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  • Essay / Views on Beauty in the Poetry of William Shakespeare

    We can read in Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare that “beauty is purchased by the judgment of the eye”. It's not something people can fully grasp or understand, and it's also a subjective experience. Something will be beautiful as long as we can find beauty in it, no matter what others think. It is said in an article on beauty by E. F. Carritt: "The sheer delight of a sunset or a symphony and our value for such experiences are not altered by the discovery that others do not find there." no beauty or by the admission that there may be no objective beauty. in them at all. Furthermore, it is written in Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, which reinforces the claim that it cannot be grasped: "We have lost the abstract sense of beauty." It does not exist physically because as individuals we will see and think about beauty in different ways. Just like Shakespeare in Sonnet 54 or Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey in The Frailty and Nuisance of Beauty expresses different views on this subject. Say no to plagiarism. Get Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get Original EssayShakespeare says that beauty can be more than it is in itself, an outward appearance, because truth and the inner qualities are what give it the essence. . He declares from the beginning, in the first two lines of the sonnet: “O how much more beautiful does beauty appear, / By this sweet ornament that truth gives! ", that is to say that something already beautiful can be even more beautiful if honesty and truth come with it. On the other hand, Surrey, as the title suggests, says that beauty is fragile and hurtful. Reading further into the sonnet, we can see how he views the transient nature of beauty, as it is illusory and deceptive. So while Shakespeare finds beauty from within, Surrey only sees the negative side of it and therefore judges it because of its transient nature. Shakespeare's sonnet can be divided into three quatrains and a final verse. He speaks of two flowers, the fragrant rose in the first quatrain and the canker in the second quatrain. In the first quatrain, after stating that beauty can be made more beautiful, Shakespeare reinforces his statement with the example of sweet roses in lines three and four. He says roses are beautiful, but we consider them even more because of their sweet scent. On the other hand, cankers or wild roses “have a tincture as deep as the fragrant tincture of roses”; they don't have the scent that makes roses beautiful. The appearance is the same, but they don't have what really matters. He continues the comparison between the two roses in the third quatrain. The cankers are only beautiful, "...for their virtue alone is their spectacle", but contain no inner beauty and so they "die to themselves" because no one loves them. However, fragrant roses do not disappear after they die, as people make rose water and perfumes from them. In the final verse, we can see the message of the sonnet: just as fragrant roses live after death, the beauty of Shakespeare's words never fades. After the death of youth, external beauty also accompanies it. As Dorian Gray said, “When your youth is gone, your beauty will go with it…”. But Shakespeare distills what remained, the truth, the inner beauty, and makes them immortal in his poetry. In short, just as John Keats said in his poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, "Beauty is truth, beauty of truth, — it is all/you know on earth, and all you need to know.,.