Shakespearean and Italian sonnets

     Sonnet is poem with fourteen lines of iambic pentameter. It has been classified into groups based on rhyme scheme. There are many types of sonnet as the Italian sonnet. It divided to two section by different group of rhyming sounds. The first 8 lines is call the octave rhymes abbaabba. It has two ideas in one poem.  The remaining 6 lines is called sestet and can have two or three rhyme sound, arranged in different of way  cdcdcd,cddcdc, Shakespearean sonnet ''sonnet 18''

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 dimmed;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed.

Buy 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.

Analysis

     In this first quatrain, the speaker is trying to find something that compare to the beauty of the young man. The speaker tries to compare him to a summer's day, but he realizes that the young man is  more lovely and more temperate than summer. The flower buds that appear in the May  are destroyed by the strong winds; thus, summer can be cruel and rough, which the young man is not.

     The second quatrain is concerned with the natural progression of nature. The "eye of heaven" is referring to the sun, which makes everything so hot. Line six offers a different extreme weather variation. When the weather is too extreme in one direction (i.e. too hot or too dimmed) there is a negative effect on nature, which causes what is considered to be fair (beautiful). Furthermore, the things that we expect to be beautiful during the summer months-flowers, plants, and the landscape as a whole-can often times become unappealing ,because overly hot temperatures or ,because they got too much moisture and not enough sun. During extreme weather conditions flowers are not able to bloom properly, and are often destroyed by too much heat or too much rain. Extreme weather happens either by chance or nature's changing course untrimmed.

     In the third quatrain, the narrator said  that the young man is superior to nature, because his beauty will not fade like that of summer. The speaker treats beauty as if it is a possession (something that lasts forever), instead of something that has been given to the young man as a gift of nature. he does this to show that the young man will maintain his beauty and he is able to escape the hands of death and  time and death cannot harm the beautiful young man as long as his beauty is written about in verse.

     The speaker tells the young man that he will live on forever, as long as men are alive and can read his verse gives life to the young man; every time someone reads this verse the young man comes alive again, and will thus live on forever.

The literary devices

He used imagery in line (rough winds do shake …)

He used allegory in these lines (Shall I compare thee …)

   and( thou art more lovely and more temperate)

He used metaphor in this line (Buy thy eternal summer shall not fade)

Italian sonnet''sonnet 75 of Spenser''

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Agayne I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray.
“Vayne man,” sayd she, “that doest in vaine assay.
A mortall thing so to immortalize,
For I my selve shall lyke to this decay,
and eek my name bee wyped out lykewize.”
“Not so,” quod I, “let baser things devize,
To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your vertues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens wryte your glorious name.
Where whenas death shall all the world subdew,
Our love shall live, and later life renew.”

Analysis

      A man wrote his beloved's name in the sand, but it was washed away by the tide. He writes her name again, but as before the tide washes it away.  He is  writing his beloved's name in the sand until he remembered his love  forever. he did that until  carve out a place in history for himself; so that he feels that his life meant something.

     In the second quatrain, a female voice (may be his beloved) tells him that he is working in vain to make something immortal that is not meant to be immortal. Mortal things  fade from history, and there nothing that anyone can do to change that; the waves will come and wash away all trace of man, no matter how hard they try to stop it.

     He tells her that she will live on through his verse (sonnet); the love that he wants to live on is between him and his beloved. The hope of every writer is to have their work immortalized; studied long after their death. Love transcends all bounds; even after death their love will be eternal.

The last rhyming couplet is meant to sum up the poem. Death cannot extinguish love; it will live on. It will be renewed every time someone reads this sonnet; these words can never die, thus their love will never die.

Literary devices

He used imagery in this line( one day I wrote her name…)

He used alliteration in this line(die in dust…)

He used personification in this line(but came the waves…)

cdeced,cdcedc. The other type of sonnet is call Shakespearean. It divided 3 quatrains of alternating rhyme and couplet. Its rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg. It has one idea at whole of poem. In this an essay, I will choose Italian and Shakespearean sonnet and I will analysis them.