Sonnet 106 Figurative Language

Some of William Shakespeare’s favorite topics to write about include beauty and time, and Sonnet 106 is a medley these two themes. This sonnet attempt to describe an unknown person’s beauty by comparing him/her to the descriptions of past beauties, but, in the end, the speaker concludes that neither the past nor the present writers are able to do this beauty justice. Sonnet 106 criticizes itself for its failure to properly immortalizes the extent of this beauty through poetry, but it is ultimately through this critic that the beauty of the subject is conveyed. Shakespeare achieves his usual themes of beauty, time, and beauty over time through the repetition of both sound and structure; the repetition both mimics the cyclical nature of time and continuously highlights the beauty of the subject. Shakespeare begins Sonnet 106 by breaking his traditional iambic meter; he begins this sonnet with a trochee. A trochee reverses the unstressed, stressed pattern of an iambic meter, and in this case, the stress is placed on the first word in the line “When in the chronicle of wasted time” (1). Shakespeare …show more content…
The speaker, however, fails in attempt to assert that this beauty will be immortal throughout time in his mimicking time passing. While he tries to maintain the beauty’s strength throughout the passing time of the sonnet, the repetitive is counterproductive in that the repetition also implies a repetition of time. The speaker paints a picture that is exactly like the past: a situation in which he is not able to properly describe itself; he fails to immortalize the subject due to his lack of detail, but he instead, perpetuates the dilemma in which each successive generation thinks they are superior to the past, as even though the past immortalizes the idea of itself, the past will always fail to immortalize