Sonnet 147

Love makes people do stupid, crazy things. When it isn’t really love, and actually an obsession, it can be like a disease, because no matter how bad for you that you know it is, you will always return for more because the short elated feeling it gives you seems to be worth the suffering that accompanies it later. Love can also make you blind as to someone’s faults, you may think that they are the most perfect faultless person in the world, but in truth they are the lowest person in the world, but once you think otherwise it is too late, because you had a chance to have that feeling before you realized what you got yourself into. It is almost like a drug, and you can’t control the way you yearn for it even when you know it is slowly killing you.

Sonnet 146

I don’t completely understand what this sonnet is trying to say, but what I get out of it is that it is no good to spend worthless time and money on earthly things when someday at the point of your death, you will no longer be able to hold on to those earthly things, including your body. The only thing that gets to leave when you die is your soul, so you should spend more time nurturing your soul and developing yourself as a person than gathering material things, because your soul is all that you will be able to preserve when you die.

Sonnet 138

I think in a lot of immature relationships, people who don’t tell the truth sometimes expect their partner to figure out that they are lying. However, some people just seem to be more content with not knowing the truth, because if they were to know the truth then it would mean that the perfect picture that they painted of the person they were with would completely fall apart. As for the speaker and his mistress, I think that they do not speak of the lies they tell each other because they are both getting something out of their relationship, and the truth would just complicate the seemingly perfect arrangement they had already established.

Sonnet 130

So now the speaker is no longer focusing on the man who he was trying to convince to reproduce and then seduce, now he has a mistress. And some say love makes people blind, well I don’t think that is true in the speaker’s case, because he really calls them like he sees them. But I really like the couplet, where he kind of seems to defend his love for her as well as the reasons as to why he finds her so appealing, by stating that he thinks she is as special as any other woman who has ever been written falsely about, like false in such a way as to make them sound more appealing. At least he loves her for the way she is and not the way he wishes she was.

Sonnet 116

The speaker makes some really powerful statements in this sonnet, especially in the couplet. The entire sonnet is basically the speaker stating that no  matter how much time passes, even when beauty fades, true love still remains. And when people who love each other spend time apart, their love does not fade, but will last until the end of the world as we know it. The couplet then states that if all of things that he said about love in the sonnet are not true and can be proven wrong, then no person has ever experienced love, even if they believe they have.

Sonnet 94

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. That power can come from anything; money, power, beauty, etc. But this sonnet does state the truth in that anyone who possesses any of these powerful tools but chooses to control their power deserves to inherit everything good, because they don’t use their power to obtain more power. And because they do not choose to abuse their power, they are in complete control of their power and they completely own themselves, and will not let anyone else own them. I think this relates to the reader because the speaker sees the reader as someone who has the type of beautiful power that they could use in a way to take advantage of others, but chooses not to employ that power.

Sonnet 87

I feel like the speaker is trying to guilt the reader into staying, because of his extensive use of flattery. In the first few sonnets when he was trying to convince him to reproduce, he used extensive flattery, and I feel like that must be his weapon of choice. Since he is so good at manipulating words, I think it would be hard for anyone not to be subdued after reading a sonnet like this. If someone told me that they didn’t deserve me and that I was a gift fit for a king, sure it would inflate my ego, but then it could convince me to do one of two things; leave that person because I agreed with them that yes, I was fit for a king, or 2, I would stay because it would appear as if I had them under my complete and total control and they would do anything to convince me to stick around.

Sonnet 73

It is the couplet of this sonnet that really is the best part of the entire thing (actually I have noticed that about a lot of the sonnets).  The couplet is so powerful simply because it is true, when you know you are going to lose something within time, it makes you love it even more than before, or at least try to pay attention to it more. For example, someone who has a terminal illness and has been at odds with their family may suddenly reconnect with them because they know within time they will no longer have that opportunity. However it does sadden me because people who wait to show something or someone they love how they feel at the last possible minute could have done so many years prior, why does it take realizing that you may lose something to give it the kind of attention it deserves?

Sonnet 55

This particular sonnet didn’t appear at first in the way it did for sonnet 30, where the speaker seemed infatuated with the reader. For a while the speaker almost seems to be praising himself, for being responsible for keeping the reader alive even after his imminent death. But then it is noticeable of how no longer does the speaker believe that the reader must procreate in order to remain immortal and beautiful, all he has to do is nothing, because the speaker will write the poetry about him that will secure his immortality. It also appears as if the speaker wants future readers to see the way the speaker adores the reader as an example of how they should adore their lovers.

Sonnet 30

I believe in this sonnet we see a sort of shift in the way the speaker addresses the reader. In the first few sonnets we read, the speaker is trying to convince the reader to reproduce. Now it appears as if the reader is the object of the speaker’s affection. The entire sonnet is quite sad, until we reach the couplet, when the speaker mentions that if they think of the reader, they regain all that they had lost, and are no longer sad. Most people don’t tell just any old person that they are the only reason that they are happy. And I take back what I said earlier, I don’t believe that the speaker is in love with the reader, I believe that the speaker is infatuated with the reader.

Sonnet 18

I believe the speaker is saying in this sonnet that the person whom he is writing to may grow old and lose their beauty, but as long as this sonnet(s) pay tribute to their beauty, that beauty will never die. The sonnet will give life to the reader long after they are deceased, simply because people will still continue to read about that person. In this sonnet it is interesting how death is personified, and I like how the speaker says that even if death has taken someone, if their memory lives on in some way, as it does in this sonnet, then death cannot brag that it is in control of the deceased person, because they still remain alive in some way.

Sonnet 12

I liked this sonnet at first because it didn’t try to convince the reader to have children, until I read the last line, where the speaker kind of snuck in a “have children!”.  I really liked how Shakespeare compared the crops from the summer being carried into a barn (summer) to an old man being carried away to his grave. And even though the sonnet is depressing, it does speak the truth in the fact that nothing young and beautiful on this earth can stay that way forever, it is just the nature of things to live and  then to die.

Sonnet 2

I find this sonnet equally as silly as the first, and it seems like the speaker is trying extreme flattery to persuade the reader to reproduce. By telling him how beautiful he is, and how he will still be able to claim that he is beautiful if he spends time and effort raising his own beautiful child, the speaker is attempting to convince him to reproduce. I find this silly because if the reader was to fall for this type of flattery, he would to me appear shallow because his youthful beauty would be the reason he chose to have a child, not because he actually wanted to have a child.

Sonnet 1

In this sonnet, the speaker is begging the person that is being addressed to procreate because he is so beautiful. The speaker acknowledges that beauty cannot last forever due to age, and that the only way for this person’s beauty to live on is through his offspring. I find this concept to be tiring in a way because eventually the child will grow old as well and lose his or her beauty, and then they will also have to procreate in order to retain the original beauty. It seems like a waste of time, and also a bad reason to have children, just because of vanity. “Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.”-John Ruskin