Shakespeare and Berrigan

For the readings this week we had to take a look at two different sonnet writers, Shakespeare and Berrigan. Having read many of Shakespeare's sonnets in past English courses I was used to his style and the way he uses rhyming within the text. It is still a little hard to fully comprehend the full significance of what he is trying to say though, because we are not used to speaking that type of English anymore. While Shakespeare's sonnets were formal, flowed together and had a clear meaning behind it, Berrigan's were a little harder to follow. Berrigan seems to weave together elements from Shakespeare's traditional way of writing sonnets, but also taking a more modern approach, that seems to push the limits of what people are used to when they read sonnets. Whereas Shakespeare sticks with the rhyme scheme, Berrigan's writing often seemed to be all over the place and sometimes without a clear meaning behind what his sonnet was saying. Berrigan also repeated lines in different sonnets, this got me thinking that maybe this is a more modern approach to looking at sonnets, because it ties his pieces together, kind of like when artists use the same symbol or brush stroke on their piece. Overall, both pieces had sonnets that talked about life and love, because everyone can relate to those topics, no matter if you lived during Shakespeare's time or Berrigan's, we still feel emotions for each of those subjects.