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"To be, or not to be" is a speech given by Prince Hamlet in the so-called "nunnery scene" of William Shakespeare's play Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 1). The speech is named for the opening phrase, itself among the most widely known and quoted lines in modern English literature, and has been referenced in many works of theatre, literature and music.
Dmitri Shostakovich set Boris Pasternak's Russian translation of this sonnet to music as part of his 1942 song cycle Six Romances on Verses by English Poets (Op. 62). Because Pasternak's translation is also in iambic pentameter, the piece can be, and sometimes is, performed with Shakespeare's original words instead (for example, by Gerald ...
Also known as "When I consider every thing that grows," Sonnet 15 is one of English playwright and poet William Shakespeare's 154 sonnets. It is a contained within the Fair Youth sequence, considered traditionally to be from sonnet 1-126 "which recount[s] the speaker's idealized, sometimes painful love for a femininely beautiful, well-born male youth". [2]
Shakespeare refers to the influences of astrology and fate in this poem. Stars are cited as the luck-giving ones that favor some with positions at court. The reference made to the "favour of the stars" is also a metaphor for the members of the court keeping in favour of the King. [9]
The poem is a reconsideration of the idea that poetry can immortalize the young man. The previous sonnets in the Rival Poet group have hinted at retaliation for the young man's disloyal preference for another poet, and in this poem retaliation becomes activated as the sonnet considers how the poet will write his friend's epitaph. [3]
This analysis of the sonnet relies upon two assumptions: 1) the young man is the poet's lover and 2) that when the poet refers to "sad interim" (9), he does not mean that the young man is away from London, but that he is separated from him emotionally - i.e., they are in a "period of estrangement" from one another due to the young man's ...
Sonnet 2 begins with a military siege metaphor, something that occurs often in sonnets and poetry — from Virgil (‘he ploughs the brow with furrows’) and Ovid (‘furrows which may plough your body will come already’) to Shakespeare's contemporary, Drayton, “The time-plow’d furrows in thy fairest field.” The image is used here as a ...
Sonnet 19 addresses time directly as "Devouring Time", a translation of the often-used phrase from Ovid, "tempus edax" (Met. 15.258). [4] G. Wilson Knight notes and analyzes the way in which devouring time is developed by trope in the first 19 sonnets.