Comparing the Beloved in Shakespeares Sonnet 20 and...

Comparing the Beloved in Shakespeares Sonnet 20 and Sonnet 130 In the hands of a master such as Shakespeare, the conventions of the sonnet form are manipulated and transformed into something unique and originally emphasized. Both sonnets in one way or another subvert the conventions of the base Petrarchan sonnet; though they are about love, the traditional topic of sonnets, whilst in Sonnet 20 the object of desire is unattainable and there is no evidence of the level of affection being requited, the target is male, and the target of the poets affections in Sonnet 130 is the poetic voices current mistress. It also seems important to note that love in neither of these cases is of the generic youthful female Aryan stereotype, and†¦show more content†¦The poetic voices mistress is of nature; no supernal gifts are hers. It is even strongly indicated that she is beneath the highest forms of beauty nature has to offer (her eyes are nothing like the sun, coral is far more red than her lips, no roses see I in her cheeks.) But this is to stray be yond the confines of the original subject, the rest of the verse argues, because the love the voice has for its lover is as rare as any other; beauty does not have to draw such clichà ©d parallels with nature to be thought of in the mind of a lover as surpassing everything around it. In reference to this repeated theme, in the introduction to the Penguin Classics printing of the Sonnets (though in reference specifically to sonnet 84), editor John Kerrigan concludes: Which hyperbolic poet, Shakespeare asks, which most-sayer, can exceed this sublime truism, that you alone are you. For you comprise the only things which, in honesty, you can be compared with. This sonnet serves to invoke a strong sense of realism in love, arguing that as strong an intensity of emotion as may be held, may be held, without the need for delusions of grandeur, taking the view that trying to reconcile two essentially different and diverse things as equal is to do true justice to neither. The beloved in this case thus represents more the need for a character developed to challenge stereotype than an actual real-life woman,