Shakespeares Sonnets

Shakespeare's Sonnets 18, 73, 97

Poets have often looked to nature for inspiration and as a vehicle for self-expression. Throughout his lifetime, William Shakespeare is known to have written 154 sonnets, which cover various topics such as love, mortality, and the passage of time. Of these sonnets, sonnet numbers 18, 73, and 97 incorporate seasonal symbols that allow Shakespeare to express his love, the passage of time and its effect on him, and serve as a metaphor for the intense desolation he feels when he is away from the person he loves.

Sonnet 18, more commonly known by its opening line of "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," utilizes seasonal symbols as a measure of beauty. In this sonnet, Shakespeare considers nature to be beautiful, however, he points out its cyclical nature and argues that his beloved's beauty, unlike nature's, is constant. He begins, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?/Thou art more lovely and temperate:/Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May/And summer's lease hath all too short a date," which point to a measurement of time (line 1-4). Through these lines, Shakespeare comments on the length of a summer day, and the entire summer itself, which he believes his beloved's beauty outlasts. Shakespeare proceeds to comment on actual summer days, noting how temperatures rise and fall, and how intermittent clouds can dim the world, yet despite these solar changes, his beloved's beauty remains constant. He explains, "Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,/And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;/And every fair from fair sometime declines,/By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd" (5-8). While Shakespeare continues to use seasonal symbolism into the poem's third quatrain, there is a marked change in tone as the poem nears the end. In the previous two quatrains, Shakespeare uses seasonal symbolism to comment on the temperamental disposition of nature, however, in the third quatrain, he argues that unlike summer, his beloved's beauty is eternal, not only because he believes it to be, but also because he has immortalized it in writing, and as long as people are alive, his works will live on. Shakespeare contends, "thy eternal summer shall not fade/Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;/Nor shall Death brag though wander'st in his shade,/When in eternal lines to time thou growest" (9-12). By using seasonal symbolism to describe his beloved's beauty, Shakespeare is able to make his love for this unnamed woman relatable to others and allow them to better understand his deep emotional connection to her.

Seasonal symbolism in Sonnet 73, "That time of year thou mayest in me behold," is used to illustrate the passage of time and the effect that it has had on the narrator. In the sonnet, the narrator states that the passage of time has manifested itself in him like the changing of seasons. Shakespeare writes, "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 ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang" (1-4). Through this description, the narrator creates parallels between his age and autumn, in which he insinuates that just like the leaves changing and falling from trees in autumn lead to bare trees in desolate winter, he too is changing, possibly losing some of his senses, and slowly creeping towards death. The narrator continues to comment on how he is towards the end of his life by comparing himself to the closing of day and claims, "In me thoug seest 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 the rest" (5-8). He continues to explain this analogy by comparing himself to dying embers -- "In me thou sees't 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" -- and explains that it is the fear created by his now limited time on earth that compels the woman he loves to love him more because it will not be long before he succumbs to the inevitable, and "This thou perceivest, which makes they love more strong,/To love that well which though must leave ere long" (9-12; 13-14). By commenting on his impending death, and how it mirrors the transition from autumn into winter, the narrator not only contends that he should make the most of the time he has left, but he simultaneously urges his readers to appreciate nature more because even though the leaves on the tree will return in the spring and summer, they will never be the same as they are at that exact moment.