THE SONNETS

Sonnet 1

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    From fairest creatures we desire increase,
    That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
    But as the riper should by time decease,
    His tender heir might bear his memory.
    But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
    Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
    Making a famine where abundance lies,
    Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
    Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
    And only herald to the gaudy spring,
    Within thine own bud buriest thy content
    And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding.
    Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
    To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

Sonnets 1 to 17 are addressed to a young man, ostensibly to encourage him to a certain course of action. To write seventeen sonnets on the advisability of begetting an heir is a curiosity in itself. Some think the youth may have been William Herbert, a young aristocrat known to be averse to marrying. (The initials W.H. appear somewhat mysteriously in the printer's dedication.) His identification is however a highly vexed question and one which I shall not explore, as it has the barest effect, if any, on a response to the sonnets as poetry. My view is that the poet took up the theme (for whatever reason) and found his way forward with it, both as a writer of sonnets, exploring the potential of his chosen form, and as an explorer at large in a difficult realm: the language of first person love. His plays deal with this on stage; but a different world is entered by the writer writing as himself. The group of seventeen, constructed about a prosaic message as it is, acts as a gateway to it.

This is not to say the feeling behind the words, his advice to the young man to 'get a son' (sonnet 7), is insincere. There can be several reasons for a course of action, some more conscious than others. A reader of poetry makes an individual judgement on such a matter; but in any case sincerity (that no imaginative writer takes an absolute position on) is not what one is looking for, but rather an authentic voice. It is this voice, creator of a storm of statements that speak from the page as if the writer's persona were one of the dramatist's own great characters, that I shall try to some small degree to follow.

Sonnet 1 delights in the assurance and grace of its opening; and, differently, in the sudden note of exasperation that one is tempted to hear in lines 5–6. Salvador Dali's golden Narcissus is before us; and an older person, exhorting him to think beyond himself. Lines 5–6 gather weight with a splendid underlying emphasis. 9 is balanced between surrender and sarcasm; the reader can take it either way. I am persuaded by the line's pure clarity and poise that a more or less total surrender is already on the cards. The ambiguity in the writer's position is itself thrillingly real; and one suspends judgement as to the exact nature of his personal involvement with the subject. 'By' in line 14 is a little vague: the suggestion is that the youth is as greedy as the grave, conspiring with it to leave nothing of himself behind.

Finally we may mention Shakespeare's sonnet-form, the three alternately rhyming quatrains and the final couplet, that others had used to some extent but that he made his own. The dynamic of its use – the craftsmanship of the poet who shapes the instrument he plays on – is touched on in the following pages. By and large it is as great a wonder as anything that at any particular moment is presented in an individual poem.

Sonnet 2

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    When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
    And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
    Thy youth's proud livery, so gaz'd on now,
    Will be a tattered weed of small worth held.
    Then being asked where all thy beauty lies,
    Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
    To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes
    Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
    How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use,
    If thou couldst answer, 'This fair child of mine
    Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,'
    Proving his beauty by succession thine.
    This were to be new made when thou art old,
    And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.

A sonnet is traditionally reserved for the theme of love, though a constellation of ideas may emerge and revolve to present it. It is probably the easiest theme to treat of conventionally, to prettify; the least apt to yield up the inner beauty of the individual voice. The topic has always seemed to require a surrender to the conventional idea of the lover; all too often there is something of a dull composite personality behind a love-poem's words. One of his later sonnets expresses Shakespeare's impatience at the dull and ridiculous language of ardour that poets so often employ. But throughout his own sequence we meet the living person, often with a slight sense of shock. Here he is before us contrasting the ravaged state of later middle age (as forty was then), and by implication surely something like his own, with 'youth's proud livery' (3). The contrast works: almost with a shudder one sees or feels him there.

The 'deep-sunken eyes' (7) of age have haunted me a half-century, taking up residence behind the scenes in my own headas a warning; eyes of an 'all-eating shame' (8) that when it is too late, will know their owner did not manage to fulfil expectations. Shakespeare can do this: bewilderingly a word, an expression can take on an added intent. It may be personal to the reader (as here), amusing, far-searching in its range, or deadly; any or all of these. It is a choice of word, or subordinate idea, with a built-in radar for further action, undeliberate as to specifics, but equipped for the quest that all poetry (as distinct from mere verse) can undertake at one level or another. Ambiguity is not what makes the pulse beat in poetry; nevertheless it lies at the core.

Already the supposed raison d'être of the piece, the same in all the first seventeen, to breed or in some way be cursed, is unconvincing. But Shakespeare evidently enjoyed finding arguments for it. He may very well have read the translation of Erasmus's Epistle to persuade a young gentleman to marriage, that appeared in Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique(1553) as an example of the Oration Deliberative. It was a popular book at the time, and one can imagine it playing a part as the poet cast about for a new variation on his theme. Erasmus speaks of a fruitful tillage of the ground, for example, that may have given rise to a line in sonnet 3. The inventiveness of the writer, as he presents and re-presents reasons to 'get a son', seems almost to be a cause for merriment. And yet each of the early sonnets is intent, at some level, with a steady seriousness.

Sonnet 3

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    Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest,
    Now is the time that face should form another,
    Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
    Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
    For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
    Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
    Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
    Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
    Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
    Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
    So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
    Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
    But if thou live remembered not to be,
    Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

The message itself is mechanical. Why is Shakespeare penning these poem-injunctions, with their blatantly contrived arguments, these variations on an idea with a repetitiveness already a little wearisome at heart? If the young man is his mother's glass (mirror), why is it assumed his own child will closely resemble its father? One cannot imagine the recipient of the poem will do more than smile at the repeated plea. But he may smile more broadly at the laddish dig in the ribs at 5–6. And his heart may well be caught by the unaffected reference to his mother at his age. To us now the sexist language of 5–6 makes 9–10 an unexpected delight; but one imagines that for the young man, the sudden allusion will momentarily put the rest out of his mind. Of course it may merely be a part of the argument – but why bring the mother on stage rather than the father? Does the poet see a feminine element in the youth (see 20)? The direct familial touch, charming as it is, seems almost out of place; certainly it would appear so in the latter part of the series, 18–126, where the familiarity between the two men is more intense, of a different nature entirely. Perhaps a kind of avuncular suggestion is a part of the poet's persona at this stage. At any rate the speaker seems to reveal a minor detail of a personal hinterland, so to speak; even if it amounts to no more than a guess at how someone used to look. One has no idea of what if anything it may tell us of the author; simply that it gives us a sense of an untroubled exterior life on the speaker's part, where people are referred to with no sense of strain or upset, or of moving in a larger-than-life world.

It is a vexed question, what one may call the validity of the autobiographical element of the Sonnets. There are other more definite suggestions of the poet's bare factual life than this to come, and yet they could all have been made up. I am inclined to go on the impression the lines leave on me after time. As far as recollections go, this is as appealing as any. Yet one should never forget that Shakespeare is an absolute master of the conceit, the adoption of a far-fetched comparison to make an effect; and the same conjuring skills lie always to hand.

The image of the last line deftly touches on the glass metaphor to conclude with a certain telling depth. The couplet that ends his adopted sonnet-shape was to become, in poem after poem, one of the poet's hallmark effects. One can already observe, in his use of the form as a whole to present an argument, how he has taken its measure as a rhetorical device. We cannot assume the order of the pieces is Shakespeare's own, but a good case can be made for the sequence as we have it as pretty well the right one; and without doubt the first seventeen go nowhere but at the beginning. The poet is learning in them to speak in a sonnet-way, that for him includes an unfathomable extra touch at poem's end. One is given a cue here as to the power of some of the sonnets to come.

Sonnet 4

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    Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
    Upon thyself thy beauty's legacy?
    Nature's bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
    And being frank she lends to those are free.
    Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
    The bounteous largess given thee to give?
    Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
    So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
    For having traffic with thyself alone,
    Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive;
    Then how, when Nature calls thee to be gone,
    What ácceptable audit canst thou leave?
    Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
    Which usèd lives th'executor to be.

One of the plainest pieces in its comparative lack of phrases and passages that illuminate by their sheer poetry, this nevertheless engages as a perfect minor example of rhetorical persuasiveness. Its addressee, one imagines, will at least have enjoyed the artistry on offer, while possibly squirming at the directness of the accusation of sexual self-absorption. Again, he may laugh at that: there is much in the sequence to do with laddish double meanings. And yet the Muse is present. The opening two words, a sigh of remonstrance and surrender; the gust of feeling that dies away, to be replaced by a kind of rapier-point sophistry (how often a Sonnet proceeds along such lines); the succession of questions interlaced with supposedly telling points, that yields to a final couplet with almost uncanny clinching effect – all this makes a fine poem. The perfect overall control of line and form, alliteration and repetition and rolling phrase, and above all perhaps the financial metaphor extended throughout, lends its strength. 'Executor' (14) finely equates the capacity of a supposed child to carry out the requirements of the will with the execution, or creation, of the father's beauty. If the piece is unconvincing in its apparent motive, a deeper one is not far to seek. The sonneteer is learning his trade and the surface argument serves him well.

This is not to say his admiration for the youth is contrived, nor even his concern for his "survival" in a child, though the latter carries considerably less conviction. But what seems to me to announce itself from the depths is the sense of a mind grappling with its material, that is ultimately the material of love. I would note here the personal pronoun – thou, thyself, thee, thy – that comes to serve almost as an unseen stepping-stone along the intuitive path of the reading mind. This is to do with far more than the writer's admiration for the young man. It is to lead into an exploration of identity, of writer and recipient both.

Sonnet 5

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    Those hours that with gentle work did frame
    The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
    Will play the tyrants to the very same,
    And that unfair which fairly doth excel.
    For never-resting time leads summer on
    To hideous winter and confounds him there,
    Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,
    Beauty o'ersnowed and bareness everywhere.
    Then were not summer's distillation left,
    A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
    Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
    Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.
    But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
    Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

Time makes an entrance, a character in its own right. It is to play as mighty a part as any of the poet's dramatic characters. A "bloody tyrant" in sonnet 16 and something like a devastating world-god as the sequence finds its true voice, it steals onstage in the softest of guises. The footfall of the first two lines has a charm all its own. And while the character reveals its hand as the poem proceeds, the picturesque expressions still leave something of a lulling effect. This is to change later.

The sestet is a rather beautiful dalliance with the practice of perfumery. This was quite a business in Shakespeare's time; the essence of the tenth line was common enough in prosaic terms. But here is an exemplar of the poetic effect, an alchemy due in part in this case to a tension between animate and inanimate, 'prisoner pent' and mere matter. It can go on meaning different things: I have to confess, with a part of my mind I see a tie-up with the very much more modern practice or business of storing the male reproductive essence for later use. While this is not ugly in itself it is scarcely inspiring to the imagination; and yet it does not impinge on the line's stellar beauty. Here is an extract from an article in Popular Science, June 1899: "No botanist can read the line 'A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass' and not recognise the exact portrayal of the living vegetable cell. The living protoplasm is a liquid prisoner sure enough, hemmed in by walls transparent. ... The first scientific glimpse of the 'prisoner pent in walls of glass' came about 1670, through the lenses of Nehemiah Grew, a Puritan physicist and botanist." Lucretius and Goethe are cited as other poets who have discerned a scientific outline before the scientists have seen it for themselves. The writer of the article is no doubt one of many who at different times have seen, and will see, a connection with states of being that when the line was written can scarcely have been envisaged. The words of poetry are cast in stone but there is a world to be made with it.

In line 14 'leese' is 'lose. 'Still' is nice: the echo, with the double meaning, laying a finishing touch out of sight, as it were. So the whole piece moves imperceptibly into place; and one is left to let it do what it will.

Sonnet 6

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    Then let not winter's ragged hand deface
    In thee thy summer ere thou be distilled:
    Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
    With beauty's treasure ere it be self-killed.
    That use is not forbidden usury
    Which happies those that pay the willing loan;
    That's for thyself to breed another thee,
    Or ten times happier be it ten for one.
    Ten times thyself were happier than thou art,
    If ten of thine ten times refigured thee;
    Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart,
    Leaving thee living in posterity?
    Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair
    To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir.