Stafford's Sonnet Comparison

A Ritual to Read to Each Other by William Strafford, and Shakespeare’s sonnet are about very different kinds of romance. The fact that these two writers lived hundreds of years apart is evident in their poetry. Although the themes of both poems are similarly dark, Stafford talks about modern social issues, while Shakespeare brings up the issue of love itself. The two poems contrast more than the compare.
In A Ritual to Read to Each Other, William Stafford speaks about a different kind of love than in Shakespeare’s sonnet. The love Stafford describes isn’t romantic, rather it is built on the fragile communication we have with the people around us. Stafford emphasizes the love of humanity, and begins his poem by pointing out how desperately bereft we are of this kind of empathy today. In the second stanza Stafford talks about the emptiness that exists between us. According to the poem we’ve become

The repetition of the words ‘slave’ and ‘servant’ establish the overall theme of a binding love. Shakespeare seems to share Petrarch’s idea that love is an almost otherworldly force. Shakespeare uses anaphora in lines 4,5,7, and 9 with his repetition of the word ‘nor.’ These constant contradictions make the reader think that the the speaker believes the exact opposite of what he is saying. His word choice shows the passive aggressive feelings, and underlying resentment the speaker has for his love. The volta in the last couplet changes the point of view of the poem. Instead of someone speaking about the relationship, these last two lines seem to come from a critical outsider’s perspective. However, it almost seems like the speaker is giving advice to himself. In this relationship where the speaker is so utterly devoted to their partner, maybe the only way they can express their true feelings is if they dissociate themselves from their