Shakespeare as a Sonneteer

Introduction:

A sonnet is a form of a poem which specifically has fourteen lines and a structured form. It was popularized in Italy where it originates; hence the Italian or Petrachan sonnet, named after Petrarch due to his expert and extensive use of this form. The Elizabethan or Shakespearean sonnet is so named because it was formed and became distinct from the Italian sonnet during the Elizabethan era and Shakespeare was its most prolific and famous user in writing about love. Shakespearean or Elizabethan sonnets are divided into three quatrains (four lines each) and a rhyming couplet at the end with a recognizable rhythm created by the rhyme scheme and the five stressed syllables per line (iambic pentameter).

Discussion:

In making use of the form of the sonnet, Shakespeare is credited with having penned 154 sonnets, with almost all of them following the Shakespearean format. Each sonnet largely presents an idea in each of the four line stanzas and the rhyming couplet completes the picture.

The apparent sequence which Shakespeare's sonnets follow has been the subject of much discussion and debate among critics but the first 126 sonnets are addressed to a young man although most of the time this is not explicitly expressed and the latter section is about Shakespeare's relationship with a woman with only the last two sonnets being adaptations of classical verse. There is no known autobiographical element to these sonnets although some critics have gone to great pains to find a connection other than his instinctive ability to create beauty and question the definitions of it from his surroundings

Shakespeare’s sonnets have enjoyed extravagant praise for their transcendent beauty and exquisite verbal melody. They have been criticised also particularly for their inanity and structural faults.  The themes are passionate love, aching jealousy, musings on the human fate, a meditation on the passage of time on earth etc. But according to the theme treated in  the sonnets they can also be divided into many subgroups like “marriage,” “friendship,” “love,” “self-love,” “the ravages of time,” “immortality and death,” “lust,” “professional rivalry,” etc. However, the most dominant themes are Shakespeare’s devotion to his patron-cum-friend, his hopeless passion for his mistress and the betrayal of both his friendship and his friend and his love by the mistress respectively.

Critical appreciation:

Sonnet 1:

Shakespeare begins his sonnets by introducing four of his most important themes — immortality, time, procreation, and selfishness — which are interrelated in this first sonnet both thematically and through the use of images associated with business or commerce.

The sonnet's first four lines relate all of these important themes. Individually, each of these four lines addresses a separate issue. Line 1 concerns procreation, especially in the phrase "we desire increase"; line 2 hints at immortality in the phrase "might never die"; line 3 presents the theme of time's unceasing progress; and line 4 combines all three concerns: A "tender heir" represents immortality for parents, who will grow old and die. According to the poet, procreating ensures that our names will be carried on by our children. If we do not have children, however, our names will die with our death.

But, this idea apparently has been rejected by the young man, whom the poet addresses as "thou," in lines 5–12. Interested only in his selfish desires, the youth is the embodiment of narcissism, a destructively excessive love of oneself. The poet makes clear that the youth's self-love is unhealthy, not only for himself but for the entire world. Because the young man does not share himself with the world by having a child to carry on his beauty, he creates "a famine where abundance lies" and cruelly hurts himself. The "bud" in line 11 is as an image which underscores the immaturity of the young man, who is only a bud, still imperfect because he has not fully bloomed.

The final couplet — the last two lines — reinforces the injustice of the youth's not sharing his beauty with the world. The "famine" that he creates for himself is furthered in the phrase "To eat the world's due," as though the youth has the responsibility and the world has the right to expect the young man to father a child. Throughout the sonnets, Shakespeare draws his imagery from everyday life in the world around him. In Sonnet 1, he writes of love in terms of commercial usury, the practice of charging exorbitant interest on money lent using the apt imagery.  

Sonnet 2:

This sonnet continues the argument and plea from Sonnet 1, this time through the imagery of military, winter, and commerce. Time again is the great enemy, besieging the youth's brow, digging trenches — wrinkles — in his face, and ravaging his good looks. Beauty is considered as a treasure that decays  or may natural increase through the act of marrying and having children.

The poet attempts to scare the young man into marrying and having children by showing him his future. When the youth is forty years old, he will be nothing but a "tottered weed" and  "of small worth held" because he will be alone and childless. The only thing the young man will have to look back on is his self-absorbed "lusty days," because he created nothing especially no children. This barrenness of old age is symbolized in the sonnet's last line, "And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold,".

Again drawing on business imagery, in sonnet 2, the poet acknowledges that all he seeks is for the young man to have a child, who would immortalize the youth's beauty. The poet does not call the act of love "increase," as he did in Sonnet 1, but "use," meaning investment, the opposite of "niggarding" from Sonnet 1. In line 8, he speaks of "thriftless praise," or unprofitable praise — the term "thrift" during Shakespeare's lifetime had various meanings, including profit and increase, which also recalls Sonnet 1.

Sonnet 3:

Drawing on farming imagery, in this sonnet, the poet focuses entirely on the young man's future, with both positive and negative outcomes. However, the starting point for these possible futures is "Now," when the youth should "form another," that is, father a child.

The sonnet begins with the image of a mirror — "Look in thy glass" — and is repeated in the phrase "Thou art thy mother's glass." Continuity between past, present, and future is established when the poet refers to the young man's mother, who sees her own image in her son and what she was like during her youth, "the lovely April of her prime," a phrase that recalls the images of spring in Sonnet 1. Likewise, the young man can experience a satisfying old age, a "golden time," through his own children.

The negative scenario, ‘in which the young man does not procreate’, is symbolized in the poet's many references to death. In lines 7 and 8, the poet questions how the young man can be so selfish that he would jeopardize his own immortality. The reference to death in line 14 stylistically mirrors the death imagery in the final couplets of the preceding sonnets, including the phrases "the grave and thee" in Sonnet 1 and "thou feel'st it cold" in Sonnet 2.

Sonnet 4:

The themes of narcissism and usury are most developed in this sonnet, with its references to wills and testaments. The terms "unthrifty," "legacy," "bequest," and "free" imply that nature's generosity should be matched by those who benefit from it. The poet, who calls the youth a "beauteous niggard," or a miser of his good looks, claims that his young friend abuses the many gifts of beauty nature has given him and thus is a "profitless usurer," a business term that recalls the three previous sonnets.

In this sonnet with a series of questions and statements, the poet lectures about the wise use of nature, which liberally lends its gifts to those who are equally generous in perpetuating nature by having children. But the youth's hoarding contrasts to nature's bountifulness. Lines 7 and 8 express this contrast in terms of usury: "Profitless usurer, why dost thou use / So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?" The term use here means both invest and use up. Similarly, "live" means both to gain immortality and to make a living.

The inevitable conclusion is that if the youth does not properly use his beauty, he will die childless and doom himself to oblivion, but if he fathers a child, he will be remembered. The final couplet presents these contrasting possibilities. Line 13 uses familiar death imagery to express the negative result of dying childless: "Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee." However, line 14 suggests that should the young man use his beauty to have a child, an "executor to be," his beauty will be enhanced because he will have used it as nature intended

Sonnet 5:

In this sonnet, the poet compares nature's four seasons with the stages of the young man's life. Although the seasons are cyclical, his life is linear, and hours become tyrants that oppress him because he cannot escape time's grasp. Time might "frame / Thy lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell," meaning that everyone notices the youth's beauty, but time's "never-resting" progress ensures that this beauty will eventually fade.

In an extended metaphor, the poet argues that because flowers provide perfume to console people during the winter, it is natural for the youth to have a child to console him during his old age. Without perfume from summer's flowers, people would not remember previous summers during the long, hard winters; childless, the young man will grow old alone and have nothing to remind him of his younger days.

Winter, an image of old age, is regarded with horror: "Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone, / Beauty o'er snowed and bareness everywhere." The "lusty leaves" imagery recalls the "lusty days" from Sonnet 2 and reemphasizes the barrenness of the youth's old age, in which he will look back longingly on his younger days but have nothing to remember them by. However, in the final couplet, the poet evokes a comforting tone, suggesting that immortality is attainable for the young man, just as it is for summer's flowers when they are transformed into perfume, if only the young man would father a child.

Sonnet 6:

Sonnet 6 continues the winter imagery from the previous sonnet and furthers the procreation theme. Winter, symbolizing old age, and summer, symbolizing youth, are diametrically opposed.

The poet begs the young man not to die childless — "ere thou be distill'd" — without first making "sweet some vial." Here, "distill'd" recalls the summer flowers from Sonnet 5; "vial," referring to the bottle in which perfume is kept, is an image for a woman whom the young man will sexually love, but "vial" can also refer to the child of that sexual union. Ten children, the poet declares, will generate ten times the image of their father and ten times the happiness of only one child.

The poet strongly condemns the young man's narcissism in this sonnet by linking it with death. "Self-killed" refers both to the youth's hoarding his beauty by not passing it on to a child, and to his inevitably dying alone if he continues his narcissistic behavior. The poet argues that procreation ensures life after death; losing your identity in death does not necessarily mean the loss of life so long as you have procreated. Lines 5 and 6 make this concept clear.  Once you recognize the wealth of beauty by loving another person, you must use this knowledge of love if it is to increase and not decay.

Sonnet 6 is notable for the ingenious multiplying of conceits and especially for the concluding pun on a legal will in the final couplet: "Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair / To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir." Here, as earlier in the sonnet, the poet juxtaposes the themes of narcissism and death. The worms that destroy the young man's dead body will be his only heirs should he die without begetting a child is a metaphysical conceit.

Sonnet 7:

In this sonnet, the poet compares human life to the passage of the sun from sunrise to sunset. The sun's rising in the morning symbolizes the young man's youthful years: Just as we watch the "sacred majesty" of the ever-higher sun, so too does the poet view the youth. The sun's highest point in the sky resembles "strong youth in his middle age." However, after the sun reaches it apex, its only direction is down. This downward movement represents "feeble age" in the youth, and what is worse than mere physical appearance is that the people who looked in awe at the youth's beauty will "look another way" when he has become old. In death, he will not be remembered.

As usual, the poet argues that the only way for the youth to ensure that he is remembered after he dies is to have a child, making it clear that this child should be a son. Two possible reasons why the poet wants the young man to have a son and not a daughter are that, first, a son would carry on the youth's last name, whereas traditionally a daughter would assume the last name of her husband, and second, the word "son" is a play on the word "sun" — it is not coincidental that in this sonnet, which incorporates the image of the sun, the poet makes clear for the first time that the young man's child should be a son.

Sonnet 8:

In this sonnet, the poet compares a single musical note to the young man and a chord made up of many notes to a family. The marriage of sounds in a chord symbolizes the union of father, mother, and child.

The first twelve lines elaborate a comparison between music and the youth, who, should he marry and have a child, would then be the very embodiment of harmony. But music, "the true concord of well-tuned sounds," scolds him because he remains single — a single note, not a chord. By refusing to marry, the youth destroys the harmony that he should make as part of an ensemble, a family. Just as the strings of a lute when struck simultaneously produce one sound, which is actually made up of many sounds, so the family is a unit comprised of single members who function best — and most naturally — when working in tandem with one another

Sonnet 9:

The poet imagines that the young man objects to the bliss of marriage on the grounds that he might die young anyway or that he might die and leave a bereaved widow and an orphaned child. To these arguments, the poet replies that should the young man marry, have a child, and then die, at least his widow will be consoled by the child whom the young man fathered; in this way, his image will not be destroyed with his death. Furthermore, by not marrying, the young man makes the whole world his widow.

Shakespeare continues the business of imagery so prevalent in this sonnet also as in the previous sonnets. The concept of love is not entirely distinguished from commercial wealth, for Shakespeare relates those who traffic in love to the world at large. When an unthrifty person makes ill use of his inherited wealth, only those among whom he squanders it benefit. The paradox lies in the fact that the hoarding of love's beauty is the surest way of squandering it: Such consuming self-love unnaturally turns life inward, a waste felt by all.

Sonnet 10:

Sonnet 10 repeats and extends the argument of Sonnet 9, with the added suggestion that the youth really loves no one. Clearly, the poet does not seriously believe the young man to be incapable of affection, for then there would be no point in the poet's trying to maintain a relationship with him. However, underneath the mock-serious tone is that the youth's self-love wastes himself. Narcissism means infatuation with one's own appearance, but the youth's absorption with his own image is really an attachment to nobody. He therefore loses the power of returning the creative force of love in a relationship. The poet considers the youth's unwillingness to marry is a form of homicide against his potential progeny, which he suggested in Sonnet 9. In Sonnet 10, the poet creates the image of marriage as a house with a roof falling in decay that the youth should seek to repair, but the poet uses the house imagery less to indicate marriage than to suggest the youth's beauty would reside in his offspring: "Make thee another self for love of me,/ That beauty still may live in thine or thee."

Conclusion:

From every point of view and in every sense these sonnets show the poetic genius of the writer. The variety of themes, the lyrical appeal, the striking images and picture, the wealth of conceits, the felicity of the language and the melody of the verse, all are the richest poetic treasures of English literature and herald that Shakespeare is one of the famous sonneteers.