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Shakespeare's Sonnets is the title of a collection of
154 sonnets
by William
Shakespeare, which covers themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty
and mortality. The first
126 sonnets are addressed to a young man; the last 28 to a woman.
The sonnets were first published in a 1609 quarto
with the full stylised title: SHAKE-SPEARES
SONNETS. Never before Imprinted. (although sonnets 138
and 144 had previously been published in the 1599 miscellany
The Passionate Pilgrim).
The quarto ends with "A Lover's Complaint", a narrative poem of 47 seven-line
stanzas written in rhyme royal – though some scholars have argued convincingly
against Shakespeare's authorship of the poem.
The sonnets to the young man express overwhelming, obsessional love. The
main issue of debate has always been whether it remained platonic or became
physical. The first 17 poems, traditionally called the procreation sonnets, are addressed to the young man urging
him to marry and have children in order to immortalize his beauty by passing
it to the next generation. Other sonnets express the speaker's love for the
young man; brood upon loneliness, death, and the transience of life; seem to
criticise the young man for preferring a rival poet; express ambiguous
feelings for the speaker's mistress;
and pun on the poet's name. The final two sonnets are allegorical
treatments of Greek epigrams referring to the "little love-god" Cupid.
The publisher, Thomas Thorpe, entered the book in the Stationers' Register on 20 May 1609:
Tho. Thorpe. Entred for his copie under the handes of master Wilson and
master Lownes Wardenes a booke called Shakespeares sonnettes vjd.
Whether
Thorpe used an authorised manuscript from Shakespeare or an unauthorised copy
is unknown. George Eld printed the quarto, and the run was divided
between the booksellers William Aspley and John Wright.
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Henry David Thoreau
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Henry David Thoreau was an American essayist, poet, philosopher, abolitionist,
naturalist,
tax resister,
development
critic, surveyor,
and historian. A leading transcendentalist,Thoreau is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living
in natural surroundings, and his essay "Civil Disobedience", an argument for disobedience to an
unjust state.
Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry amount to more
than 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions are his writings on
natural history and philosophy, in which he anticipated the
methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism.
His literary style interweaves close observation of nature,
personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic
meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility,
philosophical austerity, and Yankee attention to practical detail.He was also deeply interested in
the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and
natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion
in order to discover life's true essential needs.
He was a lifelong abolitionist, delivering lectures that attacked the Fugitive Slave Law while praising the writings of Wendell
Phillips and defending the abolitionist John Brown. Thoreau's philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced the political thoughts
and actions of such notable figures as Leo Tolstoy,
Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.
Thoreau is
sometimes referred to as an anarchist. Though "Civil Disobedience" seems to
call for improving rather than abolishing government—"I ask for, not at
once no government, but at once
a better government"—the direction of this improvement points toward
anarchism: "'That government is best which governs not at all;and when
men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will
have."
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Lord's Prayer
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The Lord's Prayer, also called the Our Father, Pater Noster,and the Model Prayer is a venerated Christian prayer originally recorded in Aramaic
that, according to the New Testament, was taught by Jesus
to his disciples. Two forms of it are recorded in the New Testament:
a longer form in the Gospel of Matthew as part of the Sermon on the Mount, and a shorter form in the Gospel of Luke
as a response by Jesus to a request by "one of his disciples" to
teach them "to pray as John
taught his disciples."
In the fourth petition, the original text of the prayer (in Greek)
uniquely contains the word epiousios, which does not appear in any other extant
classical or Koine Greek literature, and is also the only adjective
in the prayer. The prayer concludes with "deliver us from evil" in Matthew,
and with "lead us not into temptation" in Luke. The first
three of the seven petitions in Matthew address God; the other four
are related to human needs and concerns. The liturgical
form is the Matthean. Some Christians, particularly Protestants,
conclude the prayer with a doxology, a later addendum
appearing in some manuscripts of Matthew.
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Pentameter
Pentameter is a poetic meter. А poem is said to be written in
(a particular) pentameter when the lines of the poem have the length of five feet, where 'foot' is a combination of a particular
number (1 or 2) of unstressed (or weak) syllables and a stressed (or strong)
syllable. Depending on the pattern of feet, pentameter can be iambic (one of three two-syllable meters
alongside trochaic and spondaic) or dactylic (one of two three-syllable meters alongside anapestic).
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Iambic pentameter is a commonly used type of metrical line
in traditional English poetry and verse drama.
The term describes the rhythm that the words establish in that line, which is
measured in small groups of syllables called "feet".
The word "iambic" refers to the type of foot that is used, known as
the iamb, which in English is an unstressed syllable followed by
a stressed syllable. The word "pentameter" indicates that a line
has five of these "feet".
Iambic
rhythms come relatively naturally in English.
Iambic pentameter is the most common meter in English poetry; it is used in
many of the major English poetic forms, including blank verse,
the heroic couplet, and some of the traditional rhymed stanza
forms. William Shakespeare used iambic pentameter in his plays and sonnets.
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supplement
Similes and metaphors
both used to make comparisons or elucidate concepts
Metaphors simply state a comparison.
Similes use the words “like” or “as” to compare things.
vocabulary
metaphorical: expressing one thing in terms normally denoting another
