Shakespeare's Sonnets (General Shakespeare)

 About the Author:

William Shakespeare (bapt. 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet, and actor, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's greatest dramatist. He was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon" (or simply "the Bard"). His extant works, including collaborations, consist of some 39 plays, 154 sonnets, three long narrative poems, and a few other verses, some of uncertain authorship. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright. They also continue to be studied and reinterpreted.

Sonnet 12: Like many of Shakespeare's sonnets, the poem laments the frailty and impermanence of beauty and personifies "Time," which takes that beauty away, as its antagonist. The poem is part of Shakespeare's "Fair Youth" sequence, a group of poems addressed to a handsome young man with whom the speaker has an intimate relationship. Within this sequence, "Sonnet 12" belongs more specifically to a subset of poems known as the "procreation sonnets," which encourage the handsome youth to marry and have children. Here, the speaker urges the Fair Youth to reproduce specifically as a way of leaving some of his beauty behind and, therefore, defying Time.

Sonnet 18: focuses on the loveliness of a friend or lover, with the speaker initially asking a rhetorical question about comparing their subject to a summer's day. He then goes on to introduce the pros and cons of the weather, mentioning both an idyllic English summer's day and the less-welcome dim sun and rough winds of autumn. In the end, it is insinuated this very piece of poetry will keep the lover—the poem's subject—alive forever and allow them to defy even death.

Sonnet 60: The speaker begins by comparing the minutes experienced by a human during his or her lifetime to the waves of the sea. Then the speaker thinks of a different parallel for human life—the sun. The sun rises in the east, full of light. Then, it slowly makes its way up the sky to its position at high noon. But then, out of nowhere, "eclipses" come and blot it out. The speaker ends this second section by talking about how destructive time is. 

Sonnet 104: This sonnet is another that deals with the passage of time. The speaker remarks that the subject never seems to grow old. He looks exactly the same as he did when the speaker first met him three years ago. But then the speaker realizes that the subject's beauty may be diminishing imperceptibly, like the movements of the hands of a clock. His beauty may be altering, but the changes are too subtle for the speaker's eyes to detect them. The speaker then warns future generations that the epitome of beauty will have died before they were ever born!

Sonnet 127: In this sonnet the speaker discusses the way blackness and darkness have been viewed. In times past, black was not considered beautiful ("not counted fair"), or if it was, it was not called as such. But now black is considered to be beautiful: "But now is black beauty's successive heir." Then, the speaker says beauty is slandered with bastardy, or illegitimacy, since women put cosmetics on their faces—"Fairing the foul with art's false borrowed face"—making what is ugly beautiful through artificial means. True beauty has been bastardized and called into question. The speaker says that he has therefore chosen a mistress whose eyes are black and seem to be in mourning for those who use makeup to falsely disguise their natural darkness ("Sland'ring creation with a false esteem"), distorting what nature has created by covering it up with artificial cosmetics. Her black eyes look so suited to mourning that everyone says that's the way beauty should look.