Critical Overview
The sonnets appear to have attracted little attention when first published in 1609, and they have not always enjoyed the high reputation they do today. Indeed, the sonnets were reprinted only once during the seventeenth century; and it is possible that the original edition was withdrawn by Thomas Thorpe, the publisher, perhaps after a complaint by members of the aristocracy about the intimate nature of the love portrayed in some of the sonnets. However, this cannot be known for certain.
In the eighteenth century most readers regarded the sonnets as inferior to the plays of Shakespeare, and editions of Shakespeare’s works sometimes omitted them. In the nineteenth century, the poet William Wordsworth dismissed the sonnets as “tedious and obscure,” although he later changed his mind.
During the nineteenth century scholars mainly occupied themselves with trying to identify the characters in the sequence with actual people that Shakespeare may have known. It was generally assumed that the sonnets were autobiographical. Opinion was sharply divided as to their merit.
Modern critics have been less willing to assume that the sonnets tell an autobiographical story and have been more inclined to analyze them simply as literature, assuming that whether they are truth or fiction can never be known for certain. Critics today have no doubt about the high quality of the sonnets, and not since John Crowe Ransom’s The World’s Body (1938) has there been a major dissenting view.
Sonnet 19 has not attracted as much comment as some of the more famous sonnets. This may be because it does not present any interpretive difficulties. Its meaning is plain, and it has little complexity either in form or thought. However, the sonnet has had its admirers. It appealed to the Romantic poet John Keats who quoted from line 10 (“Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen”) in a letter of 1817. Keats also seems to have been recalling Sonnet 19 in his phrase “fast-fading flowers” in “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819), which echoes the “fading sweets” of Shakespeare’s sonnet (line 7). Keats’s ode, like Sonnet 19, deals with beauty and time.
Another appreciation of Sonnet 19 came from the mid-twentieth-century poet Edith Sitwell, who described it as
“one of the greatest sonnets in the English language, with its tremendous first lines … The huge, fiery, and majestic double vowel sounds contained in ‘Devouring’ and ‘Lion’s’ (those in ‘Lion’s’ rear themselves up and then bring down their splendid and terrible weight)—these make the line stretch onward and outward until it is overwhelmed, as it were, by the dust of death, by darkness, with the muffling sounds, first of ‘blunt,’ then of the far thicker, more muffling sounds of ‘paws.’”
Several other critics have commented favorably on the exquisite musical effects of the first quatrain.
Opinion has not been unanimous, however. In 1964, A. L. Rowse called Sonnet 19 a “somewhat laboured poem,” contrasting it unfavorably with the sonnet that precedes it (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”). Philip Martin complained that the sonnet lacked profundity and the couplet was “unsatisfactory.” The latter point echoed the view of C. L. Barber, who commented that the claims made in the concluding couplet “have not weight enough to make a satisfying balance.”
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