Ap English Literature Theme Essay

In all aspects of society, various themes that affect everyone in life exist. These themes include love, heartbreak, beauty, death, joy, and others. Literature often embodies these examples in ways that the audience can relate to, no matter the time period it is published in. Poems can express the themes of love and death better than many other forms of literature, as they tend to be shorter. Two poems, “My Mistress’ Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun” and “Death, Be Not Proud,” are sonnets, with fourteen lines and a form of rhyming scheme known as iambic pentameter. These sonnets, by William Shakespeare and John Donne, approach the themes of death and beauty through uses of different literary devices and distinct individual beliefs, but both relate back to the overarching idea that people’s expectations of these two ideas are nothing like the reality, at least in the eyes of the speakers. …show more content…
The sonnet has three groups of four lines, or quatrains, and a pair of two lines, known as a couplet. Shakespeare’s poem uses the literary device of satire to criticize and counter the expectations of true beauty. In each line or every two lines, Shakespeare, the speaker, briefly describes what society thinks beauty is; he then contradicts that assumption with his vision of beauty, using the woman he loves. For example, Shakespeare says that music, which is what a woman’s voice should supposedly sound like, sounds much better than the voice of the woman he loves (9/10). However, he loves her regardless of how far she falls from the standards that society expects of her. The speaker believes that it is her imperfections that make her