Dakota Bartosch

Mrs. Gardner
English/Per. 4
9 September 2015

Sonnet 44 Analysis
Shakespeares 44th sonnet is uniquely more abstract than many of its
siblings. It depicts the aggravation of unrequited love due to a literal
separation of people, one of whom is our speaker, and the other is some
nameless, mute darling of angelic repute. The speaker fantasizes about
transgressing his physical limitations and traveling on an astral level
to reach his beloved with maximum expediency. He does this elegantly so,
implementing variegated locational diction (
space, earth, sea, land,

distance)
to summon images of unlike environments, creating for the
reader a sensation of transient excursion. Essentially, hes nothing more
than a whining pseudo-hipster who injects theoretical philosophy into
his self-pitying sermons just to exaggerate his own fickle melancholia

(Shakespeare, everyone!).
To wit:
But ah! thought kills me that I am not
thought,
see what I mean?
Eventually our miserable speaker detaches himself from his abstract
fantasizing and returns to reality in a sobering dialogue, expressing the
disenfranchising tyranny of time and physical boundaries. The apparent
theme of the poem is one of pessimistic cynicism, as it exhibits loves lack
of tangible power. To galvanize the sullen morbidity of that evident
subtext, the speaker poetically emphasizes the importance of physical
control, on an almost omnipotent level, of the world,
For nimble thought

can jump both sea and land.

He also simultaneously directly correlates
this lack of metahuman authority with his emotional strife:
I must attend

time's leisure with my moan...

He concludes the poem by giving in to his paranormal
incapabilities, crushed by the gravity of his own ridiculous rationale.

I must attend time's leisure with my moan,/

Receiving nought by

elements slow/ But heavy tears, badges

of

either's woe.

This sonnet is clearly intended to provoke people into

contemplating the sublimity of love and the cold reality of our world
which beleaguers it. Its theme is about loves phantasmic capacity to
generate imaginative hope, and the fallout from that ungrounded hope
which only yields sorrow, but ultimately acceptance. Or its just about a
clingy guy who misses his girlfriend. Good arts subjective like that.