A Stylistic Analysis of William Shakespeare’s Poem “Winter”

Abstract

Linguistic studies have taken such rapid strides in recent years that the range is baffling to the innocent and amazingly delightful to the linguistics-oriented. Applied linguistics is concerned with many fields and subjects on planet earth and possibly beyond that. A piece of literature largely depends on thought and style. This poem is categorized as a Pastoral poem, “winter” being the feature that makes the poem a pastoral poem. Shakespeare who is popularly known for his love sonnets deviated and delved into pastoral poetry describing the harshness of winter and the activities carried out by the people during winter. The entire poem can be anlysed using the theory of pragmatics to see if it follows the four Gricean maxims. The Gricean maxims were posited by Paul Grice as cooperative principles that help in explaining the links utterances have in a speech community. This analysis justifies the claim that stylistics is a linguistic study in that the features of language description and a linguistic theory have been used to analyse a literary work in order to further explore the poet’s style of writing and his intended meaning. The style adopted by the poet which is the use of rhyme, capitalization of the first letter of the first word in the beginning of a new sentence, nature theme, etc. is the style that was most popular during that time period.