{"id":11552,"date":"2026-09-12T14:53:55","date_gmt":"2026-09-12T21:53:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/?page_id=11552"},"modified":"2026-09-12T15:14:53","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T22:14:53","slug":"selected-sonnets-fall-2026","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.ajdrake.com\/shakespeare\/selected-sonnets-fall-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"Selected Sonnets Fall 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Commentaries on
Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Shakespeare, William.\u00a0Sonnets and Poems.<\/em>\u00a0(Folger Shakespeare Library, eds. Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine. Simon & Schuster, 2006. Pp. 3-329, selected).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of Interest:<\/strong> Sonnets, The First Quarto, 1609<\/a> |<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnet Cycle: Notes on Selected Sonnets<\/strong><\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnet Cycle: Notes on Selected Sonnets<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In The Art of Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnets,<\/em> critic Helen Vendler does a great job with both themes and the structural and linguistic qualities of Shakespeare\u2019s sonnets. [1]<\/a> Here are some of the things I look for in my own readings of the sonnets:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201crival  poet,\u201d and the mutual entanglement of the older poet and the fair young man with a \u201cdark lady\u201d who greatly complicates matters between them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2. The sort of claims made for language and art in relation to expressivity, time\u2019s passage, aging, and mortality. What can language do, and what can\u2019t<\/em> it do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

3. How Shakespeare\u2019s 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, \u201cPetrarchan ladies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s begin with the structure of Shakespeare\u2019s sonnet sequence:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Fair Youth Sonnets 1-126.<\/strong> These poems emphasize the youth and handsomeness of the male poet-speaker\u2019s younger male friend, and express frustration at this youth\u2019s apparent failure to heed the implications of time\u2019s passage. The \u201cfair young man\u201d sonnets also attribute quite a lot of memorializing<\/em> power to the poetic arts, even though they can\u2019t stop the aging of either the older or younger friend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Procreation Sonnets 1-17.<\/strong> This block urges the fair youth to find a wife and begin having children with her, lest his dazzling beauty fail\u2014thanks to his own narcissism\u2014to reproduce itself for future generations to enjoy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rival Poet Sonnets 78-86.<\/strong> 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\u2019s attention to him,<\/em> and cause him to scorn his original admirer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Dark Lady Sonnets 127-152.<\/strong> Most of thesesonnets explore lust, obsession, and fear of betrayal;<\/em> they focus onthe addictive, destructive dimension of erotic attraction. Not all of the sonnets here are truly \u201cdark\u201d (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: \u201cTherefore I lie with her and she with me, \/ And in our faults by lies we flattered be.\u201d Here, the poet invokes both convenient \u201clying\u201d (telling lies) and the power of sexual enjoyment (as in \u201cgetting laid\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Cupid Sonnets 153-154.<\/strong> Together, these two \u201clight\u201d sonnets make the classical point that love is a power beyond human comprehension and control. The poet isn\u2019t issuing a medieval-style retraction or apology for having spent so much time on the subject, but he is<\/em> 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 \u201cthe fury and the mire of human veins\u201d (to borrow a phrase from Yeats\u2019s poem \u201cByzantium\u201d) that has preceded these last two sonnets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Helen Vendler\u2019s Tips:<\/strong> try to identify a \u201ccouplet tie\u201d 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 \u201ckey words\u201d that appear from one quatrain to the next. Also notice when such a word seems to be missing<\/u>.<\/em> Its absence is probably not an accident, and Vendler refers to that absence by calling it a \u201cdefective key word.\u201d Poetry is very compressed<\/em> writing, so it makes sense that what seems to have been deliberately left out or altered is often important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who was Mr. W. H? We can\u2019t 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\u2014he was involved in brawls at court, and played a role in the Essex conspiracy. He\u2019s the one who commissioned a performance of Shakespeare\u2019s Richard II,<\/em> which enraged Queen Elizabeth. Henry refused an early marriage to Lady Vere, but later married Eliz. Vernon and had children by her.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oscar Wilde\u2019s admirably fact-free theory, as given in his 1889 essay \u201cThe Portrait of Mr. W. H.\u201d (later enlarged and printed posthumously in 1921), is that Mr. W. H. was an attractive boy-actor named Willie Hughes. [2]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the way, the critic Margreta de Grazia writes that the real \u201cscandal\u201d for earlier readers and critics of the sonnet sequence is not so much the male-male relationship but the one with the so-called \u201cdark lady\u201d because of the seedy nature of the poet-speaker\u2019s relations with her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The young man\/poet relation isn\u2019t as heavily criticized: a firmly articulated concept of \u201cheterosexuality\u201d in its own right wasn\u2019t developed until around three centuries after Shakespeare\u2019s death. See Robert Matz\u2019s article \u201cThe Scandals of Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnets\u201d in ELH<\/em> 77, no. 2, Summer 2010: \u201cWhat distinguishes the treatment of the young man and the woman from the 1930s tracks closely with what Katz has called the invention of heterosexuality.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Matz, following Katz\u2014that\u2019s perfect,<\/em> Matz & Katz!\u2014writes, \u201cThe 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 \u2018sexuality,\u2019 a value in and of itself, as an older (re)productive ethic gives way to a modern consumer one.\u201d [3]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The point seems to be that by the 1930s, the concept \u201cheterosexuality\u201d (freed, as Matz writes, of concerns about lineage and procreation) became a positive one that might be used over against the dreaded prospect of \u201chomosexuality.\u201d If that\u2019s the case, we can see why people started looking at the dark lady sonnets more positively, and didn\u2019t dwell so intently on the adulterous and lustful dimension of this implied relationship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Anyhow, let\u2019s leave all the scandalizing aside. As Alice Roosevelt Longworth said, \u201cIf you can\u2019t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the way, we don\u2019t know who the \u201crival poet\u201d was, or who the \u201cdark lady\u201d was. Indeed, why should they be<\/em> at all\u2014how do we know any of the events in the sonnets really took place? We don\u2019t. So there. I\u2019m glad that I\u2019ve been able to resolve all those questions for you! Some makeup company like L\u2019Or\u00e9al or MAC Cosmetics should pick up on the smoky \u201cdark lady\u201d concept and develop a line of products based on it. Maybe they already have. I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust offers a helpful blog entry, \u201cAll the Sonnets of Shakespeare,\u201d regarding what has been conjectured about the order in which the sonnets may have been composed. [4]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Assigned:<\/strong>                        Sonnets:<\/em> 15 (\u201cWhen I consider everything that grows\u201d), 18 (\u201cShall I compare thee to a summer\u2019s day?\u201d), 30 (\u201cWhen to the sessions of sweet silent thought\u201d), 55 (\u201cNot marble nor the gilded monuments\u201d), 60 (\u201cLike as the waves make towards the pebbled shore\u201d), 73 (\u201cThat time of year thou mayst in me behold\u201d), 106 (\u201cWhen in the chronicle of wasted time\u201d), 107 (\u201cNot mine own fears nor the prophetic soul\u201d), 116 (\u201cLet me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments\u201d), 129 (\u201cTh\u2019 expense of spirit in a waste of shame\u201d), 130 (\u201cMy mistress\u2019 eyes are nothing like the sun\u201d), 138 (\u201cWhen my love swears that she is made of truth\u201d), 144 (\u201cTwo loves I have, of comfort and despair\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Selected Sonnets<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sonnets 1-126, Sonnets to\/about the Fair Young Man<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sonnets 3-17, Sonnets of Procreation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sonnet 15, \u201cWhen I consider everything that grows.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s 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<\/em> doing so. The basic threat to the young man\u2019s (and the poet\u2019s) happiness is the former\u2019s selfishness and lack of knowledge, which leads him to withhold making \u201ccopies\u201d of himself for others to enjoy, in spite of time\u2019s passage and the decay it brings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The botanical frame is set up in the first quatrain, with metaphors of the stage and the heavens or \u201csky\u201d figuring as well. As the second quatrain goes on to explain, even as a plant, driven by the operation of \u201cthe stars in secret influence,\u201d perfects and then begins to decay, so do human beings\u2014even the fair young man\u2014until their health and beauty are forgotten. This prospect, the speaker continues in the third quatrain, heightens his sense of the beloved youth\u2019s perfection and of the \u201cdebate\u201d taking place between Time and Decay, with the subject probably being the pace<\/em> of ruin, not whether that ruin or deliquescence should occur at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final couplet brings into play the often-cited horticultural practice of \u201cengrafting\u201d 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, \u201call in war with Time for love of you, \/ As he takes from you, I engraft you new.\u201d Time\u2019s passage is allied with natural process, which can only bring the young man to decay, but the poet\u2019s way of engrafting him\u2014writing a poem or series of poems\u2014apparently stands a better chance of bestowing a kind of immortality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, this bold claim shouldn\u2019t obscure Sonnet 17\u2019s true confession that follows Sonnet 15\u2019s promise to \u201cingraft\u201d the young man anew in art, and precedes the sonnets that go on to offer poetic immortality. Perhaps writing alone can\u2019t<\/em> guarantee immortality\u2014it needs the supplement of reality itself, which raises the possibility that the ancient mistrust of writing voiced by Plato in the Phaedrus<\/em> is true.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

18, 20, 30 Sonnets of Aesthetic Recuperation<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Sonnet 18<\/strong> (\u201cShall I compare thee to a summer\u2019s day?\u201d) [Folger pg. 55]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cShall I compare thee to a summer\u2019s day?\u201d 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\u2019s writing will recuperate and preserve the wondrous qualities he has been describing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We recognize that the poet here repurposes the ancient conception of the seasons to endow the young man\u2019s handsomeness with immortality: each and every year, we see spring give way to summer, summer to autumn, and autumn to winter and death\u2014but as the speaker says to the young man, \u201cthy eternal summer shall not fade.\u201d Death will not cast its long shadow over the youth\u2019s life and vigor, which art will translate to a heavenly ideal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the essence of this recuperative move: artistic creation replaces physical, material procreation,<\/em> issuing in a grand promise of immortality that even one\u2019s progeny can\u2019t give. After all, by Shakespeare\u2019s day, how many great houses have bred themselves into oblivion?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Vendler says, the \u201ccouplet tie\u201d in Sonnet 18 consists in I\/eye(s). There\u2019s 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\u2019s poet-speaker in \u201cSailing to Byzantium\u201d seeking eternity by disappearing into a work of art: this is what it means to be delivered into \u201cthe artifice of eternity.\u201d [5]<\/a> Such immortality will be directly granted only to the youth, but implicitly, the poet will enjoy it as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Sonnet 30 (\u201cWhen to the sessions of sweet silent thought\u201d) [Folger pg. 79]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This isn\u2019t a sonnet in which the speaker is bowled over unawares by fresh grief or sorrows\u2014in the third quatrain, he says that he pursues a regimen of summoning up<\/em> past woes, bringing them to mind and bewailing them anew; he can \u201ctell o\u2019er \/ The sad account of fore-bemoan\u00e8d moan.\u201d That narratival goal seems to be the purpose of the exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The passion so recalled is not merely fake or aestheticized passion. Shakespeare\u2019s formulation may remind us of Wordsworth\u2019s \u201cPreface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800,<\/em>\u201d in which the author tells us the following about how poetic composition begins:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2026 [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]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Each of Sonnet 30\u2019s three quatrains gives us some aspect of this grief-revivifying process. But when we get to the couplet, Shakespeare\u2019s speaker says, in thinking of the fair young man, \u201cBut if the while I think on thee, dear friend, \/ All losses are restored and sorrows end.\u201d How impressive a claim should we consider this abrupt turnaround, this volta?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We might take the word \u201crestored\u201d 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 \u201cmake good,\u201d or \u201crecuperate.\u201d When you lose money, you hope to be made whole for your losses, fully compensated. The second meaning of \u201crestored\u201d could be \u201cput back in its original place.\u201d When you use a relatively full jar of honey, you can then put it back in its place in the cupboard. The honey doesn\u2019t go away, unless you decide never to use it again. The same is true with regard to woes and sorrows, I suppose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a \u201csweetness\u201d to the \u201csilent thought\u201d that precedes the speaker\u2019s summoning of old woes. Is this \u201csilent thought\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the ending couplet, the speaker is saying that the thought of the \u201cdear friend\u201d 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\u2019s past. For a time, he thinks like a young man, as if he has been restored to the days of his youth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Other Sonnets, Mostly Philosophical<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Sonnet 55 (\u201cNot marble, nor the gilded monuments \/ Of Princes\u201d) [Folger pg. 129]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sonnet 55 is among the most beloved in the cycle, with its magnificent\u2014one wants to say \u201cmonumental\u201d\u2014claim in the first quatrain that the poet\u2019s verse will outlast all other ways of memorializing a beloved person. The power of the love that the speaker\u2019s 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\u2019s procession of violent acts and pitiless forgettings, even the grandest marble monument winds up, says the speaker, \u201cbesmeared with sluttish time.\u201d In the end, a funeral monument mostly reminds us of the deadness of the mortal person it memorializes. (Still, Siste, viator!<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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,<\/em> \u201cBooks 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.\u201d [7]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the way it seems with the present sonnet: it sends forth something of both the poet\u2019s and the young man\u2019s spirit and excellence, so the poet can say, \u201cYou live in this [verse], and dwell in lovers\u2019 eyes.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Sonnet 60 (\u201cLike as the waves make towards the pebbled shore\u201d) [Folger pg. 139]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vendler is surely right to suggest that this remarkable sonnet\u2019s quatrains develop something like a tragic view of life, a view the poet opposes with the hope that his own verses will \u201cstand\u201d 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, \u201cSo do our minutes hasten to their end.\u201d The fair young man, and we, and the poet will all die one day, and nature seems impatient\u2014monotony notwithstanding\u2014to be done with us and let others take our place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s the stuff of the well-known moral stories in the Mirror for Magistrates. <\/em> [8]<\/a> Allegorized as \u201cNativity,\u201d the child \u201cCrawls to maturity\u201d and is \u201ccrowned.\u201d But just at that point, the heavens turn malign: \u201cCrooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight, \/ And time that gave, doth now his gift confound.\u201d These \u201ceclipses\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, as the third quatrain admits, the \u201cscythe\u201d of material nature mows down all things before it. But the couplet, in a sharp volta,<\/em> announces the by-now familiar hope that the poet\u2019s \u201cverse shall stand\u201d to praise the young man\u2019s worth, whatever time, or nature, or any destructive power may do. The iteration of the poet\u2019s own \u201csequent toil\u201d puts up a counter-force that will \u201cstand\u201d the intentional<\/em> and malicious ravages of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even so, it\u2019s worth suggesting that in this sonnet, as with a number of others in the present cycle, no magic<\/em> is claimed for poetry: all its repetition can do is endow future generations of lovers with an ideal<\/em> and a stronger sense that they, like those who came before them, will \u201chave their day and cease to be\u201d (a fine line from Tennyson\u2019s In Memoriam A.H.H.<\/em>), so as always, carpe diem<\/em> is the phrase to know and live by. Sonnets 63 and 65 will continue the debate about poetry\u2019s promise to idealize, and thus to immortalize, after a fashion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s control. In Sonnet 65, the couplet\u2019s assertion of hope seems a little tenuous: the poet will wish that \u201cin black inck my love may still shine bright.\u201d  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Sonnet 73 (\u201cThat time of year thou mayst in me behold\u201d) [Folger pg. 165]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s twilight and \u201cblack night\u201d (second quatrain), and the glowing of an almost extinguished fire, almost out of fuel (third quatrain).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first quatrain\u2019s \u201cBare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang\u201d is a particularly moving figure, as its singing-bird reference may allude to the speaker\u2019s own poetic capacity, which he apparently fears will soon desert him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the final couplet, the speaker\u2019s 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\u2019s gone, so he should, if he\u2019s wise, show his affection now. It\u2019s interesting to note that the speaker doesn\u2019t suggest that he<\/em> will soon be leaving, but rather that the fair youth will be leaving him,<\/em> the sense of which remains somewhat indeterminate: the youth should, says the older speaker, \u201clove that well which thou must leave ere long.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sonnet 106 (\u201cWhen in the chronicle of wasted time\u201d) [Folger pg. 231]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cpraise of ladies dead, and lovely knights,\u201d asserts the poet-speaker, have been folded into the excellence and beauty of the fair young man.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I agree with Vendler that the most sensible reading of lines 11-12 in the third quatrain, \u201cAnd for they look\u2019d but with divining eyes, \/ They had not still enough your worth to sing,\u201d is to emend \u201cstill\u201d to \u201cskill\u201d and interpret the two lines as meaning, \u201cearlier artists could only prefigure you so well because they were inspired, like the prophets in the scriptures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The trouble is, as the couplet points out, that present-day poets don\u2019t have the necessary skills even to do more than \u201cwonder\u201d\u2014that is, they \u201clack tongues to praise.\u201d Wonder is usually a good state of mind to be in when we deal with Shakespeare (especially in his romance plays); it\u2019s a state of being to which extraordinary events open the souls of certain worthy characters. Here in Sonnet 106, \u201cwonder\u201d is still a good thing, but what\u2019s lacking is the rhetorical ability to express what is felt. In early modern times, the literary arts were classed as allied to rhetoric.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Sonnet 107 (\u201cNot mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul\u201d) [Folger pg. 233]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this confident sonnet, the poet\u2019s love seems to exceed all limits individual (\u201cmine own fears\u201d) and social (\u201cthe prophetic soul \/ Of the wide world\u201d). The speaker claims that death now \u201csubscribes\u201d to him, or obeys him and that his verses will endow him with immortality: \u201cI\u2019ll live in this poor rhyme.\u201d The couplet brings in the fair young man, who is told, \u201cthou in this [verse] shalt find thy monument, \/ When tyrants\u2019 crests and tombs of brass are spent.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Sonnet 116 (\u201cLet me not to the marriage of true minds \/ Admit impediments\u201d) [Folger pg. 251]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is an impersonal sonnet\u2014the fair young man is not mentioned\u2014and as Vendler says, it reads as dramatic refutation, not definition. Refutation, that is, of a claim such as, \u201ctrue love requires perfect reciprocity; you can\u2019t love someone who wrongs or slights you.\u201d Instead, the poet asserts, love is like a pole star by which we may navigate through our lives. This profound feeling \u201cbears it out even to the edge of doom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The poem\u2019s rhetorical structure, says Vendler, is \u201cLove is not X, but rather Y.\u201d The phrase \u201cTime\u2019s fool\u201d is important, as it is the precursor of the same language in Sonnet 124, in which the phrase \u201cfools of time\u201d appears. In the present sonnet, the lines run, \u201cLove\u2019s not Time\u2019s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks \/ Within his bending sickle\u2019s  compass come.\u201d Love may be in some sense subject to time\u2019s ravages, but it is not a dupe<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From block 127-52, Dark Lady Sonnets.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Assigned: 129, 130, 138, 144.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Sonnet 129<\/strong> (\u201cTh\u2019 expense of spirit in a waste of shame\u201d) [Folger pg. 279]<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This \u201cdark lady\u201d 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, \u201cdark\u201d sexuality to smash idols and ideals. For better or worse, the speaker suggests, this activity elicits\u2014both prospectively and retrospectively\u2014emotions almost as stark and strong as does the activity itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vendler asks the right question about how to interpret Sonne 129, with its \u201csubmission to lust\u201d: she asks, should we read it as structured \u201cpassionally and chronologically\u2014just as it sequentially happened from initial excitement to shame and analysis\u2014or analytically and retrospectively, as one looks back on that submission in later evaluation\u201d (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\u2019s as if the power of the feeling being explored reawakens the feeling itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2014that\u2019s hardly news. But knowledge doesn\u2019t always lead to wisdom, so sex tends to strip us even of the dignity of the tragic vision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One other thing: the couplet reads, \u201cAll this the world well knows, yet none knows well, \/ To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.\u201d Should we take the word \u201cmen\u201d 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\u2019s \u201cdark lady\u201d is made out to be a seductress. In Sonnets 131-132, the poet\u2019s defense of his lover\u2019s dark complexion and eyes continues his self-defense for submitting to his lust for her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sonnet 130 (\u201cMy Mistress\u2019 eyes are nothing like the sun\u201d)<\/strong> [Folger pg. 281]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s hard to see how to pull it off. The sonnet reads as a stand-alone sendup of the \u201cPetrarchan lady\u201d ideal. [9]<\/a> By Shakespeare\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, not our<\/em> speaker\u2019s 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<\/em> or turnabout: \u201cAnd yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare \/ As any she belied with false compare.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The pronoun \u201cshe\u201d should be treated as an eccentric noun meaning \u201cany woman.\u201d In other words, the woman isn\u2019t doing the comparing; others are making comparisons about her and thus misrepresenting her. So the final couplet in more prosaic form would run, \u201c\u2026 I think my love as rare \/ As any woman flattered by false claims about her beauty.\u201d In spite of her not<\/em> being up to the impossible Petrarchan lady standard\u2014who really is,<\/em> anyway?\u2014the lady has sufficient charms to endear her to her male companion, the speaker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Sonnet 138<\/strong> (\u201cWhen my love swears that she is made of truth\u201d) [Folger pg. 297]<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This sonnet ends comically with, \u201cin our faults by lies we flattered be.\u201d The poem may seem less comical when we consider the \u201cdark lady\u201d matrix in which it is embedded, but it reads as fully detachable and comic in spirit: love and full truth don\u2019t mix. Shakespeare won\u2019t condemn artifice except when it\u2019s the handmaid of grasping selfishness and cruelty. Rhetorical artifice, he suggests, is sometimes entirely necessary in a relationship. As we all know, \u201csimple truth\u201d can be needlessly destructive. If your partner asks, \u201cDoes this horizontally striped dress make me look heavier? Or, \u201cDo I look as old as I am today?\u201d the answer had better be NO!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One question we might ask as we read through Sonnet 138\u2019s catalog of deceptions and false-speakings is, does either partner believe any<\/em> of these things? The older man acts as if he believes his mistress even though he knows she is lying, so that<\/em> she might think him young and untutored, right? But does she actually believe that? Does it even matter?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a sense in which the speaker\u2019s logic resembles the 1984-<\/em>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,<\/em> 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, \u201cI do believe her though I know she lies\u201d?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The couplet is a true classic: \u201cI lie with her and she with me, \/ And in our faults by lies we flattered be.\u201d By \u201clie\u201d and \u201clies,\u201d of course, the speaker means both \u201ctell lies\u201d and \u201clie with.\u201d To put it simply, telling lies makes it easier to \u201cget laid.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

*Sonnet 144<\/strong> (\u201cTwo loves I have of comfort and despair\u201d) [Folger pg. 309]<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This sonnet shows the speaker feeling trapped in a triangle, in which \u201cThe better angel is a man right fair\u201d and \u201cThe worser spirit a woman colored ill.\u201d It seems that by the poem\u2019s end, as Vendler suggests, \u201cwe infer the friend<\/em> has indeed turned fiend<\/em>\u201d (144) since, as the couplet admits, the speaker hopes that his \u201cbad angel [may] fire my good one out.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oscar Wilde\u2019s romantic interest Lord Alfred Douglas would later take inspiration from the sonnet\u2019s title line, writing a poem called \u201cTwo Loves,\u201d which ends notoriously, \u201cI am the love that dare not speak its name.\u201d [10]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cled us into the wilderness and left us there.\u201d 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\u2019s happening, yet unable to make it right. No resolution is achieved as the last declarations of love and acts betrayal unfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final two Sonnets, 153-154 (the \u201cCupid Block\u201d), 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<\/em> be so treated, that poetry need not only add<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We know that in tragedy, if we are talking about tragic paths and outcomes, the strict answer is \u201cno,\u201d 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\u2019s strife for a while? What does it mean if we, the readers or the audience, say along with Puck in A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em> as he surveys the humans\u2019 love-strife,<\/em> \u201cLord, what fools these mortals be!\u201d [11]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/a> References to \u201cVendler\u201d refer to comments by Helen Vendler in her excellent edition of the sonnets The Art of Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnets<\/a><\/em> (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\u2019ve tidied up some of the conventions for easier reading\u2014for example, I don\u2019t spell modern \u201cv\u201d with a \u201cu\u201d or use the long \u201cs\u201d that contemporary readers often find confounding. To view a facsimile copy of the 1609 Quarto, visit \u201cShakspere\u2019s Sonnets, The First Quarto, 1609<\/a>\u201d (Internet Archive). See also Neil L. Rudenstine\u2019s Ideas of Order: A Close Reading of Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnets.<\/em> Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015. ISBN-13: 978-0374535735.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2]<\/a> Wilde, Oscar. \u201cThe Portrait of Mr. W. H.<\/a>\u201d (Gutenberg E-Texts).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3]<\/a> Matz, Robert. \u201cThe Scandals of Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnets.\u201d ELH<\/em>, vol. 77, no. 2, 2010, pp. 477\u2013508.\u00a0JSTOR<\/em>, http:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/40664640<\/a>. Accessed 3 June 2026. You can view this article with a free JSTOR account. The citation for de Grazia\u2019s essay is Margreta de Grazia, “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Shakespeare Survey 46 (1993): 49.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[4]<\/a> Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. \u201cAll the Sonnets of Shakespeare<\/a>.\u201d 9 Sept. 2020. Accessed 6\/2\/2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[5]<\/a> Yeats, William Butler. \u201cSailing to Byzantium<\/a>.\u201d Poetry Foundation. Accessed 6\/2\/2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[6]<\/a> Wordsworth, William. \u201cPreface to Lyrical Ballads, 1800<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>\u201d Gutenberg e-texts. Accessed 6\/3\/2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[7]<\/a> Milton, John. \u201cAreopagitica<\/a>.\u201d The Milton Reading Room. Accessed 6\/3\/2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[8]<\/a> See The Mirror for Magistrates<\/a>.<\/em> HathiTrust. Accessed 6\/3\/2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[9]<\/a> Petrarch\u2019s Sonnet 90<\/a> in his Canzoniere<\/em> is a good poem for comparison since it contains lines such as \u201cHer way of moving was no mortal thing\u201d (\u201cNon era l\u2019andar suo cosa mortale\u201d). This poem also demonstrates that Petrarch is far more sophisticated than his parodists allow\u2014he laments that the etherial beauty he\u2019s describing is now a thing of the past. Trans. A. S. Kline. At petrarch.petersadler.com. Accessed 6\/3\/2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[10]<\/a> Douglas, Lord Alfred. \u201cTwo Loves<\/a>.\u201d Poets.org. Accessed 6\/3\/2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[11]<\/a> Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream.<\/em> 3.2.117<\/a>. Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed 6\/3\/2026.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copyright \u00a9 2026 Alfred J. Drake<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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