Sonnet 20 Analysis

Many writers, such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and William Shakespeare, wrote sonnets as a vehicle to discuss their object of desire. Wyatt wrote traditional sonnets, that is, he expressed love toward a woman through the verses, meanwhile, Shakespeare, composed sonnets to convey love toward a male friend. In other words, Shakespeare was one of the first writers to change the traditional object of desire (as in women) to anything one truly desires. Sonnet 20 (of Shakespeare) depicts love as a being an affectionate feeling as the speaker engages in intimate praise with his desire, meanwhile, sonnet 10 (of Wyatt), portrays love as being a conquering force since the victim feels a state of defeat to his object. Although both writers addressed love differently in their poems, they also used different writing techniques to shift the content with the tone by using each volta, caesura, and enjambment to create an extended metaphor; however, because traditional sonnets are addressed to women and Shakespeare’s sonnet is written for a man, sonnet 20 attempted and failed to mimic the traditional love structure as seen in sonnet 10. As sonnet 20 begins with, A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted/ Hast thou, the …show more content…
(Wyatt, 1-4). The first four stanzas depict love as a metaphor, that is, the speaker claims love is a warrior-like force that rests in his heart since love has a banner. However, if we dig deeper, the poem begins with an enjambment, in which the long stanzas come to a full stop due to a period at the end of the fourth line. In other words, because the poem begins with the words, “long love”, and continues on until the fourth stanza, the speaker creates an extended metaphor; the four long lines encompass the speaker’s “long love” since the stanzas themselves represent