Sonnet 130 Exercises - Ejercicios sobre el Soneto 130 de Shakespeare. PDF

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Ejercicios sobre el Soneto 130 de Shakespeare. ...

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EXERCISE ON SONNET 130, dossier page 4.13 1. Read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 and fill in the gaps in the text below (you can delete the line a write a word in its place, after the corresponding number, one word per gap): The poem begins with a (1) simile that explains that the (2) eyes of the woman loved by the poetic speaker are not comparable with the sun, meaning that they are less (3) bright and less clear in colour. Her lips are not like the deep hue of (4) coral. Her (5) hair is figuratively described as wires, that is, it is not fine but coarse. “Wire” here refers to the thin gold threads employed in jewellery or in embroidery, and so it was a positive comparison which poets used in their descriptions in order to portray the ideal lady as golden blond. However, these typically golden threads change colour in Sonnet 130 and become (6) wires in this lady’s head. The roses mentioned in line 5 are part of a (7) metaphor (name of rhetorical figure) that makes us think of a red blush on a (8) pale-skinned face. But this lady’s skin is not comparable with (9) roses, and so her breasts are darker, like her face. Her smell is not more fragrant than (10) perfume, her voice is not better than (11) music. The way she walks has nothing to do with the way a (12) goddess moves, but the poetic speaker’s tone is full of (13) sarcasm when he implies that this is a silly comparison that other poets sometimes use to describe a lady’s deportment by relating it to something nobody has ever seen. The reader may be a bit puzzled at this point, because after reading the three quatrains it turns out that the loved lady has been described in terms of what she is not: she is not like this, she cannot be compared with that, etc. However, the final (14) couplet introduces a turn and things become clear as love is extolled. The women described with untrue comparisons that are mentioned in the last lines are actually the ladies in other poems, the typical “ (15) Petrarchan lady”, so called after the name of the poet who set the model that others imitated. When the poetic speaker says that his love is more extraordinary than these ladies and their hyperbolic beauty, his beloved seems to be more (16) real, not just the product of his imagination and his poetic talent. One could even conclude that the point of the poem is not only that this particular woman does not meet the ideal standard of female beauty recreated time and again in Renaissance sonnets, but that no woman does. And so, Sonnet 130 conveys the message that there is not a necessary relationship between love and ideal beauty. The strongest kind of love can, and does, exist without it. It thrives in spite of flaws and imperfections. That is what real love is all about. 2. Sonnet 130 is unconventional, but is there any sense in which this sonnet is also conventional in the treatment of its theme? Answer the question by continuing the paragraph below (without using an extra page) Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 departs from convention. It subverts the common description of female beauty in Renaissance sonnets and portrays instead a dark lady that is a most atypical beloved. The poem even seems to be making fun of the kind of comparisons other poets use, of the incredible beauty of the astounding ladies they describe. In that sense, the poem is unconventional. At the same time, however, Sonnet 130 can be seen as conventional in that it continues describing the beauty of women in the Petrarchan sonnet, although his way of doing it is through satire and comparisons, trying to deny that so "false" beauty described during those times. We can say that this is a love sonnet, typical at that time, treated with an ironic tone. We can also find the use of 14 lines in the structure of the Sonnet 130, being this format the one Petrarch established. Finally on line 9, we see the use of a volta, marked by the word "yet". A volta is defined as the change from one idea to a contrastive one. In this case Shakespeare wanted to let us know how much he loved listening to her voice, although he knew music had a better sound....