Shakespeare, Sonnet 57 a Reading of William

Shakespeare, Sonnet 57

A Reading of William Shakespeare's Sonnet 57

Shakespeare's Sonnet 57 begins with a striking metaphor: "being your slave." Shakespeare does not soften the image by using a simile to suggest he is "like a slave" -- he is already a slave because he is in love. Structurally any Shakespeare sonnet consists of three quatrains and a concluding couplet, in which the quatrains in some way speak to each other, ramifying or deepening the argument in some way. Here the striking opening metaphor of servitude is ramified and toyed with throughout the quatrains. But intriguingly the final couplet of the sonnet sidesteps all the imagery of slavery and servitude to redefine the terms of the lover's situation as described in the earlier body of the sonnet. I intend to show how the metaphor of slavery used in the first three words of the sonnet is unwritten by the last two lines.

In the opening quatrains the metaphor of servitude is sustained continuously. "Slave" in line one establishes the metaphor but "services" in line 4 confirms it, although slyly Shakespeare seems to be suggesting that these "services" are sexual: the lover waits upon the beloved's erotic whim ("tend / upon" is an abbreviated form of "attend / upon," and as a slave he is attendant upon his master's -- or perhaps mistress's -- desire). Shakespeare's joke here is to compare a slave waiting to be issued orders with a lover waiting for the beloved to initiate erotic congress. By the middle of the next quatrain, the poet addresses the beloved as "my sovereign" and by the end of that quatrain established himself as "your servant": in other words the sort of elaborate status-difference (and deference) that is associated with a monarch and her servants. It is only by the third and final quatrain that the stark metaphor is softened into a poignant simile: "like a sad slave," with the alliteration on "sad slave" singling out the phrase, as though to correct the opening line by adjusting the insouciance of the opening question with the pathos of the lover's genuine mood of servitude and bondage.

But by the second quatrain we begin to see how this servitude is actually defined -- the poet "watch[es] the clock for you" but does not "chide the world-without-end hour," another hyperbolic metaphor which compares the hour spent waiting for his beloved who remains in "absence" (line 7). In other words, the beloved is probably out having a better time with somebody who is not the poet, and that's why this feels like slavery. Consequently the denial of any jealous sentiment on the part of the poet in the third and final quatrain is meant to establish that, even if the beloved is sleeping with someone else (normally an occasion for "jealous thought"), the poet will only remain "like a sad slave" to think of "how happy you make those" you are with, even if you are not with me.

Finally we come to the concluding couplet, which drops the metaphor of slavery altogether: "So true a fool is love that in your will, / Though you do any thing, he thinks no ill." What this does is to make it clear that the striking metaphor of slave has been replaced with the more traditional metaphor for the situation of this particular lover, which is, fool. We still use the metaphor "fooling around" as a euphemism for cheating in a relationship -- in this case, only a fool could be so willingly cheated that although "you do anything [to him], he thinks no ill." In other words: this lover is complacent rather than anguished in the fact that his beloved is with someone else -- he "thinks no ill."