A Glimpse of the Sun as a Timeless Motif in Elizabethan Renaissance: Shakespearean Sonnets 7, 18, and 33

Abstract

Ever since the creation of man, he has been fascinated with the Sun as an essential element of nature that determines change in his daily life. In accordance with the natural cycle of the Sun from the east to the west, man started to calculate not only the time of the day, but also to determine the season of the year. Therefore, man rapidly started to view the Sun as a rich source of creativity due to its distinctive traits of size, light, and heat; which are incomparable to anything else. With its daily recurrence, primitive man started to look at the Sun and imagine it to be something like a golden chariot crossing the sky, while the Greco-Roman classics associated it with a heroic or divine figure as Apollo or Helios. In this article, the Sun is looked at during the Elizabethan Renaissance; particularly by the one and only “Bard of Avon” William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616) in his Sonnets 7, 18, and 33. In this collection of sonnets, the persona expresses his emotions and passions towards his beloved, where the Sun plays a vital role in their depiction. The article adopts a critical framework that attempts to highlight how Shakespeare looks at the Sun as something beyond a symbol or an archetype. The article attempts to illustrate how Shakespeare in Sonnets 7, 18, and 33 resorts to the Sun as a recurrent motif in a general outline of storytelling. In spite the fact that the persona does establish an evident connection of resemblance as well as a means of comparison between his beloved and the Sun , yet the Sun eventually proves to surpass humans, who change over time, while the Sun remains glorious and pure.