Research on the Appreciation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 44 and 45

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_40How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Sonnet; Appreciation; Motif; The four elements of life; Body and thought

Abstract

Love is an eternal motif in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Among his 154 sonnets, he reveals, implicitly or passionately, the different states of love with profuse metaphors, deep philosophy and coherent emotions. There are always connections and similarities between sonnets. Take Sonnet 44 and Sonnet 45 as an example, both express the feeling of being far away from loved ones; both use the same images of the four elements of life, body and thought; and both indicate the yearning for nimble thought and the frustration of dull body, only the return of the loved one can make the narrator’s life complete and make thought and body become one.

This thesis aims to compare and appreciate the presentation of motifs of the two sonnets. The expression of emotion in these two sonnets comes down in one continuous line. Shakespeare blends abstract concepts such as thought and desire into natural elements, and uses rich and changeable rhetorical devices to show the conflict between lightness and heaviness, and spirit and flesh.

Through these introspections and reflections, the love between the narrator and his beloved becomes stronger after suffering and separation while the poet’s interpretation and understanding of love and life become more profound.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Xiaoyan Pan
PY  - 2023
DA  - 2023/02/13
TI  - Research on the Appreciation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 44 and 45
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 4th International Conference on Literature, Art and Human Development (ICLAHD 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 323
EP  - 328
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_40
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-97-8_40
ID  - Pan2023
ER  -