What is the overall message of this poem? What is the general category of most of the metaphors in the opening quatrain? How do those metaphors serve the message of the poem?
Sonnet 2
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tattered weed, of small worth held.
Then being asked where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use
If thou couldst answer “This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse”,
Proving his beauty by succession thine.
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.
Sonnet 130
Question
What is Shakespeare’s attitude toward his subject? What is the tone of the poem?
Sonnet 130
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
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.
Hal’s Soliloquy
Question
What does Hal’s speech tell us about his character? What ideas or themes does Shakespeare’s use of language and imagery suggest will be developed in the remaining plays of the tetralogy? Do you get the sense that Hal’s plan is a new idea here? Has he been planning this for a while, or does he discover through the proposed escapade a way to restore his reputation in the eyes of the court? Do you think that the idea of a trick gave him the idea for the ultimate trick as a way to win the hearts of the nobility or do you think that this was his plan all along?
Hal’s Soliloquy:
Hal I know you all, and will awhile uphold 195
The unyoked humor of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That when he please again to be himself, 200
Being wanted, he may be more wondered at
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapors that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work; 205
But when they seldom come, they wished-for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So, when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promisèd,
By how much better than my word I am, 210
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off. 215
I’ll so offend to make offence a skill,
Redeeming time when men think least I will.
(1H4 I.ii.195–217)
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