Poetry Analysis for "when My Love Swears She Is Made of Truth"

#2 October

"When my love swears that she is made of truth"

W. Shakespeare

Page 559

Analysis of Craft

Shakespeare writes this poem as a sonnet or a verse form consisting of 14 lines with a fixed rhyme scheme. It describes a story of an affair a man is having with a lady, where he is deathly afraid of his old age. Shakespeare uses a traditional rhyme scheme of the sonnet, using three quatrains and a rhyming couplet, and iambic pentameter is the main meter. True to the traditional sonnet form, Shakespeare displays the depth of a mans love for his mistress despite her weaknesses and at the same time, he illustrates the true power of love, which looks beyond idealistic obsession. The poem is skeptical about love and shows love as involving deception and pretence. This sonnets achieves the good and yet opposing images of love through the poetic uses of diction, figurative language and structure. The tone of this poem is one of happiness. The speaker is not upset nor is he speaking about her in a lustful manner but he is talking about her, as if he was talking to an old friend casually. Besides being a sonnet, it is a poem of thoughts. The writer know she lies, but does she know that he knows she lies? Within the poem, Shakespeare tries to grasp the meaning that everyone experiences, the overwhelming power of love and need to experience it.

Synthesis of Idea

In Shakespeare's "When my love swears that she is made of truth" the poet honestly reveals both the nature of the mans relationship with a women and the insecurities he has about growing older. Shakespeare's affair with the women he writes about is uncomplicated and practical; it fulfills his most basic needs of both sexual pleasure and continual reassurance that he is still worthy of love despite his age. The Sonnet as a whole show us that time was Shakespeare's great revenge, although the dominant theme is the comfort that lies bring to an insecure mind. In line 13, he writes, "Therefore I lie with her and she with me," which shows how Shakespeare uses a double meaning of 'lie'. The line