degree to the
vocabulary of 'poetic' diction. There is nothing recondite, exotic, or
metaphysical in the thought. There are three run-on lines, one pair
of double-endings. There is nothing to remark about the rhyming
except the happy blending of open and closed vowels, and of liquids,
nasals, and stops; nothing to say about the harmony except to point
out how the fluttering accents in the quatrains give place in the
couplet to the emphatic march of the almost unrelieved iambic feet.
In short, the poet has employed one hundred and ten of the simplest
words in the language and the two simplest rhyme-schemes to
produce a poem which has about it no strangeness whatever except
the strangeness of perfection. (Brooke, 234)
Kahoot.it
1. Key in pin code
2. Group no. & Your name
Romeo & Juliet
the Courting Sonnet
Act I, Scene V
Love at First Sight (I, v, 41-53)
Seen across a crowded room:
Context – Benvolio (I, i, 226) have brought Romeo to the
Masque so that he will see other women, and thus have
his mind taken off his obsession Rosalinde – likewise,
Capulet has brought Paris there under the same advice
(I, ii, 31)
The irony is, therefore, that once they set eyes on each
other, they see no-one else – establishing their own
personal PRIVATE SPACE within the PUBLIC realm of
the masque.
source
Love at First Sight (I, v, 41-53)
ROMEO [To a Servingman]
What lady is that, which doth enrich the hand
Of yonder knight?
Servant
I know not, sir.
ROMEO
O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope's ear;
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear!
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows,
As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows.
The measure done, I'll watch her place of stand,
And, touching hers, make blessed my rude hand.
Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!
For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.
TYBALT This, by his voice, should be a Montague.
source
Metaphors?
Act I, v, 92 – 106
ROMEO [To JULIET]
If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle sin is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.
a
b
a
b
JULIET Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, c
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
d
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
c
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.
d
ROMEO Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?
e
JULIET Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.
f
ROMEO O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray: grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.
e
f
JULIET Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake. g
ROMEO Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take. g (kiss)
Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.
Act I, v, 92 – 106
JULIET
Then have my lips the sin that they have took.
ROMEO
Sin from thy lips? O trespass sweetly urged!
Give me my sin again.
JULIET
You kiss by the book.
Images: religious
1. Romeo -- hands’ and lips’ pilgrimage:
 Profane: (verb) to treat something sacred, holy,
or special with abuse.
 Shrine= Juliet or her hand: (noun) a place
where pilgrims visit to pray to and worship a
saint. Usually with a statue or relic of a saint.
 Pilgrim or Palmer (a person wearing two
crossed palm leaves as a sign of pilgrimage to
the Holy Land.)
 Puns: palm– hand, palm leaves
Conceit: Extended Metaphor for pilgrimage and purgation
Romeo’s argument (1)
• Hands’ profanation made up by lips = TWO BLUSHING PILGRIMS
Juliet’s argument (1)
• Juliet -- “Good pilgrim” = Romeo; saint = Juliet;
• holy palmers’ kiss = palm to palm
Juliet (2)
• Juliet = lips for prayer
Romeo (2)
• “O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do”
Juliet
• Saint do not move
Romeo’s Action
• kiss  sin purged  (2nd kiss) sin taken back.
Juliet
• Kiss by the book (sonnet, rules, Bible)
Courtly Love and Courting Sonnets
 Courtly Love – originated in the court,
the illicit love between a knight and the
queen as his lady (e.g. King Arthur’s
legends, Tristan and Iseult) , the love
which inspires the knight to go on a noble
quest.
 the Petrarchan tradition of courtly love
poetry (Laura) e.g. common paradoxes
about courtly love such as "sweet
torment" and "shivering at midsummer."
 Shakespeare: courting sonnets and
sonnets on love, poetry & mortality
 The Metaphysical Poetry –witty
seduction and platonic love.
Image source
Shakespeare in Love
Shakespeare inspired to write Romeo and Juliet and
The Twelfth Night by his lover, Viola de Lesseps.
 Two parallel plotlines of the film and the play within
the film.
 The Love of Poetry, Play and/or between the two of
them
 The poetic lines can be so touchingly read…
Shakespeare in Love: Clips –the
Love of Poetry or of a Woman
 1- Shakespeare in his writer’s block
 2- audition
 3. 27:00 Lady in (dance) –balcony scene – Shakespeare
writing again
 4. 00:37: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
 5. talk on the boat  “My Mistress’s Eyes Are Nothing like
a Sun”
 6. 00:49 (after the first love-making) –performance  balcony
scene (Act 2 scene 1)
 7. 01:18 [after the revelation of S’s marriage and the death of
Marlow] –Romeo’s parting (Act 3, Scene 5)
 8. 01:34 The play -- “Two households …”
Kahoot.it
1. Key in pin code
2. Group no. & Your name
How do I love thee? Let me count
the ways.
Sonnet 43: pay attention to
enjambments* & the turn
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,—I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!—and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
我的愛比山高
、比海深？
海枯石爛
至死不渝？
Sonnet 43
Thesis: The speaker expresses both through form and
content how love is both boundless and limited.
Form: limitlessness + limitations
Italian, but with only 4 rhymes; intertwining rhymes;
Repetition of words;
Emotional, long lines not limited by the form; breaks in the
middle of two lines;
Meaning in tension:
 Paradox between uncountable love and countable ways;
 between boundless love and finality of life. (freely, purely
vs. past losses and future death)
 between the spiritual and eternal (open or long vowels) and
the everyday life (short and stressed syllables).
Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1): A
Distinguished Poet
 A comfortable childhood, when she
preferred reading to social life.
 Very well-read, mostly self-educated.
 Writes her first poem at the age of
four;
 At the age of six, she received from
her father for "some lines on virtue
penned with great care" a ten-shilling
note enclosed in a letter addressed to
"the Poet-Laureate of Hope End."
 In 1850, the year when Wordsworth
died, she was mentioned frequently
as a possible successor of the Poet
Laureate.
Her life and Sonnet 43
E. B. Browning (2) : the
Conventional and Unconventional
The plot of Romantic Love
 The father did not allow them to get married (being against
the idea of marriage). (Why? …)
 Threatened with lung disease, lived in a darkened room with
few visitors (after her brother’s death by drowning).
 Browning in January 1845 wrote a letter which began, "I love
your verses with all my heart, dear Miss Barrett."
 Married before elopement. (still following the Victorian
moral codes)
 Her elopement with Browning “cured her invalidism.”
 More famous and accomplished than Browning during her lifetime;
 they lived on her money; RB becomes productive ‘after’ her death
 Reasons for the father’s objection: mixture of blood???
E. B. Browning (3) : Critical
Reception of EBB as a poet
“While Robert Browning is famous for being a poet, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning is famous for being a poet with a romantic life
story” (Beard 67)
 Contemporary feminists
readings:
 Victorians –saw her as a
 “Aurara Leigh”: Aurora, who
major poet, good enough
aspires to be a poet, is courted
to be considered for
with a marriage proposal by
laureatship;
her cousin Romney. Rejecting
his offer she proclaims her own
 Great inspiration for
`vocation'. -- a feminist
Emily Dickinson and
version
Christina Rossetti
 Sonnets: ideas of writing love
 Later critics – see her as
poems appeared in her
an adjunct to her husband
notebooks well before she met
RB.
Her sonnets
Different from the Renaissance sonnets
because she talks mostly about her own love
(and doubts—possibly including the sexual
aspects), but not her lover.
Ref. E. B. Browning (3) : love &
desire
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
The physical sources of desire is presented with
metaphors: (Kern 91-92)
She hears “footsteps of the soul” and waits with
“trembling knees.”
The hand of love is “soft and warm” and brings
“souls to touch”
Her heart opens wide to “fold within the wet wings
of thy dove”
Her own pulse and her beloved’s “beat double”
Ref. E. B. Browning (3) : desire
Exchange of a lock of hair:
 R. Browning “Give me . . . so much of you—all
precious that you are—as may be given in a lock of
your hair—I will live and die with it.”
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
“. . .from my poet’s forehead to my heart . . .
[I] lay the gift where nothing hindereth;
Here on my heart, as on thy brow, to lack
No natural heat till mine grows cold in death.”(Sonnet
19 qtd Kern 345)
Conclusion: YOUR Tasks!!!
Sonnet–
a. A witty argument
1. Difficult part explained
2. Complex meanings and sound arrangement analyzed
(“turn” and punchline)
b. A love poem
1. Read the poem as a love poem
2. Relevance? (Youthful, romantic love, mortality and
keeping something immortal in one’s work
3. Differences and Similarities? (putting the pieces back)
Love & External Factors
Love, Gender &
Class --
Love, Growth
Education & Quest
Pygmalion
same as left
Jane Eyre
“A Rose for Emily”
“A&P”
“Araby”
Love of Different Kinds
Love -Possessive
My Last
Duchess
Porphyria’
s Lover
Love vs.
Mortality
Shall I
Compare
Thee…
Bright
Star
Un/Changing
Love
On Her
Loving Two
Equally
A Red, Red
Rose
Valediction:
Forbidding
Mourning
Let me not
to the
Marriage of
True Minds
Courting the
Lady
Unrequited
Love &
Mortality
The Flea
To His
Coy
Mistress
The
courting
sonnet R&J
Barbara
Allen
Love & Related Issues
Nature
Ambition, Familial Love,
Patriotism
Love
Eternity
Art
(Grecian Urn)
Spiritual
(Platonic)
Physical
(Sexual)
Mortality
Daily Reality
(Count the ways)
Next Week
 Journal 3 due
 The poems to be interpreted by you:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Brooks, Gwendolyn “First Fight. Then Fiddle”
Anonymous “Western Wind”
Anonymous “Sir Patrick Spence” (849)
Shuttleworth, Ciara. “Sestina” (p. 881)
Cummings, E. E. “l(a” (p. 883)