Renaissance And Romatic Era

Shakespeare’s sonnet 116 attempts to define love, by telling both what it is and what it is not. In the first quatrain, the speaker says that love “the marriage of true minds,” is perfect and unchanging; it does not “admit impediments,” and it does not change when it finds changes in the loved one. In the second quatrain, the speaker tells what love is through a metaphor: a g

uiding star to lost boat (“wandering barks”) that is not susceptible to storms (“it looks on tempest and is never shaken”). In the quatrain, the speaker again describes what love is not: it is not susceptible to time. Though beauty fades in time as rosy lips and cheeks come within “his bending sickle’s compass,” love does not change with hours and weeks: instead, it “bears it out even to the edge of doom.” In the couplet, the speaker attests to his certainty that love is as he says: if his statements can be proved to be error, he declares, he must never have written a word, and no man can ever have been in love. Essentially, this sonnet presents the extreme idea of love: it never changes, it never fades, it outlasts death, and it admits no flaws. The language in this sonnet does not include an immense amount of originality in its imagery or metaphors. For example, in the third quatrain it says that time wielding a sickle that ravages beauty’s rosy lips and cheeks. Although, the language is extraordinary in that it frames its discussion of the passion of love within a very restrained, very intensely disciplined rhetorical structure. Beginning the second quatrain with, “O no,” makes an almost legalistic argument for the eternal passion of love, and the result is that the passion seems stronger and more urgent for the restraint in the speaker’s tone. Basically, viewing man as someone who can overcome anything through love.

Through stylistic and philosophical aspects Shakespeare’s sonnet, Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, and Pope’s “An Essay on Man” changed from the Renaissance period into the Romantic period, with Gray as the transitional writer. In the Renaissance period Shakespeare is philosophically more assure of his view of man. He believes that man’s love is perfect and nothing can alter that. Gray’s elegy then begins to question what mans purpose is if they do not receive recognition for what they have done. This philosophy then transforms into Pope’s essay where he ques

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