Search results
Read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20, ‘A woman’s face, with nature’s own hand painted,’ with a summary and complete analysis of the poem.
- Female
- October 9, 1995
- Poetry Analyst And Editor
“Sonnet 20” is a poem by the Renaissance playwright and poet William Shakespeare. The poem belongs to a sequence of Shakespeare's sonnets addressing an unidentified “fair youth”—a young man for whom the speaker of the poems expresses love and attraction.
Jun 1, 2019 · So begins this poem, in which the great Romantic poem William Wordsworth (1770-1850) offers an altogether more laudatory description of a beautiful woman’s appearance than Shakespeare did in his above sonnet, couched in Romantic (and romantic) terms: ‘A Spirit, yet a Woman too!’
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted. With shifting change as is false women’s fashion; An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling, Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth; A man in hue, all hues in his controlling, Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth. And for a woman wert thou first created,
Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets published in his ‘quarto’ in 1609, covering themes such as the passage of time, mortality, love, beauty, infidelity, and jealousy. The first 126 of Shakespeare’s sonnets are addressed to a young man, and the last 28 addressed to a woman – a mysterious ‘dark lady’.
Shakespeare's poems about beauty offer a diverse and profound exploration of this timeless concept. From celebrating the beauty of a loved one to challenging societal norms, he presents a comprehensive view of what beauty truly means.
People also ask
What does Wordsworth say about a beautiful woman?
Is perfect woman a romantic poem?
How does the poem combine male and female attributes?
How does Shakespeare end a poem about love?
Shakespeare draws on the powerful Elizabethan myth of the island nation as a woman: although Tarquin is a Roman, an insider, his journey from the siege of Ardea to Lucrece’s chamber connects the two assaults.
