Shakespeare’s Sonnets – Page 2 – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 97: ‘How like a winter hath my absence been’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Sonnet 97 has a famous opening line, but the rest of the poem remains less famous. Yet the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Don Paterson have both expressed admiration for it, so the sonnet is worth closer analysis and explication. Before we proceed to a few words of commentary on Sonnet 97, here’s a reminder of the poem.

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December’s bareness everywhere!
And yet this time removed was summer’s time;
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burden of the prime,
Like widow’d wombs after their lords’ decease:
Yet this abundant issue seemed to me
But hope of orphans, and unfathered fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And, thou away, the very birds are mute:

A Short Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94: ‘They that have power to hurt’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Considered one of the most challenging and ambiguous of all the Sonnets, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, beginning ‘They that have power to hurt, and will do none’, is, for our money, also one of the top five best sonnets in the whole sequence.

A Short Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 87: ‘Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing’. Nobody could accuse Sonnet 87 of failing to begin dramatically. One of the more famous sonnets in Shakespeare’s sequence of 154 poems about love, sex, desire, wigs (see Sonnet 68), and rivalry, Sonnet 87 is also one of the great English poems about deciding to end a relationship. (Indeed, it could have featured, although it didn’t, in our pick of the greatest breaking-up poems.) Before we proceed to our analysis of the poem’s meaning, here’s a quick reminder of Sonnet 87.

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know’st thy estimate,
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving.
Thy self thou gavest, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me to whom thou gav’st it else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgement making.
Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.

A Short Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 83: ‘I never saw that you did painting need’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Sonnet 83 continues the theme Shakespeare treated in the previous sonnet, by comparing his own poetry about the Fair Youth with the poetic efforts of some rival poets. Before we move to an analysis of Sonnet 83, here’s a reminder of the poem:

I never saw that you did painting need,
And therefore to your fair no painting set;
I found, or thought I found, you did exceed
The barren tender of a poet’s debt:
And therefore have I slept in your report,
That you yourself, being extant, well might show
How far a modern quill doth come too short,
Speaking of worth, what worth in you doth grow.
This silence for my sin you did impute,
Which shall be most my glory being dumb;
For I impair not beauty being mute,
When others would give life, and bring a tomb.
There lives more life in one of your fair eyes
Than both your poets can in praise devise.

A Short Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 82: ‘I grant thou wert not married to my Muse’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘I grant thou wert not married to my Muse’ is the 82^nd sonnet in Shakespeare’s sequence of 154 sonnets charting the romantic drama that’s played out between the poet, the Fair Youth, the Dark Lady, and the rival poet. In this poem, Shakespeare genteelly criticises his contemporaries who excessively praise beauty in their poems, arguing that when a poet is writing about the beauty of the Fair Youth, Shakespeare’s way – telling the truth and speaking plainly – is much more effective. Before we offer some words of analysis of Sonnet 82, here is the poem.

I grant thou wert not married to my Muse,
And therefore mayst without attaint o’erlook
The dedicated words which writers use
Of their fair subject, blessing every book.
Thou art as fair in knowledge as in hue,
Finding thy worth a limit past my praise;
And therefore art enforced to seek anew
Some fresher stamp of the time-bettering days.