Whether or not the pronoun "I" is explicitly present in their individual texts, all of the 154 verse pieces that comprise Shakespeare's sonnets are presumably narrated by a single persona. The narrator of the sonnets has a distinctive character and appears to partake in an ongoing story that revolves around his Platonic relationship to a "fair youth" and is later complicated by his carnal relationship with a "dark lady." Although the pendulum has swung back and forth over centuries of interpretation, throughout the history of Shakespeare sonnet criticism we find a deep division between critics who presume that there is an autobiographical basis to these poems and those holding that the narrator is a fictional device. The former are encouraged in their identification of the narrator as the poet himself by the fact that the sonnets are the only work in which Shakespeare wrote in the first person singular. Beyond this, however, the collective evidence that it is Shakespeare himself speaking about his own actual life in the sonnets is purely circumstantial and internally inconsistent. The predominant (but not universal) opinion among modern Shakespeare scholars is that the sonnets are to be read apart from their creator's biography. Nevertheless, the issue here has not been conclusively settled, the autobiographical thesis is intriguing and a brief consideration of the "I" problem in the Sonnets furnishes us with insight as to how they have been presented and read over the ages.

While they were first published as Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609, it is fairly well established that this set of 154 poems was written in its entirety by Shakespeare during an early period in his career, probably over a succession of years between 1592 and 1598. The Shakespeare who wrote the Sonnets would therefore be a relatively young man in his late twenties or early thirties, having already written and staged a few plays, but turning to verse for the private enjoyment of private patrons as a means of cashing in on the sonnet fad that swept through the Elizabethan court in the 1590s. It is the claim of those who identify Shakespeare as the narrator "I" of the sonnets that actual persons and events from this period in the Bard's life are represented in these poems. Working on that premise, many scholars have sought to identify the "fair youth" addressed in the first 126 sonnets, the "dark lady" addressed in the following 28 (or 26) sonnets, and the "rival poet" to whom periodic references are made in the "fair youth" poems. Shakespeare himself left but a single clue in a cryptic dedication of the 1609 collection to a "Mr. W. H." (although there is some doubt about the authenticity of even this slight inscription). On the basis of this fragment, ingenious efforts have been made to "find" the presumed patron of the Sonnets among Shakespeare's contemporaries, William Herbert (the Earl of Pembroke) and Henry Wriothesley (the Earl of Southampton) being the prime candidates. Affirmations concerning a possible relationship between Shakespeare and one of these noblemen have been sought from biographies and other records of these men, particularly Southampton, but the correspondences are not clear enough or strong enough to justify equating any historical person with the young man of the Sonnets. On even thinner bases, similar labors have been devoted to discovering the respective real identities of the "dark lady" and the "rival poet." From a complementary angle, scholars have looked to the text of the Sonnets for allusions to current events of the 1590s, constructing elaborate arguments to sketch out historical parallels. These too have fallen well short of proof. When the early twentieth-century Shakespeare scholar Edmund K. Chambers stated, "more folly has been written about the Sonnets than about any other Shakespearean topic," he undoubtedly had these autobiographical endeavors in mind.

As for Shakespeare himself, he left no autobiography, diary or personal record of his life, nor did any of his contemporaries provide any first-hand account of it, the first comprehensive life of Shakespeare being written more than one hundred and fifty years after his death. Anecdotes and oral traditions, deductions from historical chronicles, and occasional traces of what may be autobiographical allusions in his plays have helped to flesh out Shakespeare's life, but sharp disputes persist among historians over the validity of many these details.

Turning to the sonnets themselves, the most direct (but still suspect) connection between Shakespeare and the narrative persona occurs in Sonnets 135 and 136, both of which include the italicized word/name "Will" at multiple points, the latter concluding "for my name is Will." Some scholars have detected poetic allusions to historical persons and events in the Sonnets. Thus, for example, the narrator's reference to the "mortal moon" in line 5 of Sonnet 107 is taken by many scholars as an allusion to Queen Elizabeth, England's monarch in the 1590s who was associated with the virgin moon goddess Diana, with lines 5 through 8 of this piece poetically describing affairs of state in the later part of her reign. These are, however, mere shards in support of the assertion that Shakespeare is writing about his own life in the Sonnets.

The strongest (but far less) direct textual evidence for identifying the narrator of the sonnets with Shakespeare is vocational. Shakespeare was a poet; the narrator is a poet; poetry is a primary subject in more than two dozen of the sonnets. We know further that, like all Elizabethan poets, Shakespeare produced his non-dramatic verse for private patrons and was in competition with other talented artists for personal financial sponsorship and "affection." These same general circumstances are described by the narrator as his own, for he depends on the "fair youth" for support and frequently mentions vying with his rival. Moreover, the sonnets contain many references to the stage at large and the Elizabethan theater in particular, most notably in Sonnets 110, 111, and 112, where the narrator admits that he has gone to the theater and appeared as an actor on its stage.

Beyond this, there is the story that seems to unfold off-stage. It appears to have a cohesive plot that is partially summarized in Sonnet 144. The plot is thinly reflected in the tandem sonnet cycles, but its broad outlines are plausibly realistic. As some scholars have suggested, if this running story line was purely fictional, Shakespeare would have made it more coherent and dramatic. Thus the omissions, vagaries and absence of clear-cut turning points in the plot are taken by proponents of the autobiographical school as indirect support for their stance that Shakespeare and the narrator of the sonnets are one and the same. On the other hand, we know with a high degree of confidence that Shakespeare had not yet reached middle age when he composed the sonnets, while the narrator of the sonnets seems to be a significantly older person in the autumn of his years.

Allowing that the issue of whether Shakespeare is the narrator of the sonnets or even referring to facets of his life through the narrator aside, we know that it was during the Romantic Age of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that critics first became preoccupied with an autobiographical "I." Thus, the Romantic poet William Wordsworth expressed the predominate view of the Sonnets during his lifetime, that here "Shakespeare unlocked his heart." It was in 1780 that Edmund Malone published the first edition of the Sonnets complete with notes in which he encouraged his readers to approach these poems as self-representations. The eighteenth century was a period in which diaries, journals, and letters were highly popular literary forms, readers being interested in texts reflecting the lives of their authors. This focus spilled over into Shakespeare scholarship, and the working presumption was that the narrator and the author of the sonnets shared an identity.

But by the mid-point of the nineteenth century, the tide turned against autobiographical readings of the Sonnets, and it did so largely on moral grounds. The Sonnets make reference to a number of acts that the Victorians found offensive, including adultery, perjury, and (possible) homosexuality—the narrator acknowledging in Sonnet 112, for example, that his own brow is stamped with "vulgar scandal." Not only did the suggestion that Shakespeare himself was involved in such transgressions offensive to moralistic Victorians, it was at odds with the literary historian James Boswell's assertion about Shakespeare that "at no time was the slightest imputation cast upon his moral character." More broadly, the received image of Shakespeare's character was that of a gentle, benevolent man, while the narrator of the sonnets exhibits an array of ugly traits, from self-pity to envy. Nineteenth century Shakespeare critics separated the author from the text of the Sonnets, reading them as literary exercises and philosophical discourses.

Today, while the vestiges of debate remain (and there are still attempts to prove an autobiographical basis for the sonnets), the issue has been subordinated altogether. The tendency of modern Shakespeare criticism, as with modern literary interpretation as a whole, is to view the Sonnets as a text that exists independently of its author. The regnant approach is to focus on how the formal and semantic properties of the sonnets are designed to evoke a response from the reader, with the reader supplying (or even creating) the core meaning of the text. From this perspective, the question of whether the narrator is in any way or to any extent Shakespeare writing behind the mask of a fictional persona is essentially irrelevant.

Many modern readers are surprised by the difficulty that they encounter in trying to understand Shakespeare's sonnets. The sonnets are, of course, short poems composed in standard fourteen-line form with a uniform rhyme pattern and in a poetic meter (iambic pentameter) that mirrors conversational English. Granted, there are some archaic words and phrases embedded in Shakespeare's sonnets, but most editions include explanatory notes that provide definitions and synonyms. It would seem, then, that these brief pieces would be relatively easy to comprehend and explain. Nevertheless, those who come to these verses for the first time are likely to be perplexed; even after several readings, the sonnets may prove hard. This is not necessarily the result of any shortcoming on the reader's part. Rather, his or her sense of not getting what a Shakespeare sonnet is "about" often stems from approaching its text with certain preconceptions that must be modified or jettisoned altogether.

Shakespeare did not invent the sonnet form, and by the time that he took it up, the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet had evolved into an instrument of logic and rhetoric. The Italian sonnets present the reader with a cohesive argument: its first two quatrains (eight lines) pose a problem or issue, the third quatrain provides a solution to that issue, the closing couplet reiterates the solution in figurative language. This is not the case with Shakespeare's handling of the sonnet. One of the most common mistakes made by new readers of his sonnets is the presumption that they are logical vehicles through which Shakespeare presents a cogent expression of certain ideas. True, in some cases, the Shakespearean sonnet may seem to approximate an argument or debate. But not only does Shakespeare deliberately depart from the Italian model's rhetorical structure, modern critics maintain his purpose is not to convey thoughts but instead to evoke an emotional response, a mood, from the reader. In attempting to grasp a Shakespeare sonnet, the reader must be aware that there is no correct answer as to what it means, but rather a range of possible responses from the reader. The sonnets have musical qualities, with the tempo of the piece and the sounds of its words being as significant as the content they denote.

Part and parcel with their lack of logical specificity, in virtually all of the Sonnets the reader finds what Stephen Booth terms "constructive vagueness." Along with straightforward, even conversational statements, the sonnets include generalized epithets, indeterminate signifiers and floating referents, with an adjective in one portion of the verse naturally modifying a noun in another quatrain of that poem. The sonnets contain an inordinately high incidence of demonstrative pronouns ("this" and "that"), which appear to refer to some "thing" (the narrator's love, for example, or the sonnet itself), but that "thing" may well have gone through poetic transformations before and/or after the appearance of the pronoun. Thus, in the sonnets about the power of poetry to overcome human mortality when the narrator says that "this" will ensure that his lover's memory will transcend the grave, the "this" in question is the sonnet before us and, at the same time, the thought which follows. Impersonal pronouns are used in the sonnets in a similar manner. As Booth observes, in Sonnet 124, Shakespeare uses the word "It" five times. While the word "it" refers to something hard and concrete, it is also imprecise and general, potentially capable of referring to anything. On each occasion, moreover, Shakespeare qualifies the word "it" with subjective adjectives and, in some cases, with negations. The language of the sonnets, then, is purposely ambiguous and multivalent: we can never "pin down" any line to a specific meaning.

Many of the sonnets contain one or more implicit or explicit conditional clauses. "If" something is true, the narrator will assert, then something else must also be true. But "if" we do not accept such contingencies, then the logical relationship collapses. Thus, in the famous Sonnet 116, if the reader refuses to accept the narrator's condition that he or she should not consider that there may be "impediments" to the marriage of true minds, then the statement that "Love is not Time's fool" is called into question. On occasion, Shakespeare seems to explicitly remind us of the conditionality involved in the narrator's conclusions. In Sonnet 65, for example, the narrator concludes that his words (written in black ink) might endure and keep his feelings toward his beloved from evaporating under the grinding power of time, and this directs the reader to the possibility that they "might" not endure. Some of the narrator's claims, moreover, are difficult for the reader to believe. This is especially true of the "compensation" sonnets in which the narrator tells us that his love for the fair youth is so powerful that it overcomes all of his personal deficiencies and discontents, including his sorrow over the deaths of other loved ones. No matter how great the narrator's love may be, the notion that it makes up for such losses is hard to swallow.

The narrator, moreover, is not merely a disinterested, objective voice. He is a character trying to persuade, even manipulate, the person to whom his sonnets are addressed. We cannot take him at his word. The narrator is aware of the contradictions in his attitude toward his beloved. Thus, in Sonnet 35, he speaks of both his "love" and his "hate" toward the young man. From time to time, we wonder why the narrator is so infatuated with the fair youth. He insists that his love is purely Platonic, but his focus is not on the young man's outstanding character or intellectual abilities, but upon his physical beauty. Indeed, we learn very little about the young man from the 126 sonnets addressed to him other than that he is physically attractive, younger than the narrator, and of a social status that is higher than that of the narrator. His character, moreover, seems to be that of a fickle, narcissistic and self-absorbed youth. The narrator appears to repress strong erotic feelings toward the young man by praising him for qualities that the fair youth simply does not possess. The narrator insists that his love is chaste, but there is a strong undercurrent of passion and, in fact, guilt. Irony and repression abound in the sonnets.

The dominant world-view of Shakespeare's age was a mixture of Christian belief and neo-Platonic philosophy. The narrator participates in this cultural tradition, but he also undermines its central planks. His carnal attraction toward the youth's beauty (to say nothing of the dark lady's wiles) is at odds with neo-Platonic ideals. His suggestion that all beauty and truth will perish when his beloved dies would be the equivalent of blasphemy to the genuine neo-Platonic thinkers of his day for whom such abstractions existed on a higher plane independent of their manifestation in particular cases (or persons). The immortality of which the narrator speaks does not rest on the existence of a neo-Platonic realm or of a Christian heaven. There are some Christian allusions in the sonnets, but they are comparatively rare, and, in fact, irreverent. Sonnet 4 includes an allusion to the parable of the talents from the Gospel of Matthew, there is a reference to the Christian belief in resurrection (Sonnet 55), and the narrator speaks of "my heaven" in Sonnet 110. But there are also prominent parodies of Christian belief. Sonnet 105 contains a parody of the Anglican doxology ("To one, of one, still such, and ever so")." In Sonnet 121, the narrator proclaims, "I am that I am," echoing Jehovah's self-assertion in the Old Testament Book of Exodus (3:14) with the heretical inference that the narrator is God himself. In short, the narrator does not have a conventional, consistent ideology, but is given the usurping elements from the belief systems of Elizabethan times and twisting them to his purpose.

Rather than try to logically analyze the sonnets, the reader would be better served by attempting to identify the feelings that they evoke from him or her and relating those responses to the properties of the text, to its sounds and image clusters, its variable tempo, its departures from logical and rhetorical conventions. Modern critics of Shakespeare's sonnets generally maintain that their meaning has less to do with the narrator's (or even the poet's) purposes than it does in describing a mood or an emotional experience to which the reader can relate.

In all likelihood, Shakespeare wrote the 154 verse pieces that constitute his Sonnets at an early juncture in his career, and after 1598 or so, he abandoned both the sonnet form and the composition of non-dramatic poetry. Shakespeare's motives in engaging in this genre at a time when he had already written several plays was undoubtedly related to a short-lived fad in the court of Queen Elizabeth. In 1591, a year or two before Shakespeare began to write sonnets, Sir Philip Sydney's Astrophel and Stella sonnet cycle was first published, and its immediate popularity among Elizabethan aristocrats inaugurated a vogue that many other poets tried to exploit. In short order, Samuel Daniel (Delia, 1592), Michael Drayton (Ideas Mirrour, 1594) and Edmund Spenser (Amoretti, 1595) authored sonnet cycles.

By the time that Shakespeare's Sonnets was published in 1609, however, and probably years before, the enthusiasm of courtly patrons for sonnet cycles had evaporated. By then, Shakespeare had established his renown as a dramatist and dedicated his artistic labor exclusively to the theater. Modern readers may find it surprising that Shakespeare's Sonnets were not popular during the seventeenth or the early eighteenth centuries. The sonnets were not included in the authoritative First Folio of 1623 published after Shakespeare's death. There are very few allusions to Shakespeare having every written sonnets during the century after his death. In fact, the sonnets were not incorporated into Shakespeare's official canon until 1790.

In 1640, a spurious edition of Shakespeare's sonnets was published by John Burton under the title of Poems: Written by Wil. Shake-speare. Gent. For the next 140 years, it was Burton's version of the sonnets that was in circulation and treated as the official text. But Burton made some key changes to Shakespeare's original. Rather than 154 verse pieces, Burton's edition lumps together sets of two to five sonnets in synthetic poems that are much longer than their composite originals and, as such, are at total variance from the standard fourteen-line model. This, in itself, strongly suggests that the English court no longer wanted sonnets (or sonnet cycles) but extended verse pieces. Burton eliminated the number sequence from the 1609 version and inserted descriptive titles couched in the generalized third person, such as "Complaint for His Love's Absence." These emendations indicate that tastes had changed dramatically since Shakespeare's time.

Within the sonnets themselves, the narrator gives us cause to believe that the fair youth is his patron. The narrator alternatively expresses confidence in the constancy of the young man's emotional (and financial) support and complains about the efforts of a rival to woo the fair youth's sponsorship. In the early 1590s, Shakespeare himself faced a similar quandary. His career in the theater had not yet reached the stage at which he could rely solely on ticket sales to the public at large for his livelihood. In all probability, it was for the purpose of garnering supplemental funds that Shakespeare wrote his sonnets, essentially cashing in on the popularity of the form among wealthy devotees of the arts. Once this fad had passed, Shakespeare no longer required direct financial assistance. As a prominent playwright and producer, his main source of income was far less vulnerable than the patronage of a handful of rich patrons. Commercial considerations probably motivated Shakespeare to take up sonnet writing in the first place; financial independence enabled him to abandon a literary craft with a thin and unpredictable funding base.

There is, however, another reason why the Bard turned his back on the composition of sonnets. Shakespeare's sonnets differ radically from those of his predecessors and his contemporaries. There are no trains of gods or goddesses in his sonnets; Cupid does not make an appearance in these poems; Love, while prominent as a theme, is never personified as a god. Unlike those working in the sonnet tradition, Shakespeare's narrator is not enamored of a proud, chaste lady, the very thought of whom inspires divine thoughts. He addresses an inconstant young man and a sexually experienced dark lady, and neither of them inspires contemplation of the divine. Moreover, the introduction of a "rival poet" into the young man cycle (first mentioned in Sonnet 21) has no parallel in the sonnet tradition as Shakespeare inherited it.

Undercutting both Platonic philosophy and Christian belief, Shakespeare's sonnets are representative of a phenomenon that often occurs when a particular artistic form has been worked for centuries, parody. Filled with irony and ambivalence, they can be read as a "lower-case" lampoon of the "high-minded" sonnets that preceded them. If that is the case, Shakespeare's abandonment of the sonnets may have been motivated by his estimation of them as an artificial form that he abused by introducing vulgar elements. Having punctured the balloon of a pompous form once, there was no need for Shakespeare to use the sonnet anew. In other words, changing markets aside, Shakespeare may have stopped writing sonnets because he never took the form seriously in the first place.

The purpose of this brief essay is to compare two Shakespearean sonnets after Number 36. The two that have been chosen for examination here have been found to be similar in some respects—these similarities will be discussed in detail in the content of the essay. Before discussing the similarities, however, it is necessary to briefly describe what each sonnet is basically about.

All of Shakespeare's sonnets were love poems of some sort, whether they were addressed to men or to women. They were sonnets of unrequited love, by and large; and it was through this particular form of poetry that Shakespeare chose to express his yearning for time that passed too rapidly and for love that did the same. The form was as critical, if not more critical, as the content of each of these sonnets, and so the content of the particular poems, as well as the form, are basic to any discussion of individual or collective sonnets.

Sonnet Number 64 is virtually a cry against the inevitable arrival of all that wears down even the most resilient and masterful powers that might exist in the world. In this sonnet, Shakespeare stresses that even the most sturdy and magnificent monuments of the human spirit and effort are bound to yield to the ravages of time. "When I have seen by Time's fell hand defac'd / The rich proud cost of outworn buried age; / When sometime lofty towers I see down-raz'd / And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;" and so on. It is abundantly clear that the author finds time a formidable enemy, capable of eroding any and every manifestation of man's efforts to persevere. Time also is clearly the enemy to any of the finer aspirations that man might build toward. Naturally, the finer aspirations include lover, and the desire to be with the loved one indefinitely.

In this sonnet, the author finds himself utterly at the mercy of this formidable opponent and is essentially incapable of finding a means of facing Time with any degree of success. He basically abandons the love that he feels because he knows that the love that exists today will necessarily fall victim to the passage of time. There is no difference between the love that is felt deeply by the author and the other remarkable and durable things that exist in the known world. Included in this list are the shores of the sea, and the earth that all men walk upon. There is no question that there is no escape from the ceaseless erosion of time, whether it takes the form of the ocean pounding on the sea, or the water pounding on the earth, or time diluting the power and strength of the human capacity to profess and to live out an enduring love. The only choice that man has in the face of the power of time is the option of simply mourning what has been lost.

The seventy-third sonnet is also about the mournful response of the author to the fact that Time detracts from the process by which man endures and responds to the things that make him feel loved. Shakespeare starts this sonnet with a discussion of the process by which the things that surround man first start to erode and fall as a result of the passing of time. He starts his first comments with a note that the fall lays bare the boughs of the trees, so that the branches stand bare against the setting sun. Some faded yellow leaves may or may not be clinging to the branches, and the image is immediately evoked of a few stragglers who hang onto the promise of life, long after the point where even the promise seems to exist.

In this sonnet, the poet is equating himself to the fate of the leaves, who lie literally upon "the ashes of their youth." He is the one who finds himself lying on the ashes of his own youth, and he finds himself the victim of the passage of time. He cannot sustain the love that he feels and is literally consumed by both time and love, and he was once sustained by these same feelings and qualities. Essentially, he is arguing that the fate of man is to be consumed by the very things that are his life-blood: love and time. "In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire, / That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, / As the death-bed, whereon it must expire / Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by."

The similarities between these two poems are evident even to the casual reader. Basically, they are both about the author's sense of helplessness and loss in the face of the constant erosion and passage of time. The theme of loss, and the recurrent theme of impotence when faced with passing time and its incontrovertible effects, are evident in both poems. However, these are not necessarily sad or defeatist poems. The author does not submit to the passage of time by saying that he simply will not be able to feel or love or even live any more. He is not deeply depressed, to the point of being immobile.

Rather, the poet feels that man must continue to love, and to live, despite the undeniable fact that life will end, and love will eventually subside as time takes over the powers of the human spirit. In this case, in both poems, the human spirit is not quelled at its most strong and persistent time, but rather in the period when it is, inevitably, at its weakest. Since this is the case, the poet is not saying that man must simply not feel the yearning and the loving that have filled the life and the years of the writer. He is saying that man must eventually give in to the effects of time; but that in the time that does exist for man, it is possible to love, and to sustain oneself with that abiding love. Therefore, it is possible to assert that these poems, which sound sad or even lacking in spirit, are actually profoundly affirmative of the impulse toward love and toward life. "This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, / To love that well, which thou must leave ere long."

Actually, both of these poems can be interpreted as encouraging the reader to grasp the fact that love can be sweeter and more enduring if the individual is able to grasp the fact that time will eventually take that love away. Perhaps it is even possible to assert here that, because of the fact that all love is ultimately ephemeral, it is the obligation of the individual to claim his love early and live that love to the fullest extent that is possible. In this sense, each of these poems can be understood to be positive, and life-affirming.

At first reading, it is easy to come to the conclusion that the poems discussed here are sorrowful in tone and negative in their orientation. However, it is up to the reader to go beyond the obvious, to understand that the thrust and the purpose of such a remarkable talent as William Shakespeare was ultimately to celebrate life in all of its myriad manifestations and in all of its contradictions and pain. This notion is not projected onto the content of the poems here; it is the firm opinion of this reader that these poems reflect the author's capacity to embrace all of the various aspects of life, whether they mean suffering or pleasure.

The tone is surely sorrowful when the writer comes face to face with the inevitable; but the fact remains that the inevitable outcome—which is loss and the passage of time—is part of what makes the intensity of love and the quality of life so memorable and so pleasureable.

These two poems were chosen for treatment here because they do not reflect any of the problems or mysteries that many of the sonnets are replete with. The reader felt that it would be unsuitable to posit any hypotheses regarding the nature or the intention of any given poem with a particular story line. The poems that have been treated have a universal quality, where love is at once mourned and celebrated and where time is decried as it is at least understood and accepted. The reader found the poems beautiful and provocative and feels that the reading of such work can only enhance the individual's ability to use and understand the English language better. It is also a marvelous exercise in being exposed to excellence.

The purpose of this essay is to analyze Sonnet #29 by William Shakespeare. The theme of this sonnet is the curative power of love for the man who wallow in miserably destructive self-disdain.

A Shakespearean (or English) sonnet, #29 being no exception, is made up of fourteen, lines arranged in two quatrains and one couplet. The older Petrarchan or Italian sonnet, divided into one octave and one sextet was altered by the English and is named after Shakespeare who used it with such infinite skill. The rhyme scheme of most of Shakespeare's sonnets, #29 included, is abab, odod, efef, and gg, underlining the four sections of the poem.

The meter of the sonnet is by definition iambic pentameter, although as with other elements of the definition, this is not a rigid absolute. If a poet were to continually maintain the same meter, his poetry would be quite dull and in all probability void of any subtleties of expression. Shakespeare, master of verse that he was, does not limit himself to only one metric form in the sonnet in question. There are of course instances of the use of iambic pentameter, as well as certain variations. The following verses are iambic pentameter:

And look upon myself and curse my fate

With what I. moat enjoy contented least

That then I: scorn to change my state with kings

The initial verse is an example of an unusual rhythm. The first word “when”, set off by a comma, is an accented syllable. Followed by three trochees and one anapest, this makes for a varied hexameter.

In analyzing the meaning of this poem and the techniques used to convey it, one should note that the sonnet is one sentence containing five parts. Part one, the first quatrain, presents a person who feels isolated and quite desperate. In the opening verse we find the synecdoche "men’s eyes”, a figure of speech conveying the idea that the poet does not feel that he is presently sitting atop the world. He is hardly well looked upon by his compatriots.

The-alliteration of the second line "all alone", and the assonance “outcast state” manifest skillful poetic techniques. The third line contains the personification of heaven and the rather obviously paradoxical notion that a "deaf heaven" could be troubled by the anguished cries of one man, even though he is a poet.

The second part of this fourteen verse sentence expresses the poet's envy of his fellowman who appears to him to be ever so more successful in dealing with life. He sees others as being endowed with far greater capacities for hope, friendship; others who are more talented and whose range of perceptions, thoughts and actions are greater, so very much greater than his own. The poet's desire, to be like other people, an absurdly impossible desire for the real poet, accentuates his malaise, making it impossible to be contented with what he most enjoys. It can be said that verses four thru nine of sonnet #29 are exemplary of thee psychological acumen for which Shakespeare has been so highly praised. We have only to consider some basic precepts of modern psychology, and cast the most fleeting glance at our own psyches, to realize that today the inferiority complex is a most common ailment.

The resolution of the problem of self-hatred lies naturally in love. The human being, unable to discover his own worth, often is boosted by the attention of someone he admires. The word "haply" in the tenth verse, like "beweep" (v.2) and "bootless” (v.5) an archaic expression, means "by chance". "State", at the end of verse 10, means condition. Versa 11 begins a simile, and the poet's spirit soars and sings like a lark. The simile continues into verse 12 with the two verses being connected by an enjambment.

The couplet contains the complete transformation of the writer's condition. So uplifted is he that the poet suddenly finds himself to be wealthy, more wealthy than a king. The use of the word "state" in the final verse is a play upon words. In this case the word means the chair of state, or the throne of the king.

The poem is the expression of the emotional state of a person, surely a man, who is definitely not at one with himself or with the world. He is envious of others and despises himself. Nevertheless he has managed to win some "sweet love", the mere remembrance of which is enough to draw him out of his despair. He is willing to accept all the painful banalities of his life because love wields enough magic at moments to carry him into a state where he feels richer than a king. Love has given the poet security in his own self, or even more exactly has permitted him to rid himself of his obsession with his self and his inadequacies.

Shakespeare's profound understanding of human nature, and his poetic genius combine to make this poem forever relevant and fascinating.

In Sonnet 18, Sonnet 19, and Sonnet 20, Shakespeare explores a common theme. While the stances which his narrator assumes toward it vary, in each of these verses there is an acknowledgement of the corrosive effects of time, age, and change upon women addressed as lovers; but there is also the recognition of a more constant value, an "inner beauty," lovers addressed, one that outweighs the physical ravages of experience. In the Prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale as in the Wife's Tale itself Geoffrey Chaucer works at a similar theme, for while the Wife displays a sensibility considerably different from that of the narrators in Shakespeare's sonnets, she too arrives at a balanced valorization of transient physical charm and the abiding worth of a mature relationship between wives and their husbands, one in "bothe fair and good" have their proper place.

There is an ironic tone in Sonnet 18, one that suggests a dramatic occasion in which a husband or long-time lover is attempting to assuage his paramour's concerns about the impact of the years upon her attractiveness. Although the narrator carefully inserts the descriptor "lovely" into the second line, it is immediately evident that the female personage to whom the poem is addressed is by now a middle-aged woman, in the summer of her years. From this point on, the reader forms the sense that the narrator has indeed detected some lose of charm in his lover. This impression is reinforced by his use of the word "temperate," implying that his lover's personality has been tempered by experience and is no longer given to the extreme gusts of passion "which do shake the darling buds of May." Moreover, the poem then moves further still into the future by noting that the duration of "summer's lease" will expire, raising the specter of old age awaiting his paramour. Despite the narrator's assurances that he still finds his lover to be physically attractive, the figurative language which he employs here expresses physical corrosion in graphic terms, keeping the reader's mind fixed on the process of physical deterioration and decay.

The narrator brings his piece into an equilibrium in the penultimate line of Sonnet 18, "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see," implying that beauty is, at bottom, a subjective phenomenon which lies in the eyes of the beholder. This theme also surfaces in Sonnet 20, in which we read that the implied female lover of this poem possesses an eye which "gilds" the object which it beholds.

If anything, Sonnet 19 is even more graphic in its portrayal of "devouring time" consuming a lover's physical beauty. Here the gradual erosion of beauty found in Sonnet 18 is replaced by metaphors which revolve around the blows of fierce beasts, with "lion's paws" and the "keen teeth" of the tiger inflicting sharp, visual damage upon the beauty of youth. When the narrator protests: "But I forbid thee one most heinous crime," but then returns to images of bestial mutilation with the word "carve," the reader is aware that mere words cannot stop the march of time. Again, there is a bittersweet resolution which takes on full meaning when seen in light of Sonnet 18. As in that verse, while the narrator asserts that the verse at hand will memorialize the physical beauty of his lover, in making this declaration the narrator ironically fixes the reader's attention on the effects that "old Time" is bound to have.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 20 hinges on the distinction between transient artifice and permanent natural beauty. At the outset, the narrator says to the lover whom he addresses that she has no need of cosmetics to enhance her beauty. Once more, Shakespeare proceeds to underscore the permanence of inner beauty versus the transience of external beauty.

In the Wife of Bath's Tale itself, the theme of age and love is, of course, central to its resolution as the knight confronts the prospect of having sex with the aged crone whose wisdom has spared him execution. In the course of her rejoinder to the knight's aversions concerning her ugliness, poverty, and age, the hag of the Wife of Bath's tale furnishes a tactical defense of age in a wife as a natural safeguard to adultery.

Now ther ye seye that I an foul and old,
Than drede you noght to been a cokewold;
For filthe and elde, al so moot I thee,
Been grete wardeyns upon chastitee.
(ll.357-360).

This proves cold comfort to the knight, yet earlier in the Tale, the crone replies to the knight's protestations over his vow:

For thogh that I be foul, and oold, and poore,
I nolde for al the metal, ne for oore
That under erthe is grave, or lith above,
But if thy wyf I were, and eek they love.
(ll.207-210)

The sense here is considerably closer to the final stance that Chaucer assumes toward the subject of physical beauty in love, that there is a value, too, in the faithful reciprocation of marital fidelity and understanding.

The conclusion of the Wife of Bath's Tale presents the knight with precisely the same cluster of issues which Shakespeare employs in Sonnets 18, 19, and 20. The tension is between the physical beauty of youth, on the one hand, and the "inner beauty" of mutual compassion. The aged crone delineates the dilemma which the Knight must apparently resolve:

To han be foul and old til that I deye,
And be to yow a trewe, humble wyf,
And nevere yow displese in al my lyf;
Or elles ye wol han me yong and fair,
And take youre aventure of the repair
That shal be to youre hous, by cause of me,
Or in som oother place, may wel be.
Now chese yourselven wheither that yow liketh.
(ll.364-371)

In the end, the knight does not elect the "good" over the "fair" but, instead, leaves the ultimate decision to his wife. When the curtain to their bed-chamber opens, the knight finds the ugly old woman whom he married transmuted into a beautiful, young, and loving wife (ll.395).

Had the Wife of Bath been permitted to examine each of the three Shakespearean sonnets under scrutiny, she would have undoubtedly endorsed the resolution of the beauty/love issue put forth by the narrator of Sonnet 20. We can presume that the Wife would have appreciated the sentiments of the narrator in Shakespeare's Sonnet 18. In considering the views of those who replied that women love to be flattered and spoiled, the Wife indicates that this notion has validity, "He gooth ful ny the sothe, I wol nat lye" (l.75). On the other hand, the Wife dismisses the idea that women love to be considered dependable and trustworthy as a "tale is nat worth a rake-stele" (l.93).

Like the narrator of Sonnet 20, and in contrast to the narrators of the two proceeding sonnets, the Wife of Bath does not dismiss human passion as a "good." In the Prologue to her tale, she tells us that, contrary to the views of limiters, sex and sexual pleasure are natural for "God bad us for to wexe and multiplye." She considers her own sexual organs as a gift from God to be used as she sees fit: "In wyfhode, I wol use myn instrument / As frely as my Maker hath sent it." These acknowledgements take place against the backdrop of a a bawdy discourse in the "Prologue," with the Wife speaking of the "merry bout(s)" that King Solomon had on his many wedding nights. Parallel to the sextet in Sonnet 20, the Prologue to the Wife of Bath's tale contains explicit reference to sexual organs as natural outgrowths of human nature, as in the lines:

Telle me also, to what conclusioun
Were membres maad of generacion,
And of so parfit wys a wight ywroght?
Trusteth right wel, they wer nat maad for noght.
(ll.115-118)

Indeed, shortly thereafter, the Wife refers to the male's penis as his "sely" or blessed, instrument (l.132). As for the Tale itself, it takes its narrative impetus from a rape, as a knight of King Arthur's court encounters a young woman and "by verray force he rafte hir maydenhed" (l.32), and concludes with the consummation of the Knight's marriage to his transformed wife.

In Sonnet 20, Shakespeare's narrator declares that men and women are, in fact, different in nature from each other and that this is a consequence of Nature, who fits the two together. Indeed, through his references to "false" fashion and the "rolling" of eyes, the narrator of Sonnet 20 expresses his belief that women have the capacity to ensnare men through the use of their feminine wiles. There is, then, an antagonism between the sexes recognized by the narrator in Sonnet 20.

This observation receives confirmation by the Wife of Bath as she relates her experiences with five husbands. The Wife's emphasis in the presentation of her marital lives is upon domination, trickery, and physical stress, with the Wife of Bath coming out victorious. In the Prologue, the Wife lends credence to the view that a wife may have a corrosive impact upon her husband, "right as wormes shende a tree" (l.376). Indeed, she goes so far as to dismiss the value of male sexuality altogether, and thereby highlights female sexuality as a weapon which women can use to bring their lovers into submission.

But women are not culpable, nor are men responsible for the natural antagonism which exists between them and finds its must acute manifestation in conjugal sex. In the Prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale, we find the Wife ascribing all of the talents which she has used to control her five husbands to a Natural, indeed, a divine Plan, saying: "Deceite, wepyng, spynnyng, God hath yive / To wommen kyndely, whyl they may lyve." From the wife's standpoint, it is in the very nature of women to use their God-given wiles to fool their male counterparts. In explaining her own personality, the Wife of Bath tells us that it is a combination of Venus and Mars.

For certes, I am al Venerien
in feelynge, and myn herte is Marcien.
Venus me yaf my lust, my likerousnesse,
And Mars yaf me my sturdy hardynesse.
(ll.609-612)

Indeed, the Wife points out to her fellow pilgrims that she has the marks of both Venus and Mars upon her face. Shortly thereafter in the Prologue, the Wife of Bath elaborates upon the difference between men and women and the resultant natural antagonism of the sexes:

The children of Mercurie and of Venus
Been in hir wirkyng ful contrarius;
Mercurie loveth wysdam and science,
And Venus loveth ryot and dispence.
(ll.697-701)

Nevertheless, the Wife and, more especially, the old crone of her Tale exhibit "wisdom" in their knowledge of "sovereignty" as the cardinal value in the eyes of women, while the men in the Prologue and the knight of the Tale show "ryot and dispence" in their behavior more fully than the Wife herself.

If there is a key to the Wife of Bath's views on the issues raised by Shakespeare in Sonnets 18, 19, and 20, it may well lie in her citation from a proverb which she attributes to Ptolemy: "Of alle men his wysdom is the hyeste / That rekketh nevere who hath the world in honde" (ll.326-327). The Wife cannot resolve the tension between physical beauty and marital fidelity or goodness, in the same way that the narrators of Sonnets 18 and 19 cannot solve that same dilemma. The Wife is, instead, inclined toward the position adopted by the narrator of Sonnet 20, that both physical charm and amorous constancy are of value and that these values are meted out to us as part of God's natural order.