ENGL210 Week 7
In this week’s lecture we looked at Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 65”.
Shakespeare begins with a list of some of the most indestructible items in the world - for example brass and stone.
He then continues and asks the question:
“How with this rage shall beauty hold a plkea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?”
Basically Shakespeare is asking how something as fragile as beauty, symbolised by a flower, can survive in sad mortality - when everything is consumed; when even the strongest elements cannot overcome it.
He also asks whether the subtle qualities of summer can endure the element of time:
“O how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days”
However, beauty can withstand the testing elements of time…beauty has a strong-hold due to memory.
We have the ability to remember how good beauty is, and because of our memory, beauty will always remain.
Despite this poem being a depiction of the end of the world (according to Stephen Splendor), Shakespeare still speaks of hope
“O none, unless this miracle have might:
That in black ink my love may still shine bright”
I liked these last lines… I like the idea that there is still hope.