Love And Life Shakspeare

Love and Life

Derek King

English 12

Love in life takes many forms. These many forms are exemplified in many ways, such as our actions, our feelings, movies, and sonnets written by poets such as Shakespeare, Thomas Wyatt and John Milton. Each of these poets portrays a different form of love that we experience throughout life. These forms include unrequited love, true love, and love of talents. All these aspects of love that run parallel to our lives are depicted in sonnets written during the time of rebirth, the Renaissance.

Unrequited love is featured in Thomas Wyatt's sonnet "Whoso List to Hunt." The speaker of the poem is in love with a woman he cannot have, and therefore the love is unreturned. The hunt for love is metaphorically represented by the hunt for a deer; this hunt is making the speaker grow tired: "The vain travail hath wearied me so sore"(3). The speaker warns other "hunters" about this "deer": "Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt, / As well as I may spend his time in vain" (9-10). He refers to the deer as having a collar representing that she is unable to be taken, for she is in the King's possession: " 'Noli me tangere,' for Caesar's I am"(13). The speaker of this poem is in love without a hope of that love being returned.

True love may be hard to come by in our lives, but is everlasting and apparent in Shakespeare's Sonnet 116. The speaker of this poem phrases love as "an ever-fixed mark"(5), saying that love is meant as a soul mate and it is not that "Which alters when it alteration finds" (3). This true love guides: "It is the star to every wandering bark"(7); love is like the North Star guiding a traveler. Shakespeare defines pure love as something