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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.