Description
Shakespeare is not only one of the greatest playwrights in world literature, but also one of the greatest poets, a true master of verse. The volume that contains his sonnets includes 154 wonderfully deep and beautiful pieces accredited to Shakespeare, poems that discuss all the major themes in human existence from life and death to love and friendship, from beauty and loneliness to disappointment and sadness.The sonnets in the volume do not come with titles they are identified by numbers. The pieces are organized based on their theme and topic. The first 17 sonnets are addressed to a young man and they discuss the topic of getting married, establishing a family and having children. The collection then continues with poems that are addressed to various people including the Fair Youth, the Rival Poet and the most famous of all the addressees of Shakespeares sonnets, the Dark Lady.All sonnets have the same structure: each of them starts with the narration of a story or event, then the last few lines provide a conclusion related to the event. They all have the same form, too they dont follow the structure of the Petrarchan sonnet, but come in a form of their own, divided in three quatrains (stanzas consisting of four equal lines) and a final stanza called the couplet. The lines are iambic pentameters, each of them ten syllable long and they are unrhymed.Shakespeares sonnets opened a new chapter in English poetry. The special sensitivity towards the major problems and themes of human life and the special language the poems use to discuss these themes mark a radically new way of speaking about emotions. The imagery used in these poems is also strikingly new the metaphors and similes used by Shakespeare have changed poetic expression forever.