The Sonnets and Other Poems Read Free

bury that posterity
Which by the rights of time thou needs must have,
If thou destroy them not in dark obscurity?
  If so, the world will hold thee in disdain,
  Sith in thy pride so fair a hope is slain.
    The first seventeen of Shakespeare’s sonnets are a set of variations on the same theme. Throughout the entire collection of 154 sonnets, there is a frequent return to questions first explored in
Venus and Adonis
: not only mortality and endurance, beauty and its transience, but also the paradoxes of self and other, truth and delusion, in the dynamics of desire. Adonis’ eyes are “Two glasses” (i.e. mirrors) where Venus “herself herself beheld / A thousand times.” At the climax of the sonnet sequence, a key pun plays on the same idea: “For I have sworn thee fair: more perjured eye, / To swear against the truth so foul a lie.” The relationship between “I” and “eye,” inner self and the object of the gaze, is an obsession in the sonnets, while “perjured” is an example of another hallmark of the collection, the application of legal language to the promises made and broken by lovers. So, for instance, in Sonnet 30 (“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”), term after term has legal connotations (“sessions,” “summon,” “dateless,” “canceled,” “expense,” “grievances,” “account,” “restored”).
    It is probable that Shakespeare began composing sonnets soon after writing
Venus and Adonis
. Several poems in the form are woven into
Romeo and Juliet
and
Love’s Labour’s Lost
, plays that he wrote soon after the theaters reopened in 1594. The testimony of Francis Meres provides firm evidence that others were circulating in manuscript by 1598. But the collection entitled
Shakespeare’s Sonnets
was not published until 1609. We know neither whether it was authorized nor whether its arrangement of the sequence was purposeful. Some of the sonnets, however, clearly belong together as pairs or groups, in that successive poems sometimes allude to each other or enact variations on a similar theme.
    Though we cannot necessarily trust the order in which the sonnets appear in the 1609 volume, there does seem—as one would expect from the hand of the dramatist—to be a plotline running through the sequence and a “character” to each of the personae. The first 126 poems appear to be written to a man or conceivably a succession of men. The narrative extends over a considerable period of time and runs a full gamut of emotions. The person addressed is younger than Shakespeare and of higher rank. He is lovely and the image of his mother: “Thou art thy mother’s glass and she in thee / Calls back the lovely April of her prime.” The first seventeen poems are exhortations to breed, in the manner of Venus’ address to Adonis: “From fairest creatures we desire increase, / That thereby beauty’s rose might never die.” There is then a modulation toward the idea that the poet’s own work of praise may enable the young man to escape the ravages of time and death. Some sort of relationship is then imagined, with the youth in a position of power and the poet in one of supplication. Absence, travel, “disgrace,” melancholy, estrangement and reunion are variously implied. The young man appears to have an affair with the poet’s mistress, thus abusing the bond of friendship. But he is eventually forgiven: “Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all: / What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?” Later, the poet is discomposed by a rival who claims to have been taught by spirits to write “Above a mortal pitch” and who, with “the proud full sail of his great verse,” wins the patronage of the fair youth. The sequence ends with its key motif of the battle between love and time. The final poem to the youth is two lines short of the sonnet form’s customary fourteen. It ends with a pair of empty brackets, signaling some kind of closure or lacuna.
    Sonnets