Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Sonnet 15

A Shakesperian sonnet, three quatrains and a couplet. This poem focuses on time’s effects on all things of nature, but particularly on his love. Everything fades under time, but Shakespeare creates immortality for his love in his poems. Even though everything in the world seems to want to take away his love’s beauty, Shakespeare knows he can keep her beauty in his mind and for all of perpetuity by writing it down, thus becoming more powerful than time or nature.

Sonnet 18

Similarly with 15, this poem focuses on how to keep his love’s beauty alive by writing about it. The interesting things I found about both 15 and 18 are the allusions to nature, which both use “grafting” as a metaphor. In 15, Shakespeare “engrafts” his love with his poem, allowing a new part of her (the poetic part) to grow from the old. In 18, it’s similar, only here his love is grafted to time itself through his poetry and has thus become immortal.

Sonnet 25

This sonnet is about fame and how it can be dangerous to use others, “stars,” to become famous because they can use their own power to demolish you. For Shakespeare, its much safer to have no power or influence, but to be relatively safe to make your own way in the world rather than use others to gain fame.

Sonnet 60

This poem is about how fast time moves and that life is over before you know it. There’s metaphor on metaphor in this poem, much of which has to do with the earth and Jesus.

Sonnet 97

A seasonal poem, Shakespeare feels as though its winter even though it’s summer because his love is absent from him. Even though autumn has come and the fruits of man’s labor have all come up, he cannot enjoy them because his love is gone. Nature itself seems to be in mourning, as the birds go quiet because she’s absent, and if they do sing, its because winter is on its way.

Sonnet 147

Shakespeare’s body is equated with the Earth, and his soul is the inhabitant. He wants to know why his soul, who spends so brief a time in his body, lingers and puts on such a show when heaven is waiting. Instead of spending all this time/money on food/eating which the worms will only eat anyway, he wants to instead start spending time preparing for divinity. Once he’s dead, death itself will be dead, and then he won’t have to fear dying.