Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: Analysis and Context

Unit 2: Introduction to Poetic Genres and Forms

• This unit introduces various poetic genres and their defining characteristics.

Basic Elements of Poetry

Shakespeare's Sonnet 18

• The sonnet poses: Can thy beauty be compared to that of a summer's day?
• It posits that the subject's beauty is more perfect and eternal. Poetry and procreation ensure longevity
• Tudor England often saw Petrarchan poetry influence, praising female beauty using similes.
• Challenges Petrarchan poetry through questioning imagery validity
• Some sonnets lack gender signs and don't describe female beauty
• The sonnet is about a mysterious man described in the previous 17 sonnets.
• The poem praises the beloved using similes or metaphors.
• Lines of 10 syllables, i.e. pentameters, are used with iambic rhythm.
• There is a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg, making 3 quartets and 1 couplet.
• Alliteration is the repetition of sounds.
• Anaphora is the repetition of words.
• Metaphors such as 'the eye of the sun' and 'eternal lines' are used.
• Personification is used.
• Poetic forms such as "thou" and the suffix"-st"
• Poetry emphasizes language's phonological and sound qualities.
• Figurative language is explored, and polysemy is exploited.
• Syntactical order is carefully created.
• Feelings and reflections of poet expressed briefly, condensed, and elaborate way.

John Keats' Ode To A Nightingale

• Ode: Lyrical poem of feeling and style
• The poem reflects on beauty and power of poetry
• Listens alone to a nightingale in nature
• Shares his imaginative response through the poem.
• Uses structures such as abab cde cde - iambic
• Explores beauty and poetry as eternal.
• The nightingale represents beauty untouched by death and pain.
• Poem celebrates poetry's escapism.
• Recognizing the limitations of imagination happens at the end

Narrative Poetry: Epic, Romance, and Fabliaux

Narrative Poetry

• Narrative poetry tells a story in verse, focusing on plot more than personal emotion.
• Characters, events, time, place, and narrator create the narrative.
• Rhythm and rhyme are important elements, making it easier to remember and recite.
• Oral tradition of story telling before the 15th century, when printing obviated memorization.
• Poetry includes rhythm, repetition, imagery, and rhyme.

EPIC

• An epic is a long narrative poem about a legendary or historical hero.
• Includes initial statement of theme and context, invocation to a muse, and action in medias res.
• Actions begin in medias res
• Incorporates epithets, speeches from the hero, divine intervention, and a journey to the underworld.
• Embodies the values of his civilization.

Anglo-Saxon Epic

• Oral tradition uses recitations with a harp to tell a story.
• Illustrates the ethical code: honour, loyalty, courage, and strength in battle.
• Beowulf is an example of an Anglo-Saxon epic.
• No rhyme, but rhythm and alliteration are used.
• Verses are divided by a caesura
• Kennings and epithets are used.

ROMANCE

• From the 12th century, written in romance languages, not Latin.
• It deals with chivalry and courtly love, differing from Latin historical chronicles.
• Medieval romance deals with upper-class characters, love, and adventures.
• Set in classical, legendary pasts.
• Organized around quests, and includes supernatural elements.
• It often included "courtly love,” with idealization, adultery, disloyalty or self-denial related challenges.
• Usual strategies: delay, fortune reversal and intervention of supernatural elements.
• The hero encounters challenges, starts a quest, and battles enemies.
• The hero must prove ideal courtly traits.
• Setting is imprecise and remote.
• Objects, colors, and materials have symbolic significance.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is an anonymous late 14th-century work
• Employs alliterative verse and "bob and wheel" rhyming.
• One of romances about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.
• Camelot hosts a New Year's Eve celebration
• The Green Knight proposes a "beheading game".
• Gawain wears a pentangle shield.
• Gawain is faultless in his 5 senses, has 5 virtues, believes in Christ's wounds/Mary's joys.
• On his way , Gawain battles monsters.
• Gawain is received by Lord Bertilak, and his wife.
• Hunting and temptation happens via an exchange game
• The Green Knight slightly wounded Gawain
• Guinevere is tested and scared by Lady Bertilak and The Green Knight
• Wonders, magic, supernatural beings, a quest, a test, a happy ending, ideal setting/characters, and symbolism are key.

The Canterbury Tales

• Written by Geoffrey Chaucer in the late 14th c.
• Verse form uses iambic pentameters rhyming in couplets
• Consists of a framed collection of tales including a "General Prologue" and links between tales
• 30 pilgrims from different social classes leave from the Tabard Inn
• The narrator is one of the illusion and justification providing pilgrims
• Each pilgrim tells 2 stories each way, and a dinner is prize for the best story
• There are only 24 tales

FABLIAU

• A comic verse tale in verse
• Originated in France 12thc and reworked 14thc by Boccaccio and Chaucer
• Sex and scatology characterizes
• Immoral clergy, peasants, crafts workers, students, cuckolded husbands, thieves are common
• Religious or romances are contrasted
• In The Miller's Tale, Robin the Miller tells a filthy story
• John, carpenter from Oxford, marries Alison
• Absalon, a parish clerk, also woos Alison and is ignored
• Nicholas and Alison have act together
• Alison asks Absalon for a kiss, then is interrupted
• Scatology, humor around pranks, vulgar language, and cuckoldry are used.
• Romance and seriousness are contrasted with the story.

Lyric Poetry: Sonnets, Elegies and Odes

Lyrical poetry

• Expresses the personal feelings and thoughts of the speaker.
• Ancient Greek "lyric” was sung.
• Songlike quality and exploration of thoughts related to a single idea.
• Is is short in form.
• Condensed messages capture feelings
• Attempt to be memorable.
• Elegies, odes, villanelles, haikus, sonnets, hymns, is a broad category
• Are selected examples

SONNET

• Originated from the Italian "sonetto"
• Developed in Italy in the 13th-14th.
• Height came with Francesco Petrarch.
• The Petrarchan sonnet is divided into 14 lines
• an octave (abba abba pattern)
• a sestet (cde cde or similar variant).
• Courtly love and sentiments by a male about a female
• Often not requiring consummation or action and is unrequired
• Emotionally and physically distant to the male

English Sonnet

• By Thomas Wyatt in the 16th c.
• A 4-part poem in iambic pentameters.
• 3 quatrains rhyming (abab cdcd efef) and a couplet (gg).
• Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella had
• 108 sonnets and 11 songs, published in 1591, written around 1582.
• The stages are
• Expectation, search for satisfaction, despair.

ELEGY

• A meditative lyric poem that laments mortality or someone's death.
• In classical literature, elegy refers to the elegiac metre subject poem.
• Long line + short line using alternation

Anglo-Saxon elegy

• Focus on speakers or communities
• The speaker is a wandering warrior who has lost his lord.
• The Wife's Lament: Wife's lament focuses on a speaker who isn't male

Seventeenth Century

• Donne's elegy reflects the style of Latin love elegies.
• Milton's Lycidas is a pastoral lament in an idyllic environment.
• Bradstreet's poems focus on faith and family in colonial Puritan poetry.

Eighteenth Century

• Writers reflected on death in a somber mood as part of the "graveyard school of poets".
• Contributed to Gothic fiction

Nineteenth Century

• Rossetti wrote dirge, published in Goblin Market
• Dirge contains saddness.

Twentieth Century

• Cummings wrote My Father Moved Through Dreams of Love (1940)
• Auden's Funeral Blues was changed to a love cabaret.

ODE

• Lyric poems which deal with serious topics
• Enthusiasm relates to tone.
• From aeidein (to sign)
• Odes are performed to musical accompaniment
• Horatian odes are more personal, calmer, meditative in BC 1st century
• irregular odes are flexible in terms of possibilities
• Authors were Shelley, Keats Coleridge, Wordsworth
• Keat wrote Ode on a Grecian Urn.
• Keats work contains an ekphrasis
• Clifton uses elements of her nature is Homage to my Hips

An exploration of Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, including its themes, structure, and historical context. The sonnet compares the beauty of the subject to a summer's day, concluding that their beauty is more enduring through poetry. Key elements such as iambic pentameter, rhyme scheme (abab cdcd efef gg), alliteration and metaphors are discussed.