Metaphorically Speaking †Sonnet 73 Essays - 857 Words

Metaphorically Speaking – Sonnet 73 Love is a blanket of bright and colorful flowers that covers a beautifully rolling meadow on a breezy summer day. Similar metaphorical images appear in many famous poems including Shakespeares Sonnet 73. The metaphor is the most basic device poets use to convey meanings beyond literal speech (Guth 473). Shakespeares use of metaphors in this sonnet conveys his theme of the inescapable aging process. Shakespeare establishes and extends a metaphor that illuminates the poems central meaning and compares the inevitability of old age to three different aspects of nature (Prather). Similarly all the metaphorical quatrains begin with either the phrase thou mayest in me behold or In me†¦show more content†¦The bare branches and the abandoned church symbolize aging in that the bareness of the branches and loneliness of the church resemble the bareness and loneliness of old age. Shakespeare uses the falling leaves and the absence of singing birds in the branches in comparison with the absence of youthfulness within the human body when approaching old age. Much like the seasonal change to autumn, night descends upon the earth in the same manner. In the next metaphor Shakespeare compares the ending of life to the setting of the sun. The second quatrain reads In me thou seest the twilight of such day / As after sunset fadeth in the west / Which by and by [gradually] black night doth take away, / Deaths second self, that seals up all in rest (Shakespeare 5-8). Shakespeare describes the sun as fading in the west much like his life is fading into his old age and someday into death. The setting of the sun resembles the end of the day and Shakespeare feels he is at the point where end is nearing. Shakespeare describes the black night as gradually taking the day away much like death and old age takes life away (7). Shakespeare uses this metaphor to enhance the idea of growing old and nearing death. He speaks of Deaths second self that seals up all in rest where rest and sleep represent the end of life and when the sun has set, death is upon hi m (8). Like autumn and a sunset, Shakespeare relates aShow MoreRelatedMetz Film Language a Semiotics of the Cinema PDF100902 Words   |  316 Pagesconcept the author borrows from the Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev (Prolegomena to a Theory of Language, translated by Francis J. Whitfield. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961, pp. 73-75), is a relation between a correlation in one plane . . . and a correlation in the other plane of language (73). More specifically it is mutation between the members (i.e., components) of a paradigm (p. 135), where mutation is the function existing between first-degree derivates (components) of one