THE SONNETS

Sonnet 1

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    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,
    Thyself 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.

Sonnets 1 to 17 are addressed to a young man, ostensibly to encourage him to a certain course of action. To write seventeen sonnets on the advisability of begetting an heir is a curiosity in itself. Some think the youth may have been William Herbert, a young aristocrat known to be averse to marrying. (The initials W.H. appear somewhat mysteriously in the printer's dedication.) His identification is however a highly vexed question and one which I shall not explore, as it has the barest effect, if any, on a response to the sonnets as poetry. My view is that the poet took up the theme (for whatever reason) and found his way forward with it, both as a writer of sonnets, exploring the potential of his chosen form, and as an explorer at large in a difficult realm: the language of first person love. His plays deal with this on stage; but a different world is entered by the writer writing as himself. The group of seventeen, constructed about a prosaic message as it is, acts as a gateway to it.

This is not to say the feeling behind the words, his advice to the young man to 'get a son' (sonnet 7), is insincere. There can be several reasons for a course of action, some more conscious than others. A reader of poetry makes an individual judgement on such a matter; but in any case sincerity (that no imaginative writer takes an absolute position on) is not what one is looking for, but rather an authentic voice. It is this voice, creator of a storm of statements that speak from the page as if the writer's persona were one of the dramatist's own great characters, that I shall try to some small degree to follow.

Sonnet 1 delights in the assurance and grace of its opening; and, differently, in the sudden note of exasperation that one is tempted to hear in lines 5–6. Salvador Dali's golden Narcissus is before us; and an older person, exhorting him to think beyond himself. Lines 5–6 gather weight with a splendid underlying emphasis. 9 is balanced between surrender and sarcasm; the reader can take it either way. I am persuaded by the line's pure clarity and poise that a more or less total surrender is already on the cards. The ambiguity in the writer's position is itself thrillingly real; and one suspends judgement as to the exact nature of his personal involvement with the subject. 'By' in line 14 is a little vague: the suggestion is that the youth is as greedy as the grave, conspiring with it to leave nothing of himself behind.

Finally we may mention Shakespeare's sonnet-form, the three alternately rhyming quatrains and the final couplet, that others had used to some extent but that he made his own. The dynamic of its use – the craftsmanship of the poet who shapes the instrument he plays on – is touched on in the following pages. By and large it is as great a wonder as anything that at any particular moment is presented in an individual poem.

Sonnet 2

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    When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
    And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
    Thy youth's proud livery, so gaz'd on now,
    Will be a tattered weed of small worth held.
    Then being asked where all thy beauty lies,
    Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
    To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes
    Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
    How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use,
    If thou couldst answer, 'This fair child of mine
    Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,'
    Proving his beauty by succession thine.
    This were to be new made when thou art old,
    And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.

A sonnet is traditionally reserved for the theme of love, though a constellation of ideas may emerge and revolve to present it. It is probably the easiest theme to treat of conventionally, to prettify; the least apt to yield up the inner beauty of the individual voice. The topic has always seemed to require a surrender to the conventional idea of the lover; all too often there is something of a dull composite personality behind a love-poem's words. One of his later sonnets expresses Shakespeare's impatience at the dull and ridiculous language of ardour that poets so often employ. But throughout his own sequence we meet the living person, often with a slight sense of shock. Here he is before us contrasting the ravaged state of later middle age (as forty was then), and by implication surely something like his own, with 'youth's proud livery' (3). The contrast works: almost with a shudder one sees or feels him there.

The 'deep-sunken eyes' (7) of age have haunted me a half-century, taking up residence behind the scenes in my own headas a warning; eyes of an 'all-eating shame' (8) that when it is too late, will know their owner did not manage to fulfil expectations. Shakespeare can do this: bewilderingly a word, an expression can take on an added intent. It may be personal to the reader (as here), amusing, far-searching in its range, or deadly; any or all of these. It is a choice of word, or subordinate idea, with a built-in radar for further action, undeliberate as to specifics, but equipped for the quest that all poetry (as distinct from mere verse) can undertake at one level or another. Ambiguity is not what makes the pulse beat in poetry; nevertheless it lies at the core.

Already the supposed raison d'être of the piece, the same in all the first seventeen, to breed or in some way be cursed, is unconvincing. But Shakespeare evidently enjoyed finding arguments for it. He may very well have read the translation of Erasmus's Epistle to persuade a young gentleman to marriage, that appeared in Thomas Wilson's The Arte of Rhetorique(1553) as an example of the Oration Deliberative. It was a popular book at the time, and one can imagine it playing a part as the poet cast about for a new variation on his theme. Erasmus speaks of a fruitful tillage of the ground, for example, that may have given rise to a line in...