Oh Modern Day Society Communication: An Explosion of Words
To write a word on paper, is to paint a picture on canvas in its various forms, following a sequence. On a rainy day in Davis, I may curl up in bed for hours glued to a 200 page novel. I can follow every chapter of the fictional story, from start to finish, such as following the strokes on a detailed painting. In the end, one concise image is portrayed. Or perhaps before I jump on my bike, I can take a few minutes on Twitter to read some tweets or write one myself. In less than a mere 15 informal, perhaps unconventional words, I can broadcast to my friends, followers or the world, what is happening in my life, in my own personal, emotional style. This tends to be a black and white sentence with an occasional pop of color I decide to express on a deeper level. But if I am ambitious, then I will decide to unlock the content saturated 14 lines of a sonnet. A picture with consciously formed paint-strokes where I must connect the seemingly missing pieces. It is totally subjective, with layers of insightful meaning added through its rhythm, rhyme and devices to solve a problem. Essentially, how we choose to view each, is how we decide to look at a masterpiece.
In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73, the problem is the old man’s metaphysical death of his youth and passion. This poem utilizes the 3 quatrains which portray the diminution of time from a year to day to the final minutes of a fire before it outs. It is a battle of time. At then end of each there is a fullstop which adds a sense of retrospective disappointment. Its rhyming sequence (abab, cdcd, efef) heighten the solemn despair and development of self pity. The first rhyming words ‘behold’ and ‘cold’ exaggerate the almost pitying sound effect of ‘o’ in a dismal world. After, they tend to be paradoxical to each other. There are contrasting imagines of the dead ‘hang’ with the happier ‘sang’, the hope of ‘day’ with the loss of ‘away’, the warmth of ‘fire’ with the its end of ‘expire’. It represents his life. What he once had, he has now lost. This epitomizes the old man’s pessimism about life. The couplet creates a turn for the poem from speaking of his ‘death-bed’ to the complete opposite idea of love. The words that are stressed are powerful such as ‘makes, love, strong, long’. The last rhyming words ‘strong, long’ end with a brighter image than ‘cold’ and ‘hang’ which the poem began with. It brings a brighter conclusion.
You described the expactations of the sonnet,tweet, and novel beautifully. I agree with you, a sonnet has alot of thought behind it and perhaps it requires even more thought to desipher it. For instance, in previous English classes we have discussed the meaning of several sonnets and almost always there were various interpretations. Unlike in a tweet, we can't just say, "Oh, Shakespeare is hating his life right now because somebody just broke his heart." Instead, we have to look at rhyme schemes and structures to figure out the meaning in a sonnet.
ReplyDeleteI did not really interpret the ending as you might have. Insteads of seeing it as brighter, I actually saw it as gloomier. The way I interpret the last line is something like "you will love someone greatly, but you will still have to leave them behind." The word long just intensified how much more you will leave them behind for.