Shakespeare Sonnets

In both Sonnet 71 and in Sonnet 73, the narrator contemplates old age and death. Both poems use rich and dark imagery to convey the theme of human mortality, although Sonnet 73 is more filled with metaphor than 71. However, both poems are composed according to the strict rules of the poetic form: in iambic pentameter with fourteen lines organized into three quatrains and a final couplet. Iambic pentameter sets the rhythm of a Shakespearean sonnet, in which every second syllable is stressed. Rhyme scheme in the Shakespearean sonnet is also predictable: the quatrains have an ABAB rhyme sequence but the final couplet is CC. Of the two, Sonnet 73 is more morbid than Sonnet 71, which merely asks that the beloved not mourn or grieve for the speaker's death, but rather, promptly forget him. Both poems show a wise reckoning with the inevitability of death as a...
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