A Summary and Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘When in the chronicle of wasted time’ is one of the more famous poems in Shakespeare’s cycle of 154 sonnets. In the sonnet, Shakespeare addresses the Fair Youth, a young fair-haired man, and praises his beauty, arguing that the Youth is more beautiful than anyone who has lived before him.

Before we proceed to an analysis of the poem’s features, here’s a reminder of Sonnet 106, with a summary of the poem’s meaning.

Summary

When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme,
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,

The poet begins by saying: ‘When I read descriptions of beautiful people in old books, people whose beauty inspired old poems, praising women who are now dead and handsome knights …’

Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique pen would have expressed
Even such a beauty as you master now.

‘… I see in such descriptions of these paragons of beauty that the authors would have gladly described your beauty.’ Here, Shakespeare is addressing the Fair Youth, the beautiful young fair-haired man who is the subject of the majority of the Sonnets.

A ‘blazon’ is a list of desirable qualities: the term is derived from the world of heraldry, where it referred to the coat of arms which appeared on a shield.

So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring;
And for they looked but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing:

The poet goes on: ‘So all of their praise of others is merely a foreshadowing of your beauty in the present time – yet although they had the wit to predict your arrival, they did not have the skill to describe you.’

Note: Don Paterson, in his commentary on this poem in his Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, points out the ‘controversy’ surrounding the word ‘skill’ in that twelfth line: in one early printing of the sonnet, ‘skill’ was rendered as ‘still’, so the line read, ‘They had not still enough your worth to sing’.

However, this makes little sense grammatically, even if the sense of the lines can be made to fit with ‘still’ (that is, Shakespeare is arguing that previous poets ‘still’, or ‘as yet’, lacked the inspiration needed to write great poetry about beauty, since they lived in a time before the Fair Youth existed).

Paterson notes an alternative reading: that ‘still’ was an archaic spelling of ‘style’, i.e., ‘They lacked the necessary style to praise your worth’. So, ‘skill’ and ‘style’ both work.

However, in his edition of the Sonnets, Stephen Booth gives the word as ‘skill’, and this appears to be the mainstream opinion: that ‘still’ was a misreading/misprinting and the word should have been ‘skill’. Anyway, on to the final two lines of the sonnet:

For we, which now behold these present days,
Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

Shakespeare concludes Sonnet 106 by arguing: ‘For even we poets who live now at the same time as you can admire your beauty, but we don’t have the skill to put such beauty into adequate words.’

Here, ‘eyes to wonder’ means ‘the ability to marvel at your beauty’: ‘wonder’ here means ‘appreciate with wonder’ rather than ‘ruminate’ or ‘consider’.

Analysis

Sonnet 106 is another poem addressed to the Fair Youth, whose beauty Shakespeare praises. And it appears to be a fairly straightforward poem in terms of its meaning.

The effects Shakespeare generates are worthy of analysis, though: ‘wights’ is an odd choice of word perhaps, to describe ‘people’, but since ‘wight’ is an archaic – that is, an old-fashioned and outdated – term for ‘person’, it’s an appropriate choice of noun, given that Shakespeare is talking about having his nose in old books at this point.

It’s also fitting that the Bard mentions both ‘ladies’ and ‘knights’ (again, calling up a bygone medieval age of chivalry), since the Fair Youth, as Sonnet 20 had shown most clearly, possessed an androgynous beauty, being delicate but also manly, with masculine as well as feminine qualities. ‘Wights’ is similarly an apt word, then, in this context, since it’s a gender-neutral word.

This poem follows hot on the heels of Sonnet 105, in which Shakespeare had offered the blasphemous view that the Fair Youth was like God. In this sonnet, Shakespeare continues this blasphemous line of praise by casting the Fair Youth as a Christ-like figure, with these previous paragons of beauty being John the Baptists who prefigure the Coming of the Saviour.

Shakespeare’s point in the concluding couplet is that even though he and his contemporaries are fortunate enough to live at the same time as the Fair Youth, rather than the poets of old who could merely look forward to the arrival of such a beautiful human, they still can’t find the words to do such beauty justice, even though they are able to behold his beauty with their own eyes.

Why ‘wasted time’ in that opening reference to ‘the chronicle of wasted time’? ‘Wasted’ here should be interpreted as meaning ‘consumed’ or ‘spent’: essentially, time that has passed. A ‘blazon’, by the way, is a list of admirable qualities, from the heraldic term (meaning ‘shield’) for a coat of arms.

Form

Sonnet 106 takes the form of an English sonnet, also sometimes known as a ‘Shakespearean sonnet’. Although Shakespeare helped to popularise this kind of sonnet, he didn’t actually come up with it himself: instead, the credit should go to Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey (c. 1517-47), who originated it some half-a-century before Shakespeare composed his Sonnets.

What form does a Shakespearian, or English, sonnet take? Like most sonnets, it has fourteen lines, but with the Shakespearian sonnet these fourteen lines are divided into three quatrains (four-line stanzas) and a concluding couplet.

There is usually a ‘turn’ – a slight change in the direction of the sonnet’s ‘argument’ – at the beginning of the rhyming couplet, so at the start of the thirteenth line.

We can see this in Sonnet 106, as Shakespeare begins the thirteenth line with the words ‘For we …’, indicating his intention to ‘sum up’ the points he has been making in the previous twelve lines, and declare to the Fair Youth that he, the poet, considers the young man so beautiful that he renders all poets tongue-tied or speechless when they are confronted with his wonderful beauty.

If you found this analysis of Sonnet 106 useful, you can discover more of Shakespeare’s best sonnets with ‘Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore’, ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’, and ‘Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing’.