Sonnet 55 Analysis

Wait a minute. Doesn't speaker = writer = Shakespeare? Not so fast. Although it's reallllly tempting to map him on to his poetry, there's no autobiographical evidence that the "I" of the sonnets =...

There are a lot of sonnets floating around in the poetic ocean, so make sure you've got hold of the right fish when you start talking about form. Shakespeare's sonnets follow the form known as—wa...

Wait a minute. Doesn't speaker = writer = Shakespeare? Not so fast. Although it's reallllly tempting to map him on to his poetry, there's no autobiographical evidence that the "I" of the sonnets =...

There's no way to Google Maps this setting, because we aren't given a lot of geographical information. But we can draw a few conclusions from what the speaker does mention. First up are the gold-gi...

Reading Sonnet 55 is like sitting back in a fat armchair and tuning into some afternoon Bach on your local classical radio station. There's nothing warm and fuzzy about what's actually going down i...

Guys, don't judge a poem by its title. Come on, "Sonnet 55" doesn't exactly get your heart racing with anticipation. In fact, it conveys almost no information at all. Basically, it lets us know tha...

It's no secret that Shakespeare was a dude who loved to write about love and time and poetry. Just grab your Norton Critical Edition of the other 154 sonnets and read all about it. So, whenever you...

Although it sticks to its main idea (poetry is powerful and the beloved will live forever), the Shakespearean syntax and tricky irony make this sonnet a slippery climb.

All of Shakespeare's sonnets (along with some other heavy-hitters like MLK's "I have a Dream" speech) are now encoded in DNA. Shakespeare, meet the manuscript of the 21st century. (Source.)"The Dec...

It's all about love but what with the bombs bursting in air and time rattling by like a witch on a bicycle, there's no time for sex. This guy needs to write his sonnet before his beloved is lost to...

Mars (7)