Thursday, February 19, 2015

Does "Sonnet 30" by William Shakespeare suggest that after a certain amount of sorrow, the human mind no longer reacts?"Sonnet 30" by William...

No, it seems to suggest just the opposite. The speaker can
summon up remembrance of things past and relive them even long after he suffered from
them emotionally, including "love's long-since cancell'd woe" and "precious friends" who
have been dead for some time. The poem deals with the fact that Shakespeare, like
ourselves, relives old events and has to suffer the pains they caused him in the distant
past as if he had not already suffered them ("Which I new pay as if not paid before").
If an experience was important enough, and painful enough, we will all remember it for
the rest of our lives. This is why Shakespeare's sonnet is so touching. In the
concluding couplet he says that with thoughts of his "dear friend, / All losses are
restor'd, and sorrows end." But this does not mean that the losses are premanently
restored or that the sorrows are permanently ended, only for "the
while."


"Remembrance of Things Past" was used as the title
of the best English translation of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du
temps
perdu by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. In that great work
the past remains accessible in its entirety and can actually be completely
relived.

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