Archive for Shakespeare Sonnet

Sonnet No. 75

Posted in Poetry with tags , , , , , on September 18, 2025 by telescoper 
So are you to my thoughts as food to life,
Or as sweet-season'd showers are to the ground;
And for the peace of you I hold such strife
As 'twixt a miser and his wealth is found.
Now proud as an enjoyer, and anon
Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure;
Now counting best to be with you alone,
Then better'd that the world may see my pleasure:
Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,
And by and by clean starved for a look;
Possessing or pursuing no delight
Save what is had, or must from you be took.
   Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day,
   Or gluttoning on all, or all away.

by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

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Sonnet No. 112

Posted in Poetry with tags , , , , , on September 2, 2025 by telescoper 
Your love and pity doth the impression fill
Which vulgar scandal stamp’d upon my brow;
For what care I who calls me well or ill,
So you o’er-green my bad, my good allow?
You are my all the world, and I must strive
To know my shames and praises from your tongue;
None else to me, nor I to none alive,
That my steel’d sense or changes right or wrong.
In so profound abysm I throw all care
Of others’ voices, that my adder’s sense
To critic and to flatterer stopped are.
Mark how with my neglect I do dispense:
    You are so strongly in my purpose bred
    That all the world besides methinks are dead.

by by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

I find myself returning once again to Shakespeare’s sonnets, especially to the sequence of 126 poems that the poet addressed to a “Fair Youth“. This one is written in quite difficult language (for me) with some obscure words and phrases such as “adder’s sense”, “o’er-green” and “steel’d sense”. It’s almost as if parts of it are written in code. Nevertheless the overall meaning of the poem is clear: it revolves around the beautiful “You are my all the world” in line 5, shining out through the thickets, with “all the world” repeated in the last line for extra effect. The poet is saying that nobody’s opinion of him matters at all except that of his beloved. Know the feeling?

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Sonnet No. 76

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on June 29, 2019 by telescoper
Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods, and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth, and where they did proceed?
O know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument,
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
   For as the sun is daily new and old,
   So is my love still telling what is told

 

by William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

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