Sonnets

Hehehe...this is a kind of learning process..Hari ni, Im gonna talk about sonnet..Bila kita sebut about sonnet, the first thing comes to most people's mind is, Shakespeare. Why? Becoz he is famous with his 154 sonnets. He's not the first people who introduce sonnet nor a poet with the most number of sonnets in collection. However, mainly, in English literature, he is, we can say, the most well known poet through all his 154 famous sonnets. There are actually two types of sonnets, the Italian sonnet, known as Petrarchian Sonnet, and English sonnet, known as Shakespearean sonnet. Both type of sonnet share the same general pattern, which is, they are the 14 lines love poem . The different is only the rhyme scheme..how is it different in term of its rhyme scheme? As english words are less rhyming, thus, the rhyme scheme is more rhyming. The italian sonnet goes the other way around. Okeyh, below, there is a sample of a shakespeare's sonnet, the sonnet 18 (Shall I compare thee to a summer's day).

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:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest 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.

The sonnet 18 is actually refers to a young boy. This is what do kak TJ told us in class. I do believe that most of us have learned about this particular sonnet in form 4. So, basically, it sounds familiar. This sonnet is a symbol of his love to the beloved. In these 3 quatrains and a couplet, Shakespeare expressed his love towards the beloved. The true love, that will never fade away, even, if the beloved is not as beautiful as before. Okey, now, let analyse the last two lines (the couplet) in this sonnet. So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee. As far as i can see, this last couplet says that, as long as this sonnet 18 read by men, so, his love for the beloved will never die,. And also, the beloved will still alive.