Sep
I remember this sonnet above all others. It was high school and I had to take a placement test for AP English (sophomore year). This was the poem we had to analyze.
It wasn’t until after we got the results back that the poem became clearer: Love can make everything seem better. Envy goes out the door and in its place, contentment: at the memory of a one true love.
Let’s take a closer look at this sonnet, line for line now. This is something I’d like to do with all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, beginning with Sonnet 29: “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” — how sad it starts. Analysis will follow the poem, after the jump. (I did get into the class by the way, *g*.)
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf Heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur’d like him, like him with friends possess’d,
Desiring this man’s art, and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least:
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,–and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love remember’d such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings’.
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