The Interpretation of Sonnets

            The assumption that a sonnet is in "the eye of the beholder" is both simplistically accurate and also questionably flawed. It is indisputable that as readers of any type of literary work, we will take our own individual meaning of a text which is likely to differ significantly from another's interpretation. In this sense, a sonnet will always be in the eye of the beholder as it lays with whom ever is reading and their viewpoint on the text. However, it is also questionable whether or not the reader has much room to take any individual meaning from a sonnet as they would be able to with other pieces of literature, as its strict contextual nature and rules that define its genre allow for limited variation across sonnet writing and therefore would appear to only present us with a single type of writing and style. In this way, what Don Paterson could be saying is that the sonnet is a product of a poet's meaning behind their individual observation of what a sonnet means to them.
             Traditionally, as coined by Petrarchan, a poem about love, the sonnet holds certain connotations to a reader that leads their expectations of what they are looking for when reading one. More recently than Petrarchan, Shakespearean sonnets have taken a different approach on sonnet writing that blur the intentions of the sonnet itself and make us question the idea of love as a whole, something that Fineman calls a "mock encomium." Imposing the thematic sequence of a Petrarchan sonnet in a more formal pattern, Shakespeare uses the first and second quatrain to build on an argument and then concludes this by the final couplet. This is shown in "Sonnet 147" where the first quatrain outlines the speaker's feelings towards love being like a disease - "My love is as a fever," depicting a self-destructive nature to it all. This is then developed in the second quatrain as he introduces his out of control sexual desires and being on the verge of death.