Shakespeare's sonnets - choose image/theme - Term Paper Example

In this report we will analyse the themes of friendship and love, and compare the poet’s attitude and feelings concerning the platonic love to a young man, on the one hand, and the passion to the woman, on the other. Most of Shakespeare’s sonnets are about the poet’s friendship with a handsome young man and his passionate love to the “dark lady”. From the sonnets we learn that his love and his friend became lovers, yet this did not change the poet’s attitude to either of them. In the sonnets we see the friend of the poet and his lady “with the eyes of Shakespeare” – and his feelings and perception are what’s most important for us.

Writing about his feeling of love, Shakespeare depicts it as a source of the greatest pleasure in the world, but at the same time the reason for the hardest torture. The sonnets about the dark lady (from 127 to 154) can be combined into one cycle; however their unity is more of emotional character rather than following the same plot. This unity is created by the personality of the lyrical hero, the protagonist of the sonnets. If we compare the first 126 sonnets (about the friend) with the ones about the dark lady, we will see the difference between them.

Seems that in Shakespeare’s opinion, friendship for him is as much a deep feeling as the love to a woman, and because friendship lacks sexuality and passion, it might even be considered more elaborated and subtle, with the high and sincere spiritual feelings without any physical attraction. In the sonnets about the dark lady, the passion to the woman is of dual nature: it is both spiritual and physical. It is very important to remember that Shakespearean sonnets about the friend lack any homosexual motives, although there might be attempts to search for them because the poet tells about the physical beauty of his young friend, not only about his spiritual qualities.

However this tradition to praise a human beauty is very typical for the Renaissance and other