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.