Commentaries on
Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems
Shakespeare, William. Sonnets and Poems. (Folger Shakespeare Library, eds. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. Simon & Schuster, 2006. Pp. 3-329, selected).
Of Interest: Sonnets, The First Quarto, 1609 |
Shakespeare’s Sonnet Cycle: Notes on Selected Sonnets
Shakespeare’s Sonnet Cycle: Notes on Selected Sonnets
In The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, critic Helen Vendler does a great job with both themes and the structural and linguistic qualities of Shakespeare’s sonnets. [1] Here are some of the things I look for in my own readings of the sonnets:
1. How, in the midst of a rather showy poetic form, Shakespeare still conveys any number of emotional and intellectual states, from near-despair, confusion, jealousy, and alienation to triumph, clarity, a sense of deep and abiding attachment or love, and joy. He tells a story about a relationship between an older poet and a handsome young man, the interference of at least one “rival poet,” and the mutual entanglement of the older poet and the fair young man with a “dark lady” who greatly complicates matters between them.
2. The sort of claims made for language and art in relation to expressivity, time’s passage, aging, and mortality. What can language do, and what can’t it do?
3. How Shakespeare’s sonnets respond to an already long tradition and well-worn set of conventions among his fellow poets, such as the description of peerlessly beautiful and graceful, but entirely unattainable, “Petrarchan ladies.”
Let’s begin with the structure of Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence:
The Fair Youth Sonnets 1-126. These poems emphasize the youth and handsomeness of the male poet-speaker’s younger male friend, and express frustration at this youth’s apparent failure to heed the implications of time’s passage. The “fair young man” sonnets also attribute quite a lot of memorializing power to the poetic arts, even though they can’t stop the aging of either the older or younger friend.
Procreation Sonnets 1-17. This block urges the fair youth to find a wife and begin having children with her, lest his dazzling beauty fail—thanks to his own narcissism—to reproduce itself for future generations to enjoy.
Rival Poet Sonnets 78-86. The poet-speaker waxes insecure in this block since what he can urge and do, so can other poets. Some other man may, then, draw the fair youth’s attention to him, and cause him to scorn his original admirer.
The Dark Lady Sonnets 127-152. Most of thesesonnets explore lust, obsession, and fear of betrayal; they focus onthe addictive, destructive dimension of erotic attraction. Not all of the sonnets here are truly “dark” (the term comes up in 127, 131-132, and 147). Some are playful. Sonnets 130 and 138 come to mind since these two poems focus on the need for creative, good-humored deception to keep a love match going. Sonnet 138 sums it up best: “Therefore I lie with her and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we flattered be.” Here, the poet invokes both convenient “lying” (telling lies) and the power of sexual enjoyment (as in “getting laid”).
The Cupid Sonnets 153-154. Together, these two “light” sonnets make the classical point that love is a power beyond human comprehension and control. The poet isn’t issuing a medieval-style retraction or apology for having spent so much time on the subject, but he is suggesting that if we came to him looking for easy answers about dealing with love, we must be disappointed by the end of the cycle. The poet seems to want to offer us a bit of distance from “the fury and the mire of human veins” (to borrow a phrase from Yeats’s poem “Byzantium”) that has preceded these last two sonnets.
Helen Vendler’s Tips: try to identify a “couplet tie” wherein a word that appeared in the first twelve lines of the sonnet appears in some form in the final couplet. In a related sense, look for “key words” that appear from one quatrain to the next. Also notice when such a word seems to be missing. Its absence is probably not an accident, and Vendler refers to that absence by calling it a “defective key word.” Poetry is very compressed writing, so it makes sense that what seems to have been deliberately left out or altered is often important.
Who was Mr. W. H? We can’t be certain, though some commenters say is was William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke, or Henry Wriothsley, Third Earl of Southhampton. (Wriothsley was a fascinating character and something of a rascal—he was involved in brawls at court, and played a role in the Essex conspiracy. He’s the one who commissioned a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II, which enraged Queen Elizabeth. Henry refused an early marriage to Lady Vere, but later married Eliz. Vernon and had children by her.)
Oscar Wilde’s admirably fact-free theory, as given in his 1889 essay “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” (later enlarged and printed posthumously in 1921), is that Mr. W. H. was an attractive boy-actor named Willie Hughes. [2]
By the way, the critic Margreta de Grazia writes that the real “scandal” for earlier readers and critics of the sonnet sequence is not so much the male-male relationship but the one with the so-called “dark lady” because of the seedy nature of the poet-speaker’s relations with her.
The young man/poet relation isn’t as heavily criticized: a firmly articulated concept of “heterosexuality” in its own right wasn’t developed until around three centuries after Shakespeare’s death. See Robert Matz’s article “The Scandals of Shakespeare’s Sonnets” in ELH 77, no. 2, Summer 2010: “What distinguishes the treatment of the young man and the woman from the 1930s tracks closely with what Katz has called the invention of heterosexuality.”
Matz, following Katz—that’s perfect, Matz & Katz!—writes, “The invention of heterosexuality is the point at which heterosexual desire, at least, is freed from the imperatives of lineage or procreation within marriage to become ‘sexuality,’ a value in and of itself, as an older (re)productive ethic gives way to a modern consumer one.” [3]
The point seems to be that by the 1930s, the concept “heterosexuality” (freed, as Matz writes, of concerns about lineage and procreation) became a positive one that might be used over against the dreaded prospect of “homosexuality.” If that’s the case, we can see why people started looking at the dark lady sonnets more positively, and didn’t dwell so intently on the adulterous and lustful dimension of this implied relationship.
Anyhow, let’s leave all the scandalizing aside. As Alice Roosevelt Longworth said, “If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.”
By the way, we don’t know who the “rival poet” was, or who the “dark lady” was. Indeed, why should they be at all—how do we know any of the events in the sonnets really took place? We don’t. So there. I’m glad that I’ve been able to resolve all those questions for you! Some makeup company like L’Oréal or MAC Cosmetics should pick up on the smoky “dark lady” concept and develop a line of products based on it. Maybe they already have. I don’t know.
The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust offers a helpful blog entry, “All the Sonnets of Shakespeare,” regarding what has been conjectured about the order in which the sonnets may have been composed. [4]
Assigned: Sonnets: 15 (“When I consider everything that grows”), 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”), 30 (“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”), 55 (“Not marble nor the gilded monuments”), 60 (“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore”), 73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”), 106 (“When in the chronicle of wasted time”), 107 (“Not mine own fears nor the prophetic soul”), 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments”), 129 (“Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame”), 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”), 138 (“When my love swears that she is made of truth”), 144 (“Two loves I have, of comfort and despair”).
Selected Sonnets
Sonnets 1-126, Sonnets to/about the Fair Young Man
Sonnets 3-17, Sonnets of Procreation
Sonnet 15, “When I consider everything that grows.”
Let’s focus on just one sonnet from this block, which through various frames of reference offers the fair young man incentives to marry and procreate as well as warnings about the disadvantages of not doing so. The basic threat to the young man’s (and the poet’s) happiness is the former’s selfishness and lack of knowledge, which leads him to withhold making “copies” of himself for others to enjoy, in spite of time’s passage and the decay it brings.
The botanical frame is set up in the first quatrain, with metaphors of the stage and the heavens or “sky” figuring as well. As the second quatrain goes on to explain, even as a plant, driven by the operation of “the stars in secret influence,” perfects and then begins to decay, so do human beings—even the fair young man—until their health and beauty are forgotten. This prospect, the speaker continues in the third quatrain, heightens his sense of the beloved youth’s perfection and of the “debate” taking place between Time and Decay, with the subject probably being the pace of ruin, not whether that ruin or deliquescence should occur at all.
The final couplet brings into play the often-cited horticultural practice of “engrafting” or grafting a little sprig from one favored plant to another. Both the poet and Time itself are in love with the fair youth, but the speaker says, “all in war with Time for love of you, / As he takes from you, I engraft you new.” Time’s passage is allied with natural process, which can only bring the young man to decay, but the poet’s way of engrafting him—writing a poem or series of poems—apparently stands a better chance of bestowing a kind of immortality.
Well, this bold claim shouldn’t obscure Sonnet 17’s true confession that follows Sonnet 15’s promise to “ingraft” the young man anew in art, and precedes the sonnets that go on to offer poetic immortality. Perhaps writing alone can’t guarantee immortality—it needs the supplement of reality itself, which raises the possibility that the ancient mistrust of writing voiced by Plato in the Phaedrus is true.
18, 20, 30 Sonnets of Aesthetic Recuperation
*Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”) [Folger pg. 55]
In “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” which follows the first seventeen sonnets urging the young man to take a wife and produce heirs to his own beauty, goodness, and estate, the speaker works up the courage to promise his young friend that the very sonnets he’s writing will recuperate and preserve the wondrous qualities he has been describing.
We recognize that the poet here repurposes the ancient conception of the seasons to endow the young man’s handsomeness with immortality: each and every year, we see spring give way to summer, summer to autumn, and autumn to winter and death—but as the speaker says to the young man, “thy eternal summer shall not fade.” Death will not cast its long shadow over the youth’s life and vigor, which art will translate to a heavenly ideal.
That’s the essence of this recuperative move: artistic creation replaces physical, material procreation, issuing in a grand promise of immortality that even one’s progeny can’t give. After all, by Shakespeare’s day, how many great houses have bred themselves into oblivion?
As Vendler says, the “couplet tie” in Sonnet 18 consists in I/eye(s). There’s an insistent, almost desperate sense here of the poet wanting to hold on to the beautiful idealized form he sees in the younger man. In beholding and writing about this form, it appears, he hopes to preserve thoughts of his own youth. In this hope, he is rather like Yeats’s poet-speaker in “Sailing to Byzantium” seeking eternity by disappearing into a work of art: this is what it means to be delivered into “the artifice of eternity.” [5] Such immortality will be directly granted only to the youth, but implicitly, the poet will enjoy it as well.
*Sonnet 30 (“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”) [Folger pg. 79]
This isn’t a sonnet in which the speaker is bowled over unawares by fresh grief or sorrows—in the third quatrain, he says that he pursues a regimen of summoning up past woes, bringing them to mind and bewailing them anew; he can “tell o’er / The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan.” That narratival goal seems to be the purpose of the exercise.
The passion so recalled is not merely fake or aestheticized passion. Shakespeare’s formulation may remind us of Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800,” in which the author tells us the following about how poetic composition begins:
… [P]oetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. [6]
Each of Sonnet 30’s three quatrains gives us some aspect of this grief-revivifying process. But when we get to the couplet, Shakespeare’s speaker says, in thinking of the fair young man, “But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, / All losses are restored and sorrows end.” How impressive a claim should we consider this abrupt turnaround, this volta?
We might take the word “restored” in two different ways. One is the most emphatic in terms of the claim it makes for the summoning-up: to restore in the sense of “make good,” or “recuperate.” When you lose money, you hope to be made whole for your losses, fully compensated. The second meaning of “restored” could be “put back in its original place.” When you use a relatively full jar of honey, you can then put it back in its place in the cupboard. The honey doesn’t go away, unless you decide never to use it again. The same is true with regard to woes and sorrows, I suppose.
There’s a “sweetness” to the “silent thought” that precedes the speaker’s summoning of old woes. Is this “silent thought” the equivalent of an initial meditative state, a vacuum waiting to be filled with bittersweetness? As mentioned, this business of recollection and composition is not a storm-and-stress kind of operation. For the most part, it comes across as meditative.
In the ending couplet, the speaker is saying that the thought of the “dear friend” whom he addresses cures his sadness for a time and stops him from continuing to dwell on his losses. He has something new to enjoy, and does not persist in that bittersweet mainstay of age, thinking upon and dwelling within one’s past. For a time, he thinks like a young man, as if he has been restored to the days of his youth.
Other Sonnets, Mostly Philosophical
*Sonnet 55 (“Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of Princes”) [Folger pg. 129]
Sonnet 55 is among the most beloved in the cycle, with its magnificent—one wants to say “monumental”—claim in the first quatrain that the poet’s verse will outlast all other ways of memorializing a beloved person. The power of the love that the speaker’s lines invokes will, he says, supposedly outlast even marble, which is almost invariably set up with heartfelt gestures but which eventually, as outlined in the second quatrain, succumbs to the ravages of war, disuse, and decay. Marred by history’s procession of violent acts and pitiless forgettings, even the grandest marble monument winds up, says the speaker, “besmeared with sluttish time.” In the end, a funeral monument mostly reminds us of the deadness of the mortal person it memorializes. (Still, Siste, viator!)
Things are otherwise with a fine sonnet, asserts the speaker, and he proceeds with the boldness of his poetic descendant John Milton, who writes in his 1644 treatise Areopagitica, “Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.” [7]
That’s the way it seems with the present sonnet: it sends forth something of both the poet’s and the young man’s spirit and excellence, so the poet can say, “You live in this [verse], and dwell in lovers’ eyes.” The assumption is that for ages to come, the sonnet itself will continue to be read, serving as a spark that will ignite the passions of people in times yet unimagined.
*Sonnet 60 (“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore”) [Folger pg. 139]
Vendler is surely right to suggest that this remarkable sonnet’s quatrains develop something like a tragic view of life, a view the poet opposes with the hope that his own verses will “stand” against the devastating, obliterating passage and effects of time. The sonnet begins with a sense of monotonous, relentless movement: just as the waves steadily arrive to shore, “So do our minutes hasten to their end.” The fair young man, and we, and the poet will all die one day, and nature seems impatient—monotony notwithstanding—to be done with us and let others take our place.
Vendler points out that the second quatrain crowns the growing person king, in a sense, and in tragic vein proceeds to take him down. It’s the stuff of the well-known moral stories in the Mirror for Magistrates. [8] Allegorized as “Nativity,” the child “Crawls to maturity” and is “crowned.” But just at that point, the heavens turn malign: “Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight, / And time that gave, doth now his gift confound.” These “eclipses” are prodigies, unhealthy and unnatural mockeries of the natural processes, the rising, arcing, and setting of suns, that helped the child to grow to maturity and full agency.
In the end, as the third quatrain admits, the “scythe” of material nature mows down all things before it. But the couplet, in a sharp volta, announces the by-now familiar hope that the poet’s “verse shall stand” to praise the young man’s worth, whatever time, or nature, or any destructive power may do. The iteration of the poet’s own “sequent toil” puts up a counter-force that will “stand” the intentional and malicious ravages of time.
Even so, it’s worth suggesting that in this sonnet, as with a number of others in the present cycle, no magic is claimed for poetry: all its repetition can do is endow future generations of lovers with an ideal and a stronger sense that they, like those who came before them, will “have their day and cease to be” (a fine line from Tennyson’s In Memoriam A.H.H.), so as always, carpe diem is the phrase to know and live by. Sonnets 63 and 65 will continue the debate about poetry’s promise to idealize, and thus to immortalize, after a fashion.
There is a fragility about verse, indeed about language of any kind, written or spoken. Manuscripts crumble into dust, and particular poems and dramas, or even whole genres, may sink into oblivion thanks to changes in taste, morals, and expectations. That sort of falling-away is beyond an artist’s control. In Sonnet 65, the couplet’s assertion of hope seems a little tenuous: the poet will wish that “in black inck my love may still shine bright.”
*Sonnet 73 (“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”) [Folger pg. 165]
Vendler suggests that in this beautiful sonnet, the speaker has stopped holding on to memories of his own youth, and he accepts his present state by referring to a tree stripped of its leaves by winter (first quatrain), the day’s twilight and “black night” (second quatrain), and the glowing of an almost extinguished fire, almost out of fuel (third quatrain).
The first quatrain’s “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang” is a particularly moving figure, as its singing-bird reference may allude to the speaker’s own poetic capacity, which he apparently fears will soon desert him.
By the final couplet, the speaker’s angst about mortality and decay has mellowed into a bond of reaffirmation. He now attributes to the fair young man the perceptions he has described, but they are his own thoughts. The beloved will miss him when he’s gone, so he should, if he’s wise, show his affection now. It’s interesting to note that the speaker doesn’t suggest that he will soon be leaving, but rather that the fair youth will be leaving him, the sense of which remains somewhat indeterminate: the youth should, says the older speaker, “love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
Sonnet 106 (“When in the chronicle of wasted time”) [Folger pg. 231]
Vendler reminds us that the basic conceit of this sonnet comes from biblical typology, the notion that certain people and events in the Hebrew scriptures prefigure the life of Christ. All that ancient and medieval “praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights,” asserts the poet-speaker, have been folded into the excellence and beauty of the fair young man.
I agree with Vendler that the most sensible reading of lines 11-12 in the third quatrain, “And for they look’d but with divining eyes, / They had not still enough your worth to sing,” is to emend “still” to “skill” and interpret the two lines as meaning, “earlier artists could only prefigure you so well because they were inspired, like the prophets in the scriptures.
The trouble is, as the couplet points out, that present-day poets don’t have the necessary skills even to do more than “wonder”—that is, they “lack tongues to praise.” Wonder is usually a good state of mind to be in when we deal with Shakespeare (especially in his romance plays); it’s a state of being to which extraordinary events open the souls of certain worthy characters. Here in Sonnet 106, “wonder” is still a good thing, but what’s lacking is the rhetorical ability to express what is felt. In early modern times, the literary arts were classed as allied to rhetoric.
*Sonnet 107 (“Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul”) [Folger pg. 233]
In this confident sonnet, the poet’s love seems to exceed all limits individual (“mine own fears”) and social (“the prophetic soul / Of the wide world”). The speaker claims that death now “subscribes” to him, or obeys him and that his verses will endow him with immortality: “I’ll live in this poor rhyme.” The couplet brings in the fair young man, who is told, “thou in this [verse] shalt find thy monument, / When tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass are spent.” Is that the same thing as immortality for the beloved? It seems like a less absolute claim than we have seen in some of the earlier sonnets on the same theme.
*Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments”) [Folger pg. 251]
This is an impersonal sonnet—the fair young man is not mentioned—and as Vendler says, it reads as dramatic refutation, not definition. Refutation, that is, of a claim such as, “true love requires perfect reciprocity; you can’t love someone who wrongs or slights you.” Instead, the poet asserts, love is like a pole star by which we may navigate through our lives. This profound feeling “bears it out even to the edge of doom.”
The poem’s rhetorical structure, says Vendler, is “Love is not X, but rather Y.” The phrase “Time’s fool” is important, as it is the precursor of the same language in Sonnet 124, in which the phrase “fools of time” appears. In the present sonnet, the lines run, “Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks / Within his bending sickle’s compass come.” Love may be in some sense subject to time’s ravages, but it is not a dupe of Time; it does not obey or subscribe to the power of Time, and even has power to transcend such destruction, at least in the spiritual sense. Physical beauty is a temporary endowment granted by time and nature, but love is not.
From block 127-52, Dark Lady Sonnets.
Assigned: 129, 130, 138, 144.
*Sonnet 129 (“Th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame”) [Folger pg. 279]
This “dark lady” sonnet is one for the ages. What about all that at times fulsome praise of idealized male-male friendship the poet served up in the earlier sonnets? This poem seems defensive in its frank, startling analysis of the power of raw, “dark” sexuality to smash idols and ideals. For better or worse, the speaker suggests, this activity elicits—both prospectively and retrospectively—emotions almost as stark and strong as does the activity itself.
Vendler asks the right question about how to interpret Sonne 129, with its “submission to lust”: she asks, should we read it as structured “passionally and chronologically—just as it sequentially happened from initial excitement to shame and analysis—or analytically and retrospectively, as one looks back on that submission in later evaluation” (550)? The trouble is, she goes on to say, that what seems to be an analytical retrospective breaks down into something more passional. So it’s as if the power of the feeling being explored reawakens the feeling itself.
As everyone knows and has known since ancient times, sex has a way of making people think other than logically, or just not think at all—that’s hardly news. But knowledge doesn’t always lead to wisdom, so sex tends to strip us even of the dignity of the tragic vision.
One other thing: the couplet reads, “All this the world well knows, yet none knows well, / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.” Should we take the word “men” strictly here? Is it supposed to be only men who experience sexuality this way? That seems unlikely, especially given the context of the sonnet itself, in which the speaker’s “dark lady” is made out to be a seductress. In Sonnets 131-132, the poet’s defense of his lover’s dark complexion and eyes continues his self-defense for submitting to his lust for her.
Sonnet 130 (“My Mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”) [Folger pg. 281]
We may want to say that this poem is to be read in a partly serious vein, in keeping with the sometimes unhappy, defensive meanings of the other dark lady sonnets, but it’s hard to see how to pull it off. The sonnet reads as a stand-alone sendup of the “Petrarchan lady” ideal. [9] By Shakespeare’s time, this ideal had become shopworn, so often did poets resort to it. We know that the Petrarchan lady is remarkably beautiful and all but unapproachable.
Well, not our speaker’s mistress! Each quatrain tells the unappealing truth about some aspect of her person: her eyes, lips, breasts, and hair in the first quatrain; her cheeks and breath in the second; and her voice and gait in the third. The final couplet is delightful and a true volta or turnabout: “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare.”
The pronoun “she” should be treated as an eccentric noun meaning “any woman.” In other words, the woman isn’t doing the comparing; others are making comparisons about her and thus misrepresenting her. So the final couplet in more prosaic form would run, “… I think my love as rare / As any woman flattered by false claims about her beauty.” In spite of her not being up to the impossible Petrarchan lady standard—who really is, anyway?—the lady has sufficient charms to endear her to her male companion, the speaker.
*Sonnet 138 (“When my love swears that she is made of truth”) [Folger pg. 297]
This sonnet ends comically with, “in our faults by lies we flattered be.” The poem may seem less comical when we consider the “dark lady” matrix in which it is embedded, but it reads as fully detachable and comic in spirit: love and full truth don’t mix. Shakespeare won’t condemn artifice except when it’s the handmaid of grasping selfishness and cruelty. Rhetorical artifice, he suggests, is sometimes entirely necessary in a relationship. As we all know, “simple truth” can be needlessly destructive. If your partner asks, “Does this horizontally striped dress make me look heavier? Or, “Do I look as old as I am today?” the answer had better be NO!
One question we might ask as we read through Sonnet 138’s catalog of deceptions and false-speakings is, does either partner believe any of these things? The older man acts as if he believes his mistress even though he knows she is lying, so that she might think him young and untutored, right? But does she actually believe that? Does it even matter?
There’s a sense in which the speaker’s logic resembles the 1984-ish way of knowing and not knowing, believing and not believing, something. 2 + 2 make 4, but they can also make 5, or 7, or 3.14159, or whatever INGSOC needs them to make. The human spirit seems capacious enough to manage a little erotic doublethink, a sexy patch of Newspeak subterfuge now and then. Anything to smooth things over, right? How else can we interpret a line such as, “I do believe her though I know she lies”?
The couplet is a true classic: “I lie with her and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we flattered be.” By “lie” and “lies,” of course, the speaker means both “tell lies” and “lie with.” To put it simply, telling lies makes it easier to “get laid.”
*Sonnet 144 (“Two loves I have of comfort and despair”) [Folger pg. 309]
This sonnet shows the speaker feeling trapped in a triangle, in which “The better angel is a man right fair” and “The worser spirit a woman colored ill.” It seems that by the poem’s end, as Vendler suggests, “we infer the friend has indeed turned fiend” (144) since, as the couplet admits, the speaker hopes that his “bad angel [may] fire my good one out.”
Oscar Wilde’s romantic interest Lord Alfred Douglas would later take inspiration from the sonnet’s title line, writing a poem called “Two Loves,” which ends notoriously, “I am the love that dare not speak its name.” [10]
The remaining sonnets before the end of this 127-152 block, Sonnets 148-151, offer little to no solace to the speaker or reader. It seems as if, as was once said of the thundering prose of Thomas Carlyle, the writer has “led us into the wilderness and left us there.” He and we are left, that is, in a wilderness of passion, still trying to make our way forward with a poet who may be forever lost among a tangled, hellish thicket of hearts. The speaker himself seems torn by the recognition of what’s happening, yet unable to make it right. No resolution is achieved as the last declarations of love and acts betrayal unfold.
The final two Sonnets, 153-154 (the “Cupid Block”), withdraw to a classical distance, providing perspective. Were they written last? Who can say? Maybe we should draw hope from the fact that this troublesome topic of love/eroticism can be so treated, that poetry need not only add to the confusion and the mire, but may attenuate it, or bring understanding. Still, the question is whether being able to articulate something gives us any power over it.
We know that in tragedy, if we are talking about tragic paths and outcomes, the strict answer is “no,” though in a manner that scarcely vitiates the power and value of tragedy. But this is a romantic sonnet cycle, not a tragic play, that we are dealing with. In these final sonnets, does the poet give us a kind of knowledge or perspective that allows us to stand outside love’s strife for a while? What does it mean if we, the readers or the audience, say along with Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as he surveys the humans’ love-strife, “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” [11]
[1] References to “Vendler” refer to comments by Helen Vendler in her excellent edition of the sonnets The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Amazon info). Harvard Belknap, 1999. ISB-13: 978-0674637122. My quotes from the sonnets are taken from the 1609 Quarto edition that Vendler in part uses. I like the early-modern spellings, though I’ve tidied up some of the conventions for easier reading—for example, I don’t spell modern “v” with a “u” or use the long “s” that contemporary readers often find confounding. To view a facsimile copy of the 1609 Quarto, visit “Shakspere’s Sonnets, The First Quarto, 1609” (Internet Archive). See also Neil L. Rudenstine’s Ideas of Order: A Close Reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. ISBN-13: 978-0374535735.
[2] Wilde, Oscar. “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.” (Gutenberg E-Texts).
[3] Matz, Robert. “The Scandals of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” ELH, vol. 77, no. 2, 2010, pp. 477–508. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40664640. Accessed 3 June 2026. You can view this article with a free JSTOR account. The citation for de Grazia’s essay is Margreta de Grazia, “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Shakespeare Survey 46 (1993): 49.
[4] Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. “All the Sonnets of Shakespeare.” 9 Sept. 2020. Accessed 6/2/2026.
[5] Yeats, William Butler. “Sailing to Byzantium.” Poetry Foundation. Accessed 6/2/2026.
[6] Wordsworth, William. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800.” Gutenberg e-texts. Accessed 6/3/2026.
[7] Milton, John. “Areopagitica.” The Milton Reading Room. Accessed 6/3/2026.
[8] See The Mirror for Magistrates. HathiTrust. Accessed 6/3/2026.
[9] Petrarch’s Sonnet 90 in his Canzoniere is a good poem for comparison since it contains lines such as “Her way of moving was no mortal thing” (“Non era l’andar suo cosa mortale”). This poem also demonstrates that Petrarch is far more sophisticated than his parodists allow—he laments that the etherial beauty he’s describing is now a thing of the past. Trans. A. S. Kline. At petrarch.petersadler.com. Accessed 6/3/2026.
[10] Douglas, Lord Alfred. “Two Loves.” Poets.org. Accessed 6/3/2026.
[11] Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 3.2.117. Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed 6/3/2026.
Copyright © 2026 Alfred J. Drake