Sonnets

Summary

Shakespeare's Sonnets is a sequence of 154 fourteen-line poems, nearly all in the form now named after him: three quatrains rhyming abab cdcd efef and a closing couplet gg, in iambic pentameter. The sequence has no plot in the ordinary sense, but readers since the eighteenth century have traced a loose story. Sonnets 1 to 17, the so-called procreation sonnets, urge a beautiful young man to marry and father a child so that his beauty will survive him; Sonnet 1 opens with the wish that beauty's rose might never die. From Sonnet 18 the poet changes his promise: verse itself, not children, will preserve the friend, and the famous comparison to a summer's day ends with the claim that the poem gives life to its subject so long as men can breathe. Through Sonnet 126 the poems addressed to the young man move through devotion, absence, jealousy, apology and reconciliation. Sonnet 29 lifts the despairing speaker like a lark at break of day; Sonnet 30 summons remembrance of things past to the sessions of sweet silent thought; Sonnets 55, 60, 64 and 65 set the power of rhyme against devouring time, wasteful war and ruined towers. Sonnets 78 to 86 concern a rival poet whose better verse threatens the speaker's place. Sonnet 73 compares the aging speaker to autumn boughs, to twilight and to a dying fire. Sonnet 116 defines true love as an ever-fixed mark that does not bend with the hours. Sonnet 126, twelve lines in couplets, closes the first group with a warning that Nature must at last render up her treasure to Time. Sonnets 127 to 152 turn to a dark-haired woman, whom the speaker loves against his judgment; Sonnet 130 mocks the conventional praise of a mistress's eyes, lips and cheeks, Sonnets 133 and 134 suggest that she has drawn the friend into a triangle, Sonnets 135 and 136 pun on the poet's name Will, and Sonnet 147 likens his passion to a fever that his reason, as physician, has abandoned. Sonnet 146, set among these, turns inward and urges the soul to feed on Death. The sequence closes with two light poems, 153 and 154, retelling a Greek epigram about Cupid's torch quenched in a well that became a healing bath. The quarto was printed in 1609 by George Eld for Thomas Thorpe, with a dedication to an unidentified Mr. W. H.; Francis Meres had mentioned Shakespeare's sugared sonnets circulating among his private friends in 1598, and two of the poems were printed in The Passionate Pilgrim in 1599.

Plot or Argument

• Sonnets 1-17: The procreation sonnets

  The poet urges a young man of great beauty to marry and have a son, arguing from husbandry, usury, the seasons and the mirror that beauty hoarded is beauty wasted and that a child is the surest answer to time.

• Sonnets 18-60: Verse against time

  The promise of immortality shifts from offspring to poetry. Sonnet 18 makes the summer's day comparison; 29 and 30 find comfort for disgrace and grief in the friend's love; 33 to 42 record a wrong done by the friend and its forgiveness; 55 and 60 claim that the powerful rhyme will outlast marble monuments and the waves of passing minutes.

• Sonnets 61-77: Age, decay and mortality

  The speaker looks at ruined towers and drowned shores (64), asks how beauty can hold a plea against rage (65), lists the world's injustices in 66, and in 71 to 74 asks to be forgotten after death, compares himself to autumn and dying embers, and leaves his spirit in his lines.

• Sonnets 78-86: The rival poet

  Another poet, praised for the proud full sail of his great verse, competes for the young man's patronage and favour; the speaker answers with a plain style and a tongue-tied muse.

• Sonnets 87-126: Estrangement and constancy

  The speaker bids farewell (87), fears the friend's falseness (93 to 96), recalls absence in winter (97), confesses his own wanderings (109 to 112, 117 to 120), and defines love as an unalterable star (116). Sonnet 126, in six couplets, warns the lovely boy that Nature's audit must come.

• Sonnets 127-152: The dark lady

  A woman whose black eyes and dark hair defy fashion holds the speaker against his will. He parodies Petrarchan praise (130), suspects her of seducing his friend (133 to 134, 144), plays on his own name (135 to 136), and describes desire as fever and madness (147); between these, Sonnet 146 calls the soul to rule its body.

• Sonnets 153-154: Cupid's brand

  Two versions of an old Greek epigram tell how a nymph quenched Cupid's torch in a fountain that became a hot bath for sick men, yet could not cool the speaker's love.

Characters

• The speaker (the poet), lyric voice

  An older poet who calls himself Will, devoted to the young man, troubled by the dark lady, and conscious of age and low fortune.

• The young man (the Fair Youth), addressee of Sonnets 1-126

  A beautiful, well-born friend urged to marry, praised, forgiven and warned against time; his identity is unknown.

• The dark lady, addressee of Sonnets 127-152

  A dark-eyed, dark-haired woman whom the speaker loves and distrusts, and who seems to draw the young man away.

• The rival poet, competitor in Sonnets 78-86

  A learned poet whose eloquent praise of the young man leaves the speaker tongue-tied; scholars have proposed Chapman, Marlowe and others without agreement.

• Time, personified adversary

  Devouring Time with his scythe and sickle, against whom the verse claims to stand.

Lessons

• Poetry as a monument

  Sonnets 18, 55, 60 and 65 make a bold claim: that a poem can preserve a person after statues fall and bodies decay. The claim is half true and half a lover's boast, since the young man's name is lost while the lines survive. Reading them shows how Renaissance poets understood fame and how verse carries memory across centuries.

  • In Sonnet 18, what exactly does the poet promise will not fade, and on what condition?
  • Sonnet 55 says the friend will live in the poem until the judgment. Has the promise been kept, given that no one knows who he was?
  • Why might the poet need to keep repeating this promise across so many sonnets?

• Love defined by constancy

  Sonnet 116 defines love by what it refuses to do: it does not alter when circumstances change, bend when the beloved moves away, or yield to the sickle of time. Its images of a sea-mark and a guiding star make love a fixed point for navigation rather than a feeling. The sonnet reads differently against the poems of jealousy and estrangement around it.

  • Why does Sonnet 116 begin with words echoing the marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer?
  • What is the difference between love that alters and love that is an ever-fixed mark?
  • Do the sonnets around 116, such as 117 to 120, confirm or test its definition?

• Honest praise

  Sonnet 130 refuses the inflated comparisons that Elizabethan sonneteers borrowed from Petrarch: her eyes are not suns, her lips not coral. The couplet claims that love which sees truly is as rare as any celebrated by false compare. Students can weigh flattery against truthful affection, a question that runs through the whole sequence.

  • List the conventional comparisons Sonnet 130 refuses. Where else had you met them?
  • Is Sonnet 130 an insult, a joke, or a love poem?
  • Elsewhere the poet praises the young man in very high terms. Is that praise false compare?

• Desire and the soul

  The dark-lady sonnets describe a passion the speaker himself condemns: Sonnet 129 calls lust perjured and savage, and Sonnet 147 says his reason, his physician, has left him. Sonnet 146 answers with a sermon to his own soul, urging it to starve the body's vanity and feed on things divine. The sequence thus contains its own moral argument about the ordering of love.

  • How does Sonnet 147 use the language of illness and medicine to describe love?
  • What does Sonnet 146 ask the soul to do with its fading mansion?
  • Why might Shakespeare place a poem like 146 among the poems to the dark lady?

Context

The sonnet came into English from Petrarch's Italian through Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey in the 1530s and 1540s, and the publication of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella in 1591 set off a fashion for sonnet sequences, among them Spenser's Amoretti (1595), Daniel's Delia and Drayton's Idea. Shakespeare's sequence departs from the pattern by addressing most of its poems to a young man and by turning the conventional idealized mistress into a dark lady loved against reason.

Composition

The dates of composition are uncertain; many scholars place most of the poems between the early 1590s and the early 1600s, with revision possible. Francis Meres's Palladis Tamia (1598) refers to Shakespeare's sugared sonnets among his private friends, and versions of Sonnets 138 and 144 appeared in William Jaggard's miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim (1599). The 1609 quarto, printed by George Eld for the publisher Thomas Thorpe, was entitled Shake-speares Sonnets and also contained the narrative poem A Lover's Complaint. Thorpe's dedication to the only begetter, Mr. W. H., has prompted centuries of guesswork about identities (the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke are the most common candidates); no identification is agreed.

Reception

The quarto drew little notice, and John Benson's 1640 edition rearranged and retitled the poems and altered some pronouns. Edmond Malone's 1780 edition restored the 1609 order and began the modern habit of reading the sequence as a story. Wordsworth called the sonnet the key with which Shakespeare unlocked his heart, and Browning replied that if so, the less Shakespeare he. The poems now stand among the most quoted lyrics in English, and Sonnets 18, 29, 73, 116 and 130 are staples of school anthologies.

Comparisons

• sonnet-116

  The library's separate record for Sonnet 116; this collection supplies the surrounding poems of estrangement (Sonnets 109 to 120) that give its definition of constant love an edge.

• death-be-not-proud

  Donne's Holy Sonnet 10 ends with Death dying, as Shakespeare's Sonnet 146 does; one is a confident theological taunt, the other a private exhortation to the soul.

• on-his-blindness

  Milton's Italian-form sonnet shows another seventeenth-century use of fourteen lines, turning from personal loss to patient service rather than from love to time.

• ozymandias

  Shelley's sonnet treats the fall of monuments that Sonnets 55 and 64 also describe, but finds no verse able to save the king, only the sculptor's irony.

• the-faerie-queene

  Spenser, Shakespeare's contemporary, also wrote a sonnet sequence (Amoretti); his allegorical epic shows the same age's ideal of chaste and constant love on a larger canvas.

• romeo-and-juliet

  The play's Prologue and the lovers' first exchange are written as sonnets, showing Shakespeare using the same form on the stage in the mid-1590s.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The turn (volta) in each sonnet, usually at line 9 or in the couplet, as in Sonnet 29's Haply I think on thee.
• The change in Sonnets 17 to 19 from urging the young man to have children to promising him life in verse.
• Time personified with scythe and sickle in Sonnets 12, 60 and 116, and the ruined towers of Sonnet 64.
• The shift of address at Sonnet 127 from the young man to the dark lady, and the darker tone of 129 and 147.
• Sonnet 146, a meditation on the soul placed among the dark-lady poems.

Key terms and names

Shakespearean (English) sonnet

Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter in three quatrains and a couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg; nearly every poem in the sequence uses it.

Procreation sonnets

Sonnets 1 to 17, which urge the young man to marry and father a child so that his beauty will outlive him.

Volta

The turn in argument or feeling; in Sonnet 73 it comes in the couplet, which turns three images of dying into a reason for love.

Petrarchan conceit

The elaborate comparison of a beloved to suns, roses, coral and snow, inherited from Petrarch; Sonnet 130 refuses each one.

The rival poet

The unnamed writer of Sonnets 78 to 86 whose proud full sail of verse threatens the speaker's place with the young man.

Mr. W. H.

The person named in Thomas Thorpe's dedication of the 1609 quarto as the only begetter of the sonnets; his identity is unknown.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension In Sonnets 1 to 17, what arguments does the poet use to persuade the young man to marry?
2. Comprehension What three images of ending does Sonnet 73 use, and in what order?
3. Comprehension What is the speaker's state of mind in the first eight lines of Sonnet 29, and what changes it?
4. Interpretation Sonnet 18 begins by asking whether to compare the friend to a summer's day. Why does the poem then spend most of its lines on summer's faults?
5. Interpretation Is Sonnet 130 kinder or crueller to its subject than the conventional sonnets it mocks?
6. Interpretation How does Sonnet 146's address to the soul change the way we read the dark-lady sonnets on either side of it?
7. Big Question Can art really preserve a person against time, as Sonnets 18 and 55 claim, or does it preserve only the art?
8. Big Question Is constancy the heart of love, as Sonnet 116 says, even when the beloved has done wrong, as in Sonnets 33 to 35?

Faith Connections

• 1 Corinthians 13:4-8 (Scripture)

  Paul's love that bears all things and never fails parallels Sonnet 116's love that bears it out even to the edge of doom, though the sonnet speaks of human friendship and the epistle of charity.

• 1 Corinthians 15:26, 54-55 (Scripture)

  Death as the last enemy swallowed up in victory lies behind the couplet of Sonnet 146, where the soul that feeds on Death leaves no more dying.

• Matthew 6:19-21 (Scripture)

  Treasure laid up where moth and rust corrupt is the argument of Sonnet 146, which tells the soul to stop spending on its fading mansion and buy terms divine.

• Augustine, Confessions IV (Church Fathers)

  Augustine's grief for a friend and his conclusion that only love of creatures in God is secure throws light on the sonnets' fear of losing the young man to time and change.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Beauty and youth are destroyed by time; children and monuments cannot be fully trusted to preserve them; therefore the poet offers verse, which lasts as long as it is read, while the later sonnets admit that only the soul, not the body or its beauty, can finally defeat death.

Rhetorical device: Anaphora and turn. Sonnet 18's couplet repeats So long to bind the poem's life to the reader's breath, and Sonnet 29 pivots on the word Haply at line 10 after eight lines of complaint.

Debate: Resolved: that the speaker of the Sonnets loves the young man more truly than he loves the dark lady.

Memory Work

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove:

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Choose three sonnets (for example 18, 55 and 73) and argue whether the speaker believes his poetry can truly defeat time.

Comparison with Holy Sonnet X: "Death, be not proud": Compare the endings of Shakespeare's Sonnet 146 and Donne's Death Be Not Proud: how does each poem imagine Death dying, and on what grounds?

Medical Lens

The sonnets are not about medicine, but they borrow its vocabulary in ways that show how an Elizabethan Londoner thought about the body. Sonnets 44 and 45 build on the four elements, the earth and water of the body and the air and fire of thought and desire, a scheme tied to humoral physiology. Sonnet 118 compares the speaker's lapses to the purges taken to prevent sickness, a common preventive practice. Sonnet 147 develops lovesickness as a fever with Reason as the abandoned physician, an image rooted in the long medical and literary tradition of love as a disease. Sonnets 153 and 154 describe a hot bath curing men diseased; some editors read the seething bath as an allusion to the sweating treatments used for venereal disease, a reading that remains conjectural. Sonnet 73 and the poems on the poet's age offer a lyric picture of senescence rather than clinical description.

• Sonnets 44-45

  The four elements divided between the heavy body (earth, water) and swift thought and desire (air, fire); when the lighter two are absent, the speaker sinks into melancholy.

  Humoral Medicine Melancholia Depression
• Sonnet 118

  Purging to prevent unseen maladies used as a figure for the speaker's turning to worse company; the couplet says the drugs poison him.

  Pharmacology Poisons Humoral Medicine
• Sonnet 147

  Love as a fever that feeds the disease; Reason the physician leaves in anger because his prescriptions are ignored, and the patient is frantic-mad.

  Physicians Doctors Fever Infection
• Sonnets 153-154

  Cupid's torch heats a cool well into a healing bath for sick men; the speaker goes there for cure and finds none.

  Syphilis Venereal

Creative Prompts

• Poetry

  Write a Shakespearean sonnet (three quatrains and a couplet) in which the couplet reverses or deepens what the quatrains have argued, as in Sonnets 29 and 73.

• Essay

  Trace the image of Time across Sonnets 12, 19, 60, 64 and 116. Does the poet ever claim to defeat Time outright?

• Classroom

  Divide Sonnet 116 into its quatrains and couplet, paraphrase each section in one sentence, and then compare the paraphrase with the original to see what the images add.

• Dialogue

  Stage a conversation between the speaker of Sonnet 130 and a conventional sonneteer who praises his mistress's sun-bright eyes.

Further Reading

• The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Helen Vendler

  Poem-by-poem commentary on all 154 sonnets.

• Shakespeare's Sonnets (Arden Shakespeare, third series), Katherine Duncan-Jones (ed.)

  Annotated edition with the 1609 quarto's A Lover's Complaint and a full introduction.

• Shakespeare's Sonnets, Stephen Booth (ed.)

  Edition with a facsimile of the 1609 quarto and extensive notes.

• Astrophel and Stella, Philip Sidney

  The sequence that started the English sonnet fashion of the 1590s.

• Shakespeare's Lives, S. Schoenbaum

  History of the search for Shakespeare's life, including the debates over the sonnets' addressees.