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

The first of the 126 sonnets comprising the "young man" or "fair youth" cycle, Sonnet 1 introduces a recurrent theme of this broad grouping, that of the natural course of time eradicating human beauty through eventual death, and a solution to this quandary: reproduction through procreation. Here as in the next eleven sonnets, the narrator urges the young man for whom he has developed a passionate affection to marry and have children so that his qualities will live on in his offspring. The first quatrain (four lines) of this sonnet state a general principle, that "we" (meaning human beings in general) seek the regeneration of "fair creatures" through the breeding of their best qualities in their heirs. The second and third lines of the sonnet move from the general to the particular as the narrator rebukes the young man for his failure to marry and have children. This charge culminates in the horrid image of the young man "eating his mess" (as pagan gods of ancient myth often did), devouring his potential posterity and the beauty they would embody by refusing to leave a vestige of himself behind for the world to consume. The figurative language of the poem is dissonant. It combines the organic with the mechanical: the "rose" of nature, the young man's "bud" and the "flame" of his spirit are set in a framework of increase and decrease. The poem contains startling contradictions, including the notion of a "fresh ornament," which culminate in the oxymoron of the young man being a "tender chorl," the word "churl" connoting anything but tenderness and usually reserved for ill-natured, old misers. The sonnet also introduces the reader to the narrator of all the sonnets as a mature poet (significantly older than the individual whom he addresses) who is quite willing to employ sophistry to gain his unstated, selfish ends. Thus, he tells the youth that by having children he will preserve "his memory," but this is not something the young man himself will enjoy (no trace of his memory surviving death) but rather something that others will enjoy. Here, as elsewhere, he attempts to manipulate and persuade through bogus arguments. In the end, the reader recognizes that the youth is not a foe to himself but an object of desire who refuses to do what the narrator wants him to do.

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

Sonnet 6 occurs in the same dramatic situation as Sonnet 1 and explores the same general theme—that of time defiling beauty by bringing on death. The first quatrain does not establish a general argument; instead, it moves immediately to the particulars of the young man's situation as a beautiful young man now in the summer of his life. Oddly, while winter is personified, summer is relegated into a conventional modifier, suggesting an inequality in which the destructive former is more actively powerful. In this case, dissonance pivots on the conjunction of beautiful qualities with language drawn from the realm of commerce, including the twice mentioned "treasure," "usury" and "loan." The narrator urges the young man to "repay" nature's loan by breeding "another thee." By the same token, the chemical language of "distilled" self being poured into "some vial" (a woman's womb) is at odds with conventional views of children as the outcome of a loving marriage: the narrator does not seem to care who the young man weds, this being subordinate to the narrator's desire that the youth have children. The narrator also undercuts the implicit notion that the young man is uniquely charming by interrupting the second quatrain with the suggestion that he have not one, but ten children. He seizes upon and relishes this extension through the repetition of "ten" three times in three successive lines and its multiplication to one hundred in the third. The narrator again claims that the youth's resistance to his suggestion is the product of self-will. The reader is left to ask why such self-determination is necessarily perverse. The answer is that it is perverse in the eyes of the narrator and his desires. Similarly, the last two lines of the third quatrain ask what the narrator apparently views as a rhetorical question, asserting that death will be rendered powerless if the young man takes the narrator's advice. Yet in the concluding couplet, when he refers to "worms" eating the young man's corpse when he is buried, we are led to the opposite conclusion: whether or not the fair youth replicates himself by having children, he will nonetheless molder in the grave.

Serving as the most-often cited example of the 154 verse poems that appear in Shakespeare's sonnets, Sonnet 18 is widely acknowledged as among the finest of the Bard's poems. Its fourteen lines read:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The structure of the Shakespearean sonnet, its rhyme pattern and meter are all faithfully illustrated in this work, as three successive quatrains of iambic pentameter verse lead lyrically to a concluding rhymed couplet and a high note.

In this sonnet, the poet acknowledges the current (or prospective) effects of time, age, and change upon his beloved but then speaks of a more constant value, an inner beauty, that outweighs the physical ravages of experience. Although the poet carefully inserts the descriptor "lovely" into the second line, it is immediately evident that the person to whom the poem is addressed is approaching the end of youth. The impression that the speaker senses a loss of charm in his lover is further reinforced by his use of the word "temperate," implying that the bond between him and his lover's has cooled and is no longer given to the extreme gusts of passion "which do shake the darling buds of May." Despite the narrator's assurances that he still finds his lover to be physically attractive, the figurative language which he employs here expresses corrosion in graphic terms, keeping the reader's mind fixed on the process of physical deterioration and decay. The poet then turns his verse toward a positive conclusion in the third quatrain ("But thy eternal summer shall not fade"), suggesting that the poet's expression of love will give life to his beloved's beauty even after Death arrives.

As elsewhere in the young man sonnet cycle, the themes raised in Sonnet 18 are approached in the two poems that follow immediately thereafter. Sonnet 19 begins with the lines: "Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws, / And make the earth devour her own sweet brood." If anything, Sonnet 19 is even more forceful in its portrayal of time consuming his lover's physical beauty. 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. The poet protests: "But I forbid thee one most heinous crime," but when he returns to images of bestial mutilation with the word "carve," the reader senses that even the power of "this" (poetry) cannot stop the march of time. Sonnet 20 takes another angle on the same subject. It pivots on the qualitative distinction between transient artifice and permanent natural beauty. At the outset, the narrator says to the lover that he has no need of cosmetics to enhance his beauty. Once more, the speaker underscores the permanence of inner beauty versus the transience of external.

By no means as bitter as many of the other middle sonnets of the young man cycle, Sonnet 55 is probably the best known of the beauty/love/age thematic complex within Shakespeare's sonnets. It begins with the poet's assertion that "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme." In what follows, the poet claims that the evocative power of the sonnet itself will immortalize his lover far longer than the seemingly durable artifacts which men create to memorialize individual lives. While these monuments seem to be beyond the reach of time, the marble structures that the powerful build to commemorate their great deeds are vulnerable to the effects of weather, war, and human neglect. The sonnet at hand will remain intact in the mind of future readers, having a capacity to convey refined sentiments that soiled statutes cannot match. Only God's Judgment Day places a limit on the sonnet's power to transcend those natural, historical, and human forces which diminish and dissolve memorials carved in stone. Until that final reckoning, when the beloved youth will surely be resurrected, the sonnet will live on in its original form and its subject, the beloved, will touch the hearts of those who read it.

One of the best of the Dark Lady sonnets in the second grouping, Sonnet 138 begins: "When my love swears that she is made of truth" and then questions not only the truthfulness of the Dark Lady but also the poet's own honesty. The speaker says that both he and his beloved have lied to each other repeatedly, pretending to be what they are not. Not only has the poet labored to appear to be more youthful than he actually is, one of the techniques that he has employed to bolster this illusion is to naively accept his lover's vows of fidelity at face value. Now, he discards all such pretense; he is not young, nor is he innocent of her transgressions. He urges his lover to do the same, for he knows full well that she has been unfaithful to him. There is a balanced exchange at the center of the sonnet, as the speaker suggests that the illusions which have furthered their love are mutual fabrications, that both parties have acted falsely. Yet he does not upbraid his lover or himself for engaging in those white lies that enable them to sustain the illusion of pure love. In fact, the poet implies that lying serves the affirmative purpose of allowing passion to persist despite aging and infidelity. It should also be noted that "lie" is used throughout as both a synonym for telling falsehoods and as a ribald term suggesting sexual intercourse, i.e., a man and a woman "lying" in bed together. It is the comic candor of a lover freely admitting that he is not all that he would appear to be and that he knows that his beloved is not, either, which controls our response to this piece. Indeed, while love (it glories and its discontents) is the over-arching subject of the sonnets, this does not prevent humorous, sometimes lewd from arising in many of its constituent poems.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Widely acknowledged by Shakespeare critics to be one of the Bard's best poems, Sonnet 18 begins characteristically by posing a rhetorical question to which the narrator admits no answer other than his own. He immediately launches into the comparison, finding his subject, the young man, to be "more lovely and more temperate" than a summer's day. But having placed the young man beyond comparison in the first quatrain, he then draws a series of implicit analogies that reflect upon the young man's temperament. When the narrator mentions that the sun ("eye of heaven") is sometimes too hot and that, conversely, the sun's beauty is sometimes diminished by the operations of the seasons and the chance of clouds, he seems to suggest that the young man has been "too hot" in following his self-will and, alternately, "too cool" toward the narrator. This impression is only reinforced in the third quatrain when the narrator again places the youth outside of a natural context, asserting in its first line "But thy eternal summer shall not fade." The reason for this special treatment stems from the "eternal lines" that the narrator is now presenting to the world in the form of the poem at hand. The suggestion is then made that poetry has a transformative power that gives life to its subject. By virtue of this suggestion, the narrator attempts to nurture the young man's dependency upon him as the source of immortality. The emotional equation of the second quatrain, however, challenges the idea that the "hot-tempered" young man will serenely accede to reliance upon the narrator's "lines."

Shakespeare was the most unconventional of the Elizabethan sonneteers. The typical lovesick sonneteer, imitating the Italian Petrarch, idealized his fair lady in highly wrought, artificial language featuring metaphor and oxymoron. Shakespeare not only poked fun at this conventional language (see Sonnet 130) but also declared his love for a younger man and a rather sluttish “dark lady.” He also used a simplified sonnet form, three quatrains and a rhyming couplet.

Sonnets 1-126 address the young man, whom Shakespeare idealizes but also advises and corrects. The first seventeen urge the young man to marry and procreate, but the main group develops Shakespeare’s own emotional relationship with the young man, who also becomes involved with Shakespeare’s mistress and a rival poet. Sonnets 127-154 treat Shakespeare’s relationship with his unfaithful mistress, the dark lady.

Can the speaker of these poems be identified in every particular with William Shakespeare, the man? Critics continue to disagree about this question. The publication of the sonnets in Shakespeare’s time caused no scandal, and no one has definitely identified either the young man or the dark lady.

All such questions aside, Shakespeare’s sonnets deserve their fame for their unsurpassed expression of life’s transience, moral ambiguities, and entanglements.

Bibliography:

Crossman, Robert. “Making Love out of Nothing at All: The Issue of Story in Shakespeare’s Procreation Sonnets.” Shakespeare Quarterly 41, no. 4 (Winter, 1990): 470-488. Argues that a consistent story line unifies many of the sonnets, focusing especially on Sonnets 1 through 17. In this group, Crossman traces the progress of the sonnet speaker’s friendship and warm affection for a fair young man.

Green, Martin. Wriothesley’s Roses: In Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Poems, and Plays. Baltimore: Clevendon Books, 1993. Links historical records with poetic context in various sonnets in an interesting attempt to establish the identities of Shakespeare’s fair young man and of the rival poet who seems to compete with Shakespeare’s speaker for the affections of the Dark Lady. Provides a good historical background.

Landry, Hilton. Interpretation in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. Despite numerous more recent studies, this book remains an excellent introduction to the thematic analysis and interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Ramsey, Paul. The Fickle Glass: A Study of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New York: AMS Press, 1979. A clearly written scholarly examination of critical problems, poetic techniques, and meaning in the sonnets. Explores questions of authorship, order, and date of composition. Excellent discussion of metrical rules and Elizabethan rhetoric in the sonnets.

Smith, Hallet. The Tension of the Lyre: Poetry in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1981. General discussion of the sonnets, beginning with an exploration of poetic voice and audience, and including an overview of Shakespeare’s world as it is reflected in the sonnets.

Weiser, David K. Mind in Character: Shakespeare’s Speaker in the Sonnets. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987. Thorough explication of the sonnets. Useful appendix classifies the sonnets by modes of address.

Cosmos

Cosmos. Natural phenomena of heaven and Earth are compared to human activities. The universe is like a huge stage, on which each natural element performs at its peak of perfection then declines and dies; likewise, a youth experiences a moment of perfection that does not last. An astrologer predicts the future by reading the stars, but the speaker looks into his lover’s eyes for truth and beauty. Fate bestows fame on military heroes and the prince’s favorites, who will soon wilt like marigolds.

Time and season

Time and season. Many of Shakespeare’s sonnets compare stages of life to time passing from dawn to midday to sunset, and from spring to summer to fall and winter. Youth is like a blazing sunrise, maturing at high noon, declining in old age, and dying at sunset. The rising sun kisses earth’s mountaintops, meadows, and streams, but clouds of disgrace sometimes emerge to hide its brilliance. Time turns youthful black curls silver, and green meadows fall to the scythe. Time is a tyrant that drives summer onward to winter and death, leaving behind the fragrance of summer flowers. A lover’s absence seems bleak like winter, even though it may be spring, and Nature is reproducing so extravagantly that the gloomy planet Saturn laughs.

Gardens

Gardens. Several sonnets compare a lover’s faults to flaws in nature: thorns on roses, mud in silver fountains, clouds and eclipses that hide the Sun and the Moon, and the worm inside a rosebud. Except for their thorns, wild roses are as colorful and smell as sweet as cultivated roses. Cold, unemotional people are like stones, while lovers are like lilies. If lilies become infected, they smell worse than weeds that choke them out. The speaker accuses flowers (other lovers) of stealing color and scent from the youth’s cheeks and breath, white from his hand, gold from his hair, roses from his blush, and white from his low spirits. In retaliation, worms soon steal life from the flowers.

Familiar settings

Familiar settings. Familiar Elizabethan settings appear in many sonnets. For example, one speaker compares his stage of life to ruins of a deserted chapel, where trees are bare and no birds sing, to twilight after sunset, and to the dying embers of a once-glowing fire. In another, a family’s heritage is like a house needing constant repair—through its heirs—so it can withstand storms of misfortune and death. Lawyers in a courtroom argue over whether a lover belongs to the defendant or to the plaintiff; the jury decides in the defendant’s favor.

In another sonnet, two men are imprisoned in the steel cell of a woman’s heart; the speaker begs the woman to release his friend and in return promises to remain her prisoner. Elsewhere, a mirror reflects a speaker’s aging face; a clock reminds him of time wasted, and blank pages in his journal reflect his lack of creativity. While a woman plays a spinet, admirers wish they were the wooden keys being caressed by her fingers; they kiss her hand, but the speaker wishes to kiss her lips. Although marble monuments may be overturned during wars, and memorial stones in church floors may be effaced, the poet claims his verse will last until Judgment Day.

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
And burn the long-liv'd phoenix, in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet'st,
And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
O! carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.
Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.

Personifying and directly addressing "Time" as if it were a ravenous beast, the first seven lines of Sonnet 19 set forth the narrator's permission for this "swift-footed" creature to do whatever it will to the world at-large. Filled with alliterations, including measured "Ts," "Ls," "Ss," and, finally "W" sounds, give Time sway over the natural and the mythical worlds, over lions and tigers, over the mythical phoenix and over the world as a whole, again personified, in a series of deviant invitations. The narrator does not wait for the natural turn of the sonnet to occur between lines 8 and 9. Already in the last line of the octet (line 8), the narrator introduces an exception to his one-sided challenge, a sphere apart which he forbids Time to touch, the physical beauty of the young man's face. The narrator's command or plea to Time is recognized as being futile: in the final couplet, he taunts time to do "thy worst," even to that model of beauty for all mankind, his beloved fair youth. The last line of the sonnet makes the assertion that despite Time's most heinous crime of leaving his imprint on the young man, "My love shall in my verse ever live young." The imperfect rhyme of "wrong" with "young" again reinforces the futility of a mere human trying to constrain Time; yet once again, the narrator claims that the sonnet at hand will somehow modify Time's inevitable damage. The narrator recognizes that Time will "carve" the brow of the young man, a wrong that his words cannot prevent but rests in the solace of eternalizing youth through poetry.

Sonnets are rhymed poems consisting of fourteen lines, the first eight making up the octet and the last six lines being the sestet. The Shakespearean sonnet—which differs slightly from the Italian (or Petrarchian) sonnet and the Spenserian sonnet—ends with a rhymed couplet and follows the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg. Thus, the octet/sestet structure can be alternatively divided into three quatrains (sets of four lines) with alternating rhymes concluding in a rhymed couplet. With the lone exception of Sonnet 145, the meter of Shakespeare's sonnets is iambic pentameter, each line being comprised of five double-syllable iambic feet. Of all poetic meters, iambic pentameter comes closest to conversational English; the verse speech that prevails in Shakespeare's plays is uniformly composed in iambic pentameter.

Shakespeare did not originate the sonnet form. The basic structure of the sonnet arose in medieval Italy, its most prominent exponent being the Early Renaissance poet Petrarch. The appearance of English sonnets, however, occurred when Shakespeare was an adolescent (around 1580). Both Edmund Spenser and Philip Sydney, among others, worked in this form a decade or so before Shakespeare took it up in the early 1590s, possibly seeking to exploit the ongoing popularity of the sonnet among literary patrons of the day. Sonnets 153 and 154 differ from the other 152 poems included in the first edition of the Sonnets in that they are clearly based on an epigram from ancient Greek poetry that was in all probability known to Shakespeare (and others) through Ovid's Metamorphoses. Apart from these two pieces, none of the sonnets has an identifiable literary (or historical) source.

Given this and the intimacy of the themes broached by Shakespeare in the sonnets, it is natural that scholars would entertain a search for autobiographical sources and that this search would focus on three identity issues: (1) who is the young man to whom Sonnets 1-126 are addressed? (2) who is the Dark Lady of Sonnets 127-154? (3) who are the rival poets who intrude in the love triangles of Sonnets 78 through 86? As to the first question, the starting point for the search of the young man's actual identity (and virtually all of the hard evidence at hand) is an inscription to a "Mr. W. H." in the first edition of Shakespeare's sonnets, these initially referring to a male who is called the "onlie beggeter" (only source) of the volume's contents. Literary historians have come up with a host of actual men whose names resonate with the "W. H." initial tag. They include two individuals—William Herbert (Earl of Pembroke) and (with the WH initial order reversed) Henry Wriothesley (the Earl of Southhampton)—both of whom were young nobles in the 1590s and literary patrons associated with Shakespeare and his circle. But there are problems with both of these (and all the other) candidates for the model of Shakespeare's young man.

As to the second question, the identity of the Dark Lady to whom Sonnets 127 through 154 are addressed is based on even thinner evidence. On purely speculative grounds, Mary Fitton, Emila Lanier, and Lucy Morgan (all ladies of Queen Elizabeth's court) have been suggested as women whom Shakespeare might have had in mind when he wrote the second broad grouping in his sonnets. Third and last, as to the possible identity of the rival poet who appears in Sonnets 78 through 86, the names of George Chapman and/or Christopher Marlowe are often mentioned. The conclusions that we reach from trying to identify the persons addressed in the sonnets are twofold: no convincing identification of the young man, the Dark Lady, or the rival poet has ever been made; there is no reason to believe that any individual in Shakespeare's personal life directly corresponds with the beloved youth, the loose woman, or the artistic competitor of his sonnets.

There is one final background issue that must be raised, which is the nature of the love between the explicitly male speaker of the sonnets and the young man to whom the first 126 poems are formally addressed. The tender terms, and indeed the jealously, that the speaker extends toward the beloved youth of the sonnets has led some to interpret these poems as expressions of a homosexual love affair and, still further, that Shakespeare himself engaged in sexual relations with other men. It is to Sonnet 20 that proponents of this thesis most often refer. There we read the opening lines: "A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted / Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion," as the speaker continues on to say that his lover has been endowed by Nature with the charms of woman but that the speaker's love for the young man has been "defeated" by Nature through an "addition" (possibly the male penis). Aside from the seeming strangeness of a male openly authoring love poetry to another man (and the Elizabethans would have seen this activity in a different, possibly broader, light) and these intriguing references, the sonnets do not necessarily describe homosexual or even physical intimacy between the speaker and the young man addressed. Indeed, within Sonnet 20 the speaker says that he was "defeated" by Nature, implying that his love for the youth could not be consummated. Again, the questions in this patch of the background to the sonnets are unresolved, and open-ended.

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

Sonnet 29 is distinguished by Shakespeare's precise handling of its momentum. The pace of the sonnet builds up in the octet; it reaches a turning point at the start of the third quatrain and then generates a burst of counter-movement before arriving at an equilibrium in the poem's concluding couplet. It not only evokes a mood of agitation followed by contentment in the reader, it is about the narrator's own moods. Self-pity and envy of "this" man and "that man" expressed in the octet are brought about by the perception that others see the narrator as a "disgrace." Yet with the closing sextet, the narrator's outlook changes entirely, as he shifts the focus from his own estate to contemplation of his beloved fair youth. Shakespeare includes an odd, one-and-a-half line parenthetical analogy between his improved mood and the singing of a lark at daybreak. Contradictions abound: he first tells us that heaven is "deaf" to his "bootless" (unheard) cries, but then sings hymns at heaven's gate. By merely recollecting his young friend, the narrator claims that he becomes entirely content with his person, his own talents, and his station in life. Love not only transforms the narrator's mood, it uplifts his self-conception. The main theme of the sonnet is how the unattractive mental state of self-pity can be overcome by mental and emotional engagement with a beloved other.

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows end.

In several of Shakespeare's sonnets, the narrator contends that his love for the fair youth compensates him for otherwise permanent personal defects or irretrievable losses. The narrator assumes a role analogous to that of a judge: the "sessions" of the first line connote a court, the words "summon," "cancell'd" and "grievances" all suggest some type of legal dispute. Among the "remembrance(s)" of the past that the narrator calls to mind are those things that he did not attain in youth, slights that he failed to repay to others, and, above all, the loss of precious friends who have died. Trying the past in this manner is both costly and purgative: recalling his losses, the narrator claims to pay for them again; but at the same time, it enables him to mourn. It is only in the final couplet that the thought of his "dear friend," the beloved young man, brings an end to this self-indulgent nostalgia. Simply by thinking of the fair youth, "All losses are restor'd and sorrows end." The question naturally arises: if merely thinking of his beloved puts an end to self-reproach, why does the narrator summon up his court in the first place? There is no satisfactory answer to this inquiry, and, moreover, there is something perverse about an ongoing relationship (and a lopsided one at that) serving as compensation for the deaths of loved ones.

Shakespeare's sonnets do not depict a clear sequence of events, nor do they follow a straightforward logical or chronological order. They reference only a few specific actions, and even these are presented in broad terms rather than detailed descriptions. The setting is also generalized, with no mention of any specific location. While there is a sense of time passing, as the sonnets illustrate changes in the speaker's relationships with the young man and the woman, there is only one hint about the duration of these relationships.

In Sonnets 1-17, known as the "procreation sonnets," the speaker encourages a young man of noble birth to marry and have children to ensure his exceptional beauty endures through the ages. The final three sonnets in this group suggest another way to defy time's destructiveness: the Poet will immortalize the Friend's beauty in his verses. This concept is more thoroughly explored in Sonnets 18-26, where the Poet makes grand claims about the lasting fame of his verses but also shows humility regarding his art. Additionally, new themes are introduced, such as the potential for a physical or sexual relationship between the Poet and the Friend (Sonnet 20), and the presence of a rival poet (Sonnet 21).

Starting with Sonnet 27 and continuing onward, it appears that while the Poet was away, his mistress seduced the young man. Sonnet 40 hints that the youth may have similarly betrayed the Poet on another occasion. Sonnets 28-126 depict a recurring cycle of remorse and indifference from the Friend, and forgiveness, understanding, praise, and reproach from the Poet. In these verses, the Poet vacillates between confidence in his art and his friendship with the young man, and doubts and anxieties about their lasting value. For instance, in Sonnets 32, 76, 87, 105, and 108, the speaker expresses concerns about the worth and originality of his poetry, and in Sonnets 71-74, he questions whether he will be remembered after his death.

Sonnets 27-28, 43-45, and 97-99 suggest that there may have been multiple periods of estrangement between the Poet and the Friend. In Sonnets 78-80 and 82-86, the speaker again refers to another poet or poets competing for the young man's attention and patronage.

Sonnets 127-154 explore the Poet's relationship with a woman referred to as the Dark Lady. Unlike the first 126 sonnets, these lack a clear sequential narrative. The Poet's feelings towards his mistress—and himself—shift dramatically from one sonnet to another. He mocks her, criticizes her sensual desires, accuses her of constant infidelity, admires her unconventional dark beauty, chastises himself for his own physical urges, and humorously plays on the various meanings of "will." Similar to the sonnets addressed to the young man, the Poet's conflicting emotions and thoughts do not follow a logical order. Critics debate whether either section of Shakespeare's sonnets concludes with a sense of finality or resolution.

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud:
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authorizing thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss,
Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are;
For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense,
Thy adverse party is thy advocate,
And 'gainst myself a lawful plea commence:
Such civil war is in my love and hate,
That I an accessary needs must be,
To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.

Throughout the "young man" cycle we detect the glimmerings of a story. At this juncture, the collective inference is that the fair youth has either taken another (male) lover or shifted his patronage to a rival poet. In the first quatrain, the narrator pretends to "forgive" his friend, but the inclusion of "loathsome canker" in its last line strongly suggests that the narrator harbors animosity toward the fair youth for this betrayal. In the second quatrain, the narrator first excuses this fault as universal to all men and then says that his own fault has been excusing the young man's sins. Again legalistic language intrudes, as the narrator assumes the parts of both a plaintiff making the case that he has been wrongly harmed and the attorney for the defendant (young man). This is, of course, a conflicted stance, as the narrator admits in speaking of the "war" between his love for the youth and his hate for the "crime" that the youth has committed, and then characterizes the young man as a "sweet thief." Here as in other sonnets, the narrator claims to write for one purpose (forgiveness) when it is plain that he does not truly forgive his lover. Whether the narrator is consciously aware of this contradiction in his motives is left completely open-ended.

Booth, Stephen. An Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969.

Calvert, Hugh. Shakespeare's Sonnets and Problems of Autobiography. Braunton: Merlin Books, 1987.

Fineman, James. Shakespeare's Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986.

Hubler, Edward. The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets. New York: Hill & Wang, 1952.

Hubler, Edward, Northrop Frye, L. A. Fiedler, Stephen Spender, and R. P. Blackmur. The Riddle of Shakespeare's Sonnets. New York: Basic Books, 1962.

Landry, Hilton. Interpretations in Shakespeare's Sonnets. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1963.

Leishman, James B. Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets. New York: Hillary House, 1961.

Martin, Philip. Shakespeare's Sonnets: Self, Love, and Art. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1972.

Stirling, Brents. The Shakespeare Sonnet Order. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968.

Wilson, Katharine M. Shakespeare's Sugared Sonnets. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1974.

Winny, James. The Master-Mistress: A Study of Shakespeare's Sonnets. London: Chatto & Windus, 1968.

How can my muse want subject to invent,
While thou dost breathe, that pour'st into my verse
Thine own sweet argument, too excellent
For every vulgar paper to rehearse?
O! give thy self the thanks, if aught in me
Worthy perusal stand against thy sight;
For who's so dumb that cannot write to thee,
When thou thy self dost give invention light?
Be thou the tenth Muse, ten times more in worth
Than those old nine which rhymers invocate;
And he that calls on thee, let him bring forth
Eternal numbers to outlive long date.
If my slight muse do please these curious days,
The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.

In more than two dozen of the sonnets, the narrator writes about his art: in Sonnet 38, he claims that his beloved youth's qualities furnish him with an endless supply of materials to extol in verse. The first quatrain is a rhetorical device: it is not a question that the narrator asks here, but a claim that the poetic inspiration that he receives through his relationship to the young man is boundless. The second quatrain embodies a similar device. The narrator first states that if the young man is pleased by the poet's art, then the credit belongs entirely to the source of inspiration. In the third quatrain, the narrator asks his friend to become his Muse, saying that his power to inspire will be "ten times" greater than the other nine Muses recognized in ancient mythology. Alliteration is prominent in this sonnet, "T" sounds giving way to "L" sounds in the second half of the third quatrain. Oddly, the poet-narrator attempts to demonstrate that his beloved is a source of endless inspiration even as he turns to "subjects" (the Muses) that have been used as a traditional subject of classical verse. In the final couplet, while transferring any praise that his poetry might earn in the present day (again reminding us that there is nothing inventive about the subject he has chosen), the narrator ironically inserts that it is he who incurs the pain of laboring over verse on his friend's behalf.

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword, nor war's quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
'Gainst death, and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.

The sonnet begins with the bold assertion that the poem before us will outlive objects of physical grandeur and then becomes bolder still is stating that "you" (the fair young man) will consequently "outlive this mere stonework." Both time (here in non-personified form but still qualified as "sluttish") and war (personified as the god Mars) are incapable of destroying "the living record of your memory," that is, the powerful verse at hand. In the concluding couplet, the narrator claims that only God's Judgment Day places a limit on the sonnet's power to transcend those natural, historical, and human forces that diminish and dissolve memorials carved in stone. Until that final reckoning, when the beloved youth will surely be resurrected, the sonnet will live on in its original form and its subject, the beloved, will touch the hearts of those who read it. Sonnet 55 is among the best loved of Shakespeare's poems about the capacity of art inspired by love to overcome the ravages of time. Here the claim is more logically consistent than in other instances of this theme in the sonnets: the narrator allows that the beloved and the powerful rhyme will only outlive "marble" in a subjective frame of reference.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crowned,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
And yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

The first four lines of Sonnet 60 draw an extended simile between the action of the waves upon the beach and the ebb and flow of human life, the minutes allotted to human beings ultimately ebbing altogether. The dynamic action is reinforced in the sonnet's second quatrain. The span between birth ("Nativity") and the peak of life "maturity" is given less than two lines; once "crowned" in line 6, human beings begin a downward course ending with Time taking back his gift of life. In the third quatrain, the narrator delineates three destructive effects of Time: Time penetrates and tears youth, it leaves its indelible imprint upon youthful beauty, and it then devours youth altogether. We are faced at the end of the third quatrain with the implied image of the grim reaper and his scythe. In the final couplet, however, the narrator observes that time can also perform a constructive and conserving end, conveying his praise of the beloved youth to those who will live in the future. The couplet connects directly to the opening quatrain: Time erodes the shore, but is also pushes "pebbles" (analogous to the sonnet) further ashore where they will not be swept back into the sea.

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd,
And strength by limping sway disabled
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly, doctor-like, controlling skill,
And simple truth miscall'd simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

Shakespeare's sonnets are filled with indeterminate pronouns, and in Sonnet 66 our focus naturally falls upon determining precisely what the narrator is referring to by "all these." In the next eleven lines, our interest is only partially satisfied. The narrator produces a roster of injustices that are apparently common to the age in which he lives. During his life, the narrator asserts, that what is trivial is held in high esteem and that what is of genuine value is disparaged. We gain the sense that the narrator has particular and personal injustices in mind, yet he writes only in generalities. Some of these, such as "art made tongue-tied by authority" seem to have a connection to the narrator; presented without distinction from the former, others appear to have no such association, as when the narrator complains that "maiden virtue [is] rudely strumpeted." Our frustration (mirroring the narrator's own mood) builds as the sonnet takes a flat shape, obliterating the customary form of the sonnet through an unbroken succession of lines that begin with the simple conjunctive "And." We never achieve a firm grasp of why the narrator is in a state of despair. The concluding couplet sheds no light on the matter. There the narrator merely states that he would prefer to die rather than witness the normative deficiencies of his age were it not for the fact that this would leave his love alone.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
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.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

In Sonnet 73, the narrator at first anticipates that his beloved may at some indefinite time notice that he is growing older and that he is now in the autumnal stage of life. The sonnet contains some noteworthy progressions. The scope of temporal stages is successively reduced. In the first quatrain, the temporal frame is that of seasons, the narrator saying that he is now between the autumn and the winter of his life, growing bald as the "yellow leaves" of his hair thin out. In the second stanza, the frame is truncated into a time of day, "twilight." In the third quatrain, the frame is an instance in a common physical phenomena, when a fire's red glow changes to ashes. There is a parallel progression in the dominant colors of the text, from "yellow" leaves to "black" night and then to the "fading red" of a dying fire's glow. What is most remarkable about the sonnet is the narrator's effort to see himself as his beloved patron "may" see him and to control the reaction of the young man in the final couplet. Rather than being repulsed by seeing the force of age exact its toll, the narrator says that this should spur his lover to embrace him more fully and urgently under the general principle of "To love that well, which thou must leave ere long." But in a work that is deliberately vague (is the narrator already elderly or merely middle-aged; will the young man see him in the future), what stands out is the contrast between definite fact and indefinite future perception.

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O! know sweet love I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.

The structure of Sonnet 76 is integral to its theme. The narrator's apology for his reliance upon long-standing poetic conventions is couched in a form that mirrors the old Petrarchan sonnet. Consistent with the Italian approach to the sonnet, the octet of this piece poses a straightforward problem, the third quatrain furnishes a response to it, and the closing couplet restates the solution through the use of a simile. In other words, here Shakespeare uses the sonnet according to its original rhetorical/logical rules. The narrator observes that he has not introduced any innovations into his poetry despite the fact that other contemporary poets have turned to "new-found methods" and "compounds strange." He reiterates this question in the second quatrain, allowing that his style is now so standardized and free of variation that the reader can tell who has composed it without the benefit of any direct identification of its authorship. The answer to the question that the narrator raises is that because he always writes about the same subject, his love for the fair youth, his style is necessarily the same. In the closing couplet, he compares his reliance upon a single poetic form to express but one subject to the sun rising along the same trajectory each day. The dominant metaphors here are those of costumes and coins, both of which are connoted in the second line's quick change.

Whilst I alone did call upon thy aid,
My verse alone had all thy gentle grace;
But now my gracious numbers are decay'd,
And my sick Muse doth give an other place.
I grant, sweet love, thy lovely argument
Deserves the travail of a worthier pen;
Yet what of thee thy poet doth invent
He robs thee of, and pays it thee again.
He lends thee virtue, and he stole that word
From thy behaviour; beauty doth he give,
And found it in thy cheek: he can afford
No praise to thee, but what in thee doth live.
Then thank him not for that which he doth say,
Since what he owes thee, thou thyself dost pay.

The 126 sonnets of the "young man" cycle vary in the degree to which they refer to an ongoing story about the narrator, the fair youth, and two other characters (one of whom is a rival poet). In Sonnet 79, the narrator first notes that at one time, he was the only poet whom the young man patronized. Now, however, the young man is aiding a second artist; and this, in turn, has caused the narrator's creative energies to wither, his Muse becoming sick and giving way to that of the rival. In the first half of the second quatrain (lines 5-6), the narrator inserts a gratuitous sentiment, admitting that his own poetic powers are unequal to the expression of the youth's outstanding qualities. He does not wait for the third quatrain to get to his primary purpose, casting aspersions on his competitor, albeit in a very general argument that could apply to his own poetic labors as well. Because the youth's qualities, his beauty and his actions, are poetic in themselves, the rival poet is merely taking or "stealing" these from the youth and then requiring "payment" from him. That being so, the narrator asserts that the young man does not owe the rival poet anything, since the rival's verses merely give back what he has robbed from the youth.

Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
Some in their wealth, some in their body's force,
Some in their garments though new-fangled ill;
Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse;
And every humour hath his adjunct pleasure,
Wherein it finds a joy above the rest:
But these particulars are not my measure,
All these I better in one general best.
Thy love is better than high birth to me,
Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' costs,
Of more delight than hawks and horses be;
And having thee, of all men's pride I boast:
Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take
All this away, and me most wretched make.

There is a singsong, nursery rhyme quality to the first quatrain of this piece, with the word "some" marking a beat and each line divided by a comma. Here the narrator lists seven "things" in which other people glory. Each person has a particular "pleasure" that he places above all else, but the narrator claims to differ from each and all of them in that his sole pleasure lies in his relationship with the fair youth. He proceeds to go over his roster of "things" in which others take pride, leaving out only physical strength from his original list. There is, however, a conditional downside to the all-encompassing nature of his love for the young man. He is "wretched" only in the possibility that the fair youth could readily take all this away and thereby make the narrator utterly "wretched." The sonnet's discordant couplet captures its principal theme that the joy of love is always contingent upon the will or whim of the other person in the relationship. There is a nuance in the narrator's use of the word "wretched": he is currently "wretched" in being vulnerable to the threat of the young man's breaking of the bond between them, and he would be "wretched" at some point in the future if the fair youth were to reject him. Love is conditional, and the more that one invests in a relationship, the more one has to lose.

When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rime,
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,
Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty's best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique pen would have express'd
Even such a beauty as you master now.
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring;
And for they looked but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing:
For we, which now behold these present days,
Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

The main theme of this sonnet is the narrator's claim that while poets of bygone times addressed their adulation to ladies and knights that are now dead, their words of praise were not descriptors of their subjects but "prophecies" about the qualities of an individual who had not yet been born, the narrator's beloved young man. In the first quatrain, the narrator says that when he reads old poetry (notably the "blazons" of the Italian love sonnets), he finds that they apply more closely to his subject, the fair youth, than they do to their ostensible subjects. In doing so, the narrator directs the reader's attention to the gap between a poet's intentions and the actual meaning of his verses. Although he considers these "old" poems to be forecasts of the qualities that the youth embodies, they still do not measure up to a true expression of the youth's beauty. In the final couplet, the narrator disparages the poetry of his own day as being unable to express praise to the degree that the fair youth's beauty merits. The conjunction of "ladies dead" and "lovely knights" at the end of the first quatrain suggests that the fair youth possesses features of both genders in his person. But the main point raised is that words have a meaning that extend beyond the intentions of those who write them.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

The principal theme of Sonnet 116 is that love is constant despite the corrosive power of Time and chance. The sentiment expressed here was familiar to Shakespeare's readers and to us from the customary marriage ceremony ("for better or for worse," "for richer or for poorer"), and the language employed by the narrator here closely resembles that found in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. Reinforcing this, the word "alter" connotes its homonym of a marriage altar while the metaphor of a "bark" (or ship at sea) being guided by the light of constant love is a traditional figuration of marriage. At the start of the sonnet's third quatrain, the narrator asserts even though Time inevitably exacts its toll on physical beauty and leads to the "doom" of mortality, true love remains. "Love's not Time's fool" captures the gist of the sonnet as a whole. The ending couplet, though, injects a false note into the text. The narrator challenges others to the impossible task of disproving his argument that true love is constant and then uses both his own verse and the existence of love at-large as his proof. We note that the first lines establish a conditional state, requiring the reader to cast aside the possibility that there may be impediments to the union of two people. But if the reader rejects this stipulation and admits that such impediments may exist, then the contention that love does not change over time is by no means self-evident.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.

Sonnet 130 is part of the "dark lady" cycle which extends from Sonnet 127 to Sonnet 154, all of these verses being addressed to another of the narrator's lovers—a dark-haired mistress who is far more mature, sexually experienced, and duplicitous than the fair youth of the proceeding "young man" cycle. The rhetorical strategy of Sonnet 130 rests upon a series of inversions. His mistress's eyes do not meet the standard poetic definitions of feminine beauty. Her eyes are not bright like the sun, her lips are not as red as coral, and, in fact, her features have some decidedly unpoetic qualities, her breasts being darkly-colored, her hair like black wires, her breath "reeking," and her gait being a heavy trod. But despite the disparities between the mistress as she is and the conventional figurative language of love sonnets, the narrator still considers her to be exceptional. He provides no reason whatever for this assessment. The sonnet thus expressed the old adage that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," a subjective perception that cannot be justified or explained.

When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed:
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O! love's best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love, loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

Sonnet 138 is an ironic paean to the falsity of love, for it is in the willingness of lovers to accept the lies of their partners that the habit of trust develops, trust being superior to truth. In the opening quatrain, the narrator says that he "believes" what he knows to be "lies," so that when she says that he is youthful, the narrator recognizes that this is not the case but lodges no objections and acts accordingly. There is a basic reciprocation involved here: in exchange for her flattery, the narrator suppresses the truth that the mistress herself is past. The lies that lovers tell each other have value, for "love's best habit" stems from overlooking what is physically true. There is, of course, an obvious pun involved in the repeated use of the multivalent word "lie" as both falsehood and as lying together in bed. Love, then, is a matter of pretense, but there is much to be said on behalf of such falsehood.

My love is as a fever longing still,
For that which longer nurseth the disease;
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now Reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed;
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

Here the narrator creates a simile between love and disease that the affected person prolongs by his refusal to take counsel from reason. The controlling figure is established at the start of the first quatrain in which the narrator states that his consumption of love is a "sickly appetite" which he nonetheless nurtures. The medical analogy is extended in the second quatrain in which the narrator's reason is cast in the role of a helpless physician, who is able to diagnose the malady and prescribe a cure but is unable to prevail upon his patient to take his advise. In the third quatrain, the narrator admits that he has been made mad by his irrational passion. The sonnet moves from the general to the specific in the couplet as he addresses his "dark lady mistress." As proof of his madness, the narrator says that he has thought his mistress to be "fair" and "bright," while knowing full well that she is "as black as hell, as dark as night." These are blunt terms that encompass both the "dark" physical features of his mistress and her evil ways.