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Shakespeare, like many sonneteers, portrays time as an
enemy of love. Time destroys love because time causes beauty to
fade, people to age, and life to end. One common convention of sonnets
in general is to flatter either a beloved or a patron by promising
immortality through verse. As long as readers read the poem, the
object of the poem’s love will remain alive. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet
Through art, nature and beauty overcome time. Several
sonnets use the seasons to symbolize the passage of time and to
show that everything in nature—from plants to people—is mortal.
But nature creates beauty, which poets capture and render immortal
in their verse. Sonnet
Growing older and dying are inescapable aspects of the
human condition, but Shakespeare’s sonnets give suggestions for
halting the progress toward death. Shakespeare’s speaker spends
a lot of time trying to convince the young man to cheat death by
having children. In Sonnets
Shakespeare used images of eyes throughout the sonnets
to emphasize other themes and motifs, including children as an antidote
to death, art’s struggle to overcome time, and the painfulness of
love. For instance, in several poems, the speaker urges the young
man to admire himself in the mirror. Noticing and admiring his own
beauty, the speaker argues, will encourage the young man to father
a child. Other sonnets link writing and painting with sight: in
Sonnet
Readers’ eyes are as significant in the sonnets as the
speaker’s eyes. Shakespeare encourages his readers to see by providing
vivid visual descriptions. One sonnet compares the young man’s beauty
to the glory of the rising sun, while another uses the image of
clouds obscuring the sun as a metaphor for the young man’s faithlessness
and still another contrasts the beauty of a rose with one rotten
spot to warn the young man to cease his sinning ways. Other poems
describe bare trees to symbolize aging. The sonnets devoted to the
dark lady emphasize her coloring, noting in particular her black eyes
and hair, and Sonnet
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