blog




  • Essay / Collateral beauty in the poems of Surrey and Shakespeare

    We can read in Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare that “beauty is purchased by the judgment of the eye”. It is not something that we as a society could properly define or fully understand, as it is a subjective experience. Something will be beautiful as long as we can find beauty in it, no matter what others think of it. EF Carritt states in an article describing our perception of true beauty: "The sheer delight of a sunset or a symphony and our value for such experiences are not altered by the discovery that others find no beauty in them or by the admission that there may be no beauty in them. there is no objective beauty in them.” Furthermore, it is written in Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, which reinforces the idea that beauty 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 a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Shakespeare says that beauty can be more than just outward appearance, for inner truth and qualities are what give it its essence. In the first two lines of the sonnet, Shakespeare writes: “Oh, how much more fair does beauty seem, / By that sweet ornament which truth gives!” ", that is to say that something already beautiful can be even more beautiful when accompanied by honesty. and the truth. On the other hand, Surrey, as the title suggests, wants to convince us that beauty is fragile and hurtful. Reading further into the sonnet, we can see how he views the transient nature of beauty and its illusory and deceptive disposition. Shakespeare's sonnet can be divided into three quatrains and a final couplet, which he uses to speak of two flowers: the fragrant rose in the first quatrain and the canker bloom in the second. In the first quatrain, after stating that beauty can be made more beautiful, Shakespeare reinforces this point with an example in lines three and four of sweet roses. It expresses that roses may be inherently beautiful, but we esteem them even more because of their sweet scent. On the other hand, although cankers or wild roses “have a tincture as deep as the fragrant tincture of roses,” they do not have the fragrance that gives roses increased beauty. He continues his comparison between the two roses in the third quatrain. The beauty of cankers lies in their appearance, "...for their only virtue is their show", and so, having no inner beauty, they "die to themselves" because no one loves them. However, the scent of roses gives it additional necessity and value, as we can extract their beauty by making rose water and perfumes, thereby extending the life of their perceived beauty. 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 will never fade. This idea coexists with that of external beauty which disappears after youth, while also being commonly explored through literature. 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; just as John Keats says in his poem Ode on a Grecian Urn: “Beauty is.