Sonnets

Overview

The Sonnets were printed in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe, in a quarto that opens with a dedication signed by the publisher rather than the author: to the only begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr W. H., all happiness and that eternity promised by our ever-living poet. Four centuries of scholarship have failed to establish who W. H. was, whether Shakespeare authorised the printing, or whether the order of the poems is his. Everything anyone says about the sequence as a narrative rests on that unstable ground.

The form is the English sonnet, which Shakespeare did not invent but perfected: fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, three quatrains rhyming alternately and a final couplet. The structure matters because it thinks. The quatrains usually develop or vary an idea and the couplet turns, clinches, undercuts or, in the weaker poems, merely repeats.

The shape of the whole: sonnets 1 to 126 concern a young man, of which 1 to 17 urge him to marry; 127 to 152 concern a woman with dark hair and dark eyes; 153 and 154 are two versions of a Greek epigram about Cupid and appear to be an appendix. A long poem, A Lover’s Complaint, was printed with them.

A warning about biography. The sequence has been mined for evidence about Shakespeare’s life since the eighteenth century, and the candidates for the young man, the rival poet and the dark lady are a small industry. None of it is settled and none of it is necessary. These are poems, in a genre with strong conventions, by a professional dramatist who wrote convincingly in many voices.

The argument

Sonnets 1 to 17: have a child. The sequence opens with seventeen poems making one argument from every available angle: you are beautiful, beauty dies, and the only copy you can leave is a son. Shakespeare rings the changes with extraordinary ingenuity, through images of husbandry, usury, distilling, glass and music, and the effect is of a case being pressed rather than a feeling expressed. Then, at 18, the argument changes without warning.

18 to 126: the young man. Sonnet 18 offers a different answer. Not a child but a poem: so long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee. It is the claim the sequence keeps returning to, in 55 on the gilded monuments of princes, in 65 on how beauty can hold a plea against the wrackful siege of battering days, in 60 on waves moving toward the pebbled shore.

The relationship, so far as it can be reconstructed, is not comfortable. There are poems of absence, of jealousy, of social inferiority. Sonnet 29, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, moves from self-loathing to the recollection of the beloved and refuses to end where it began. Sonnet 94, on those who have power to hurt and will do none, is a poem of such cold ambiguity that critics disagree about whether it is praise. There is a betrayal, in which the young man sleeps with the poet’s own mistress, handled in 40 to 42 with a strained generosity that fools nobody. There is a rival poet in 78 to 86, better connected and possibly better funded. And there is shame about the theatre: sonnet 110 on having gone here and there and made myself a motley to the view, and 111 on the dyer’s hand, subdued to what it works in.

Sonnet 116, on the marriage of true minds, is read at weddings and is more complicated than that use suggests, since it defines love by what it does not do and ends by staking the poet’s whole authorship on the claim.

Sonnet 73 is the best single poem in the sequence for most readers: autumn, then twilight, then a dying fire, three images of diminishing scale, ending on a couplet about loving well what you must leave.

127 to 152: the dark lady. The tone changes completely. She is not beautiful by the conventions, and 130 makes fun of those conventions directly, listing everything she is not and concluding that the comparison itself is the lie. The poems that follow are about compulsion. Sonnet 129 is the most concentrated thing Shakespeare wrote about desire: it never names lust’s object, consists almost entirely of adjectives, and describes an appetite that is mad in pursuit and despised as soon as satisfied, known by everybody and avoided by nobody. Sonnet 138, on two people lying to each other about her fidelity and his age and both pretending to believe it, is the sequence’s driest.

How to read it

Do not read them straight through like a novel. Read a few at a time and come back. They were probably written over a decade and circulated privately.

Read each one twice: once for sense, once watching the couplet. Ask whether it earns what the quatrains set up or merely announces a conclusion, and you will quickly see which poems are working hardest.

Start with 18, 29, 30, 55, 60, 65, 73, 94, 116, 129, 130, 138 and 147. That is a fair sample of the range from the famous to the unpleasant.

Read Vendler if you want to see how they are made. She takes each poem as a structure and shows the repetitions, reversals and key words, and it is the most useful thing written about them.

Resist the temptation to solve the mystery. The identity of W. H. and the dark lady have consumed enormous scholarly effort and produced nothing secure, and the poems do not need it.

The common misreading is 116, taken as a straightforward definition of constancy. Read it beside 138 and 152, in which everybody is lying, and the sequence looks less like a doctrine and more like an argument the poet keeps having with himself.

Questions it raises

• The order was printed by someone else. How much of the story readers find here is in the poems and how much in the arrangement?
• The first seventeen argue for children and sonnet 18 switches to poetry. Is that development, or a rhetorician changing tack?
• The immortality claim has been vindicated. Does knowing that change how the boast reads?
• Sonnet 94 praises people who have the power to hurt and do none, and its tone is unreadable. Is it admiration, warning, or accusation?
• The dark lady poems are written by a man who describes his own desire with contempt. Is that honesty, misogyny, or both?
• Would these poems be read differently if the first hundred and twenty-six were addressed to a woman? They were once reprinted that way.