Wednesday, April 1, 2015

What are the similes and uses of alliteration in Shakespeare's Sonnet 116?

Although Sonnet 116 has plenty of metaphors, there are no similes at all in this poem. You can tell because of the absence of the words "like," "as," and "resembles" every time the speaker of the poem makes a comparison.


For example, when he states that love "is an ever-fixed mark," he's comparing love to a lighthouse ("an ever-fixed mark") by actually stating that love is the lighthouse, not that love is like a lighthouse or that love guides us with its constancy as a lighthouse does.


However, you can find quite a few examples of alliteration in Sonnet 116:


In the first quatrain: "marriage of true minds," "love is not love," "alters when it alteration finds," and "remover to remove" are all alliterative phrases. It may be more to the point to notice, though, that the speaker is using an especially emphatic repetition of words and their alternate forms (and not just beginning sounds) in most of these examples of alliteration.


In the third quatrain: "compass come" and "But bears" are the brief alliterative phrases.


In the final couplet: "never writ, nor no" is the alliterative phrase.

No comments:

Post a Comment

find square roots of -1+2i

We have to find the square root of `-1+2i` i.e. `\sqrt{-1+2i}` We will find the square roots of the complex number of the form x+yi , where ...