2 Szonettek

The Sonnets

Elizabethan tragedy and comedy alike reached their true flowering in Shakespeare's works.
Beyond his art, his rich style, and his complex plots, all of which surpass by far the work of
other Elizabethan dramatists in the same field, and beyond his unrivaled projection of
character, Shakespeare's compassionate understanding of the human lot has perpetuated his
greatness and made him the representative figure of English literature for the whole world.

William Shakespeare, who wrote during the late 1500s and early 1600s in England, is generally
considered the
greatest dramatist in human history and the supreme poet of the English language. His brilliant
works are
universally celebrated for their comprehensive understanding of the human condition.

Shakespeare’s poetic works include the epic poems Venus and Adonis, the Rape of Lucretia, and
the Sonnets.
Shakespeare’s sonnets are very different from Shakespeare’s plays, but they do contain dramatic
elements. The sonnet sequence has a linking dramatic thread: out of a total of 154 sonnets, the
first 126 of the sonnets seem to be addressed to an unnamed young nobleman, whom the speaker
loves very much; the rest of the poems (except for the last two, which seem generally
unconnected to the rest of the sequence) seem to be addressed to a mysterious woman,
embodying the counterpoint of the Elizabethan fair lady. The two addressees of the sonnets are
usually referred to as the “young man” and the “dark lady”; Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets to
“Mr. W. H.,” and the identity of this man remains unknown.
The sonnets often expand along a sequence of images and ideas, the couplet representing either a
summary or a new point of view. Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence is the least Petrarchan of all the
Elizabethan sonnet sequences. Shakespeare subverts the traditional themes and refuses the
conventional imagery and woman ideal of the Elizabethan poetry.
The sonnets touch upon recurrent subject matters such as friendship as a value that compensates
for everything, the beauty of the young human body, the sinful bodily love, the duality of love
and hatred and the contradictory character of human feelings.
An essential theme of the poems is the The Danger of Lust and Love
Modern readers associate the sonnet form with romantic love: the first sonnets written in
thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy celebrated the poets’ feelings for their beloveds and their
patrons. Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets to “Mr. W. H.,” and the identity of this man remains
unknown. In contrast to tradition, Shakespeare addressed most of his sonnets to an unnamed
young man, possibly Wriothesly. Addressing sonnets to a young man was unique in Elizabethan
England.In the first 18 poems, the speaker expresses passionate concern for the young man,
praises his beauty, and articulates what we would now call homosexual desire. The woman of
Shakespeare’s sonnets, the so-called dark lady, is earthy, sexual, and faithless—Several sonnets
also probe the nature of love, comparing the idealized love found in poems with the complicated
love found in real life.
In Shakespeare’s sonnets, falling in love can have painful emotional and physical consequences.
Sonnets 127–152, addressed to the so-called dark lady, express a more overtly erotic and
physical love than the sonnets addressed to the young man. Shakespeare portrays making love
not as a romantic expression of sentiment but as a base physical need with the potential for
horrible consequences.
Several sonnets equate being in love with being in a pitiful state: as demonstrated by the poems,
love causes fear, alienation, despair, and physical discomfort, not the pleasant emotions or
euphoria we usually associate with romantic feelings. Shakespeare shows that falling in love is
an inescapable aspect of the human condition—indeed, expressing love is part of what makes us
human.
Real Beauty vs. Clichéd Beauty

Traditionally, sonnets transform women into the most glorious creatures to walk the earth,
whereas patrons become the noblest and bravest men the world has ever known. Shakespeare
makes fun of the convention by contrasting an idealized woman with a real woman. In Sonnet
130, Shakespeare directly engages—and skewers—clichéd concepts of beauty. The speaker
explains that his lover, the dark lady, has wires for hair, bad breath, dull cleavage, a heavy step,
and pale lips. He concludes by saying that he loves her all the more precisely because he loves
her and not some idealized, false version. Real love, the sonnet implies, begins when we accept
our lovers for what they are as well as what they are not.
A recurrent motif in the sonnets is time. Shakespeare, like many sonneteers, portrays time as an
enemy of love. Time destroys love because time causes beauty to fade, people to age, and life to
end. Growing older and dying are inescapable aspects of the human condition, but Shakespeare’s
sonnets give suggestions for becoming immortal by having a child or by artistic creation.
Shakespeare’s speaker spends a lot of time trying to convince the young man to cheat death by
having children. In Sonnets 1–17, the speaker argues that the young man is too beautiful to die
without leaving behind his replica, and the idea that the young man has a duty to procreate
becomes the dominant motif of the first several sonnets.
Another common convention of sonnets in general is to flatter either a beloved or a patron by
promising immortality through verse. As long as readers read the poem, the object of the poem’s
love will remain alive.
Symbols
Flowers and Trees
Flowers and trees appear throughout the sonnets to illustrate the passage of time, the transience
of life, the aging process, and beauty of his beloved.
Weather and seasons

In the sonnets, the speaker frequently employs the pathetic fallacy, or the attribution of human
characteristics or emotions to elements in nature or inanimate objects. The speaker in Sonnet 18,
one of Shakespeare’s most famous poems, begins by rhetorically asking the young man, “Shall I
compare thee to a summer’s day?” (1). He spends the remainder of the poem explaining the
multiple ways in which the young man is superior to a summer day, ultimately concluding that
while summer ends, the young man’s beauty lives on in the permanence of poetry.
The sonnets have a very complex rhetorical style with antonyms, parallelism, repetitions
wordplays and puns. The tone of these poems has an argumentative character, it moves on a
large scale from feelings of passion to grievance; the complexity of tone and the rhetorical
construction results in an utterly modern subjectivity in the texts.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
XVIII. szonett (Magyar)
Egy nyári naphoz hasonlítsalak?

Te kedvesebb vagy, s rendületlenebb.
Május bimbói közt már szél arat,
S közelgő őszi dátum integet;
Az égi szem hol perzsel, hol megint
Arany tüzére felhő fátyla hull;
Arany tüzére felhő fátyla hull;

Szilaj szeszély, vagy vastörvény szerint
Mindaz mi szépség, rendre megfakul;
De hervadatlan a Te friss nyarad,

Szépséged kertje mindig zöldelő,
Halál fölötted győztes nem marad,
Örök sorokban, fényed egyre nő:
Míg ember szája szól, és lát szeme,

Él majd e versem, és élsz benne Te.
Summary: Sonnet 18
The speaker opens the poem with a question addressed to the beloved: “Shall I compare thee to a
summer’s day?” The next eleven lines are devoted to such a comparison. In line 2, the speaker
stipulates what mainly differentiates the young man from the summer’s day: he is “more lovely
and more temperate.” Summer’s days tend toward extremes: they are shaken by “rough winds”;
in them, the sun (“the eye of heaven”) often shines “too hot,” or too dim. And summer is
fleeting: its date is too short, and it leads to the withering of autumn, as “every fair from fair
sometime declines.” The final quatrain of the sonnet tells how the beloved differs from the
summer in that respect: his beauty will last forever (“Thy eternal summer shall not fade...”) and
never die. In the couplet, the speaker explains how the beloved’s beauty will accomplish this
feat, and not perish because it is preserved in the poem, which will last forever; it will live “as
long as men can breathe or eyes can see.”
Commentary
This sonnet is certainly the most famous in the sequence of Shakespeare’s sonnets; it may be the
most famous lyric poem in English. On the surface, the poem is simply a statement of praise
about the beauty of the beloved; summer tends to unpleasant extremes of windiness and heat, but
the beloved is always mild and temperate. Summer is incidentally personified as the “eye of
heaven” with its “gold complexion”; the imagery throughout is simple and unaffected, with the
“darling buds of May” giving way to the “eternal summer”, which the speaker promises the
beloved. The language, too, is comparatively unadorned for the sonnets; it is not heavy with
alliteration or assonance, and nearly every line is its own self-contained clause—almost every
line ends with some punctuation, which effects a pause.
Sonnet 18 is the first poem in the sonnets not to explicitly encourage the young man to have
children. The “procreation” sequence of the first 17 sonnets ended with the speaker’s realization
that the young man might not need children to preserve his beauty; he could also live, the
speaker writes at the end of Sonnet 17, “in my rhyme.” Sonnet 18, then, is the first “rhyme”—the
speaker’s first attempt to preserve the young man’s beauty for all time. An important theme of
the sonnet (as it is an important theme throughout much of the sequence) is the power of the
speaker’s poem to defy time and last forever, carrying the beauty of the beloved down to future
generations. The beloved’s “eternal summer” shall not fade precisely because it is embodied in
the sonnet: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” the speaker writes in the couplet, “So
long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
Szépem szeme nem lángol mint a nap;

Sem keble, mint a hó, nem oly fehér;
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Piros korall, ajkánál pirosabb;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; Sötét haja selyemmel föl nem ér;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; Van rózsa fehér, patyolat s bibor,
Az ő arczán ily rózsa nem virul;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
Hímes mezőn jobb illat árja forr
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white, Mint kedvesem fürtjérül, ajkirul;
But no such roses see I in her cheeks; Hallgatnom őt öröm, de jól tudom,
And in some perfumes is there more delight Hogy a zene sokkal fölötte szép;
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. Angyal nem járt még vélem egy uton,
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know S megvallom, ő ha jár, csak földre lép:
That music hath a far more pleasing sound; S ő nékem mégis szebb, ritkább virág
I grant I never saw a goddess go; Mint bármihez csalfán hasonliták
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
Summary: Sonnet 130

Sonnet 130, one of Shakespeare’s most famous, subverts the conventions of love poetry common
to Shakespeare’s day. Most sonnet sequences in Elizabethan England were modeled after that of
Petrarch. Petrarch’s famous sonnet sequence was written as a series of love poems to an
idealized and idolized mistress named Laura. In the sonnets, Petrarch praises her beauty, her
worth, and her perfection using an extraordinary variety of metaphors based largely on natural
beauties. In Shakespeare’s day, these metaphors had already become cliche (but they were still
the accepted technique for writing love poetry. The result was that poems tended to make highly
idealizing comparisons between nature and the poets’ lover. In many ways, Shakespeare’s
sonnet reverses and mocks the typical Petrarchan metaphors by writing about an admittedly
imperfect woman.
In “Sonnet 130,” the speaker unfavorably compares his lover's body to a series of beautiful
objects. Her eyes are “nothing like the sun,” her lips are less red than coral; compared to white
snow, her breasts are dun-colored, and her hairs are like black wires on her head. In the second
quatrain, the speaker says he has seen roses separated by color (“damasked”) into red and white,
but he sees no such roses in his mistress’s cheeks; and he says the breath that “reeks” from his
mistress is less delightful than perfume. In the third quatrain, he admits that, though he loves her
voice, music “hath a far more pleasing sound,” and that, though he has never seen a goddess, his
mistress—unlike goddesses—walks on the ground. In the couplet, however, there is an
unexpected turn, the speaker declares that ,it is the uniqueness of the beloved person that makes
her worthy of the speakers love. The speaker claims that he finds “his love” as beautiful as any
other woman “belied with false compare,” thus emphasizing that no false comparisons need to be
invoked to describe the loved one’s beauty. By resorting to, and at the same time denying the
conventional imagery of love poetry, this piece of the sonnet sequence becomes a veritable
parody of the Petrarchan sonnet.

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The Sonnets

Real Beauty vs. Clichéd Beauty

Weather and seasons

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Egy nyári naphoz hasonlítsalak?

Arany tüzére felhő fátyla hull;

De hervadatlan a Te friss nyarad,

Míg ember szája szól, és lát szeme,

Szépem szeme nem lángol mint a nap;

Summary: Sonnet 130

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