Topic > Collateral beauty in the poems of Surrey and Shakespeare

We can read in William Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost that “Beauty is bought by the judgment of the eye”. It is not something that we, as a society, could adequately define or fully understand, as it is a subjective experience. Something will be beautiful as long as we can find the beauty in it, regardless of what others think. E.F. Carritt states in an article describing our perception of true beauty: “The sheer pleasure of a sunset or a symphony and our value in such experiences are not affected by the discovery that other people find no beauty in them or by the admission that there may be no beauty at all.” objective beauty in them”. After all, 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 beauty and think about it in different ways. Just like Shakespeare in Sonnet 54 or Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey in The Frailty and Wound of Beauty express different opinions on the matter. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Shakespeare says that beauty can be more than just an outward appearance because the truth and inner qualities are what give it its essence. In the first two lines of the sonnet, Shakespeare writes: "O how much fairer beauty seems, / For that sweet ornament that truth gives!", that is, an already beautiful thing can be even more beautiful if accompanied by honesty. and truth. On the other hand, Surrey, as foreshadowed in the title, wants to convince us that beauty is fragile and painful. Going further into the sonnet we can see how he considers the transitory nature of beauty and its illusory and deceptive temperament. Shakespeare's sonnet can be divided into three quatrains and a final couplet, which he uses to talk about two flowers: the fragrant rose in the first quatrain and the bloom of cancer in the second. In the first quatrain, after declaring that beauty can be made more beautiful, Shakespeare reinforces this with an example in lines three and four of sweet roses. He states that roses may be intrinsically beautiful, but we think of them even more so for their sweet scent. In contrast, although canker flowers or wild roses “have as deep a hue as the fragrant tincture of roses,” they lack the scent that gives roses greater beauty. The comparison between the two roses continues in the third quatrain. The beauty of cancer flowers is in their appearance, "...because their virtue is only their show", and so, having no inner beauty, they "die to themselves" because no one loves them. However, the fragrance of roses gives them additional necessity and value as we can extract their beauty by producing rose water and perfumes, giving their perceived beauty an extended life. In the final couplet we can see the message of the sonnet, that, just as fragrant roses live after death, the beauty in Shakespeare's words will never fade. This idea coexists with that of external beauty fading after youth, although it is also commonly explored through literature. As Dorian Gray said “When your youth goes, your beauty goes too…”. 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 truth, truth beauty, - that is all / You know on earth, and all you need to know." The Surrey poem, like Shakespeare's sonnet, can also be divided into three quatrains and a couplet, although not.