A sonnet is a poem of 14 lines that rhyme in a particular pattern. Shakespeare used sonnets within some of his plays (especially Love's Labour's Lost), but his sonnets are best known as a series of 154 poems that tell a story about a young aristocrat and a mysterious mistress.
The sonnet form is one of the most difficult for a poet. The restricted pattern forces the poet to capture the maximum passion within those 14 lines. In his plays, Shakespeare was free to add subplots, use long speeches, vary the rhyme scheme, and mix prose and verse. But in the sonnets, you meet Shakespeare the master poet.
Hallmarks of Shakespeare's sonnets
 | Shakespeare didn't invent the style named after him, but he perfected it. One of the hallmarks of Shakespeare's sonnets is his use of the final couplet (two adjacent lines that rhyme), either to summarize the rest of the sonnet in two neat lines or to throw you a surprise ending. For example, Sonnet 19 bemoans the advance of "devouring time," and the poet asks time to "carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow." The surprise ending comes in the last two lines: |
Yet do thy worst, old Time, despite thy wrong, My love shall in my verse ever live young.
He used the same sonnet style when he included sonnets in his plays and in his series of 154 sonnets published in 1609. The sonnets in the series are not titled and are referred to by number. We don't know whether Shakespeare determined the order and numbering of the sonnets. You can read more about the questions surrounding the sonnets in the section "The Mystery of the Sonnets," later in this chapter.
Shakespeare the poet is also Shakespeare the playwright and vice versa. Even in the sonnets, Shakespeare cannot escape his ties to the theater. In some of the sonnets, he uses theatrical metaphors, such as the start of Sonnet 23:
As an unperfect actor on the stage, Who with his fear is put besides his part;
Rhyme and reason
Unlike Shakespeare's plays, which are mostly in blank — or unrhymed — verse, the sonnets follow a specific rhyme pattern, represented as abab cdcd efef gg. (The standard way to show a rhyme pattern in a poem is to use letters, where each letter represents a different rhyme at the end of a line.)
Each line follows the same rhythmic pattern that Shakespeare used in his plays — dah-DUM dah-DUM dah-DUM dah-DUM dah-DUM — called iambic pentameter. The rhythm of the sonnets is more striking than the rhythm usually found in his plays. That doesn't mean that you need to read the poems with a heavy beat, but you should feel the beat and how it carries you through each line. Read each poem out loud to fully appreciate its beauty.
Sonnet 18 is typical of Shakespeare's sonnets:
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 first line rhymes with the third, and the second rhymes with the fourth, giving the pattern abab. The next set of four lines follows the same pattern, but the rhymes are different from those in the first four lines, so the pattern is cdcd. The third set of four lines also rhymes in the same pattern, giving efef. The last two lines rhyme as a couplet: gg.
| Almost all of Shakespeare's sonnets follow this same rhyme pattern: abab cdcd efef gg. Only a few sonnets have different patterns — for example, Sonnet 126 has 12 lines in 6 couplets. |
The story of the sonnets
Shakespeare's collection of sonnets reveals a story. Most of the poems speak to a handsome young lord: advising him, admonishing him, praising him, and nagging him. The last several poems are about the poet's mistress, who apparently also became the young lord's mistress. The poet in the sonnets is not necessarily Shakespeare himself. One of the mysteries of the sonnets is whether they are autobiographical. Either way, you can enjoy the story and the poetry of the sonnets separately from the mystery.
The series starts with several poems that encourage the lord to settle down and have children. His youthful beauty will not last forever, and the poet urges the lord to have children so that the lord's beauty can live in his children. The first 17 sonnets repeat this same message.
Many of the early sonnets sing the praises of the young lord and express the poet's love and admiration for him. Shakespeare used love in this context to mean a deep friendship without any sexual connotation, as you can read in Sonnet 26, which begins like this:
Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit:
To thee I send this written embassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit;
The story turns sour — the lord steals the poet's mistress, or maybe the mistress seduces the poet's friend. The friends contend for her, but in the end, the poet gives her up to the lord. Another crisis arises when the lord becomes patron to a rival poet. In the end, though, the young lord and poet are reconciled:
Sonnets 1 through 126 tell the story of the young lord. Sonnet 127 begins a new section, this one focusing on the poet's mistress. The poet describes her as "black," which doesn't literally mean black, but darker than the standard of beauty at the time: pale and blond. The poet's description of his mistress is most interesting in Sonnet 130, which pokes fun at the exaggerations of conventional love poetry:
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.
As you know from the first part of the sonnets, the poet loses his mistress to the young lord. He struggles with his competing interests, but it's clear which way his preferences tend:
Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,
Which, like two spirits, do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill.
To win me soon to hell my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,
And would corrupt my saint to be a devil,
Wooing his purity with her foul pride;
And whether that my angel be turned fiend
Suspect I may, yet not directly tell;
But being both from me both to each friend,
I guess one angel in another's hell:
Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,
Till my bad angel fire my good one out. (Sonnet 144)
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