Close Reading – Sonnet 71 Shakespeare Essay Example

writ it;(. . .)” (lines 5-6). By referring to himself as “the hand that writ it” (line 6) it seems like he’s trying to make his image seem less “material” as if he had only existed in his lover’s mind and it had all been just a dream. This would oblige his lover to forget him as though he had never existed. Following that, the speaker is more direct and also clearer about his wish of being forgotten “( . . .) for I love you so / That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot” (lines 6 and 7).; he asks his lover not to remember him when reading the poem after his death; the speaker’s love is so pure and real that he’d rather have his lover forget him and not suffer than nurture a memory of him everyday, living in pain in consequence of these memories.

In the following lines, the last argument is presented as a last attempt to try to convince the speaker’s lover: “If thinking on me then should make you woe / Oh, if, I say, you look upon this verse / When I perhaps compounded am with clay / Do not so much as my poor name rehearse / But let your love even with my life decay” (lines 8 – 12). The speaker is preoccupied with restating his wish over and over again throughout the sonnet, as if his lover is stubborn and will not be willing to forget him, but this image of the speaker ‘compounded with clay’ is an allusion to the buried body in the land. Leaving the lover with this image, the

speaker is trying to make all the magic of the love once lived by them disappear by leaving her with horrible images on her mind.

This unwillingness on the part of the lover can be understood by imagining the supernatural love they felt for each other, each one puts the other’s desire in first place and therefore often abdicates from their well being in order to the other reach full satisfaction. In the line 7 the speaker also suggests an end to the love of his lover for him “let your love even with my life decay” and from this excerpt we can analyze the simplicity with which the speaker talks about the end of his life as if it is a simple event that’s not going to affect anything in an attempt to make it easier for his lover to forget him.

Finally, in the heroic couplet is the conclusion of this sonnet, where the speaker clarifies all his inducements for wishing to be forgotten: “Lest the wise world should look into your moan / And mock you with me after I’m gone” (lines 13-4). The speaker fears for the life of his lover after he dies; it shows some vulnerability on the part of the lover, perhaps it’s just the speaker’s overprotection or the fragility in the woman that is the cause of this concern coming from the speaker. These two last lines also suggests that the love was unwise, because the wise world would mock if they saw fragility and grief in the lover; referring back to the line 4, where the speaker calls the world vile we are able to notice the difference

in opinions between ‘vile world’ and ‘wise world’ that happens because of an irony in the thirteenth line: in this world that judges itself wise people are not allowed to love without being judged by ‘vile worms’.

As the speaker of a persuasive sonnet, this speaker cannot be entirely reliable; all his thoughts about the judgmental old English society can be here just because of the effect the he knew it was going to have on his lover, which implies that she was a woman who cared about reputation but learned to go against the world with him and yet, wasn’t prepared to go against an old set of values on her own and therefore would be best for her to forget that the speaker had ever existed and go back to her former life, restituting her image in society and also preventing her a pointless suffering.