IMMORTALITY IN SHAKESPEAREAN SONNETS.

 


A sonnet is a lyric poem consisting of a single stanza of fourteen iambic pentameter lines linked by an intricate rhyme scheme. There are two major patterns of rhyme in sonnets written in the English language:

The Italian or Petrarchan sonnet (named after fourteenth-century Italian poet Petrarch) falls into two main parts: an octave (eight lines) rhyming abbaabba followed by a sestet (six lines) rhyming cdecde or some variant, such as cdccdc. Petrarch’s sonnet was first imitated in England, by Thomas Wyatt in the early sixteenth century. The earl of surrey and other English experimenters in the sixteenth century also developed a stanza form called the English sonnet, or else the Shakespearean sonnet. This sonnet falls into three quatrains and a concluding couplet: abab cdcd efef gg.

After Wyatt and surrey, the sonnet was neglected for a number of years tills sir Philip Sidney resuscitated the dying form by composing one hundred and eight sonnets and eleven songs all put in astrophel and Stella. After the publication of Sidney’s astrophel and Stella there was a rich harvest of sonnets procured by a host of writers of whom Spenser and Shakespeare are worthy of detailed consideration. Spenser composed eighty-eight sonnets of love and addressed them to Elizabeth boyle and have been given the name amoretti.

Shakespeare’s sonnets, one hundred and fifty-four in number were published in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe. The entire collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets consists of two clearly distinguishable series of sonnets. The first series (1-126) is addressed to a youth, and the second series (127-154) is about a certain dark mistress, to whom the poet in some senses loves, or has loved, but whom he also despises, and despises himself for loving.

Shakespeare’s best remembered sonnets promise eternal life which is one of the major themes that have encouraged the young man to self-perpetuation through biological reproduction

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this and this gives life to thee. (18.13-14)

 

 

 

 

The 1st seventeen sonnets have come to be known as procreation sonnets because the poet in repeated terms and numerous ways tries to influence the fair young man to accept the fact that he should marry, beget children and he should leave behind his progeny who would carry the lineage of the beauty in this world.

Times constant attack is often what we see in sonnet 2 Shakespeare describes its callous and relentless destruction of beauty. He writes to the fair youth

The youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now

Will be tattered weed of small worth held

The poet is lamenting the passing of time and asking his friend to procreate as fairness will fade., beauty will go, time will eat up everything and in 40 years wrinkles will be there and what his friend will answer and as such in sonnet 15, 16, 17  Shakespeare’s verse will be a tomb, a memorial containing lifeless body but cannot reflect the reality of a man or woman and combines immortality in and verse that when this youth will be old, if there’s a child the youth will live twice as in his own child and in the rhymes and people will believe Shakespeare’s rhyme seems the youths beauty to be continued in his child.

The poems temperate subject is first set in a world of extremity, unbalance and temporal decline. just as the soul has “so short a lease” on the fading mansion of the body in sonnets 146, in sonnet 18 “summers lease hath all too short a date” (146.5; 18.4). but the young man will not lose possession of the beauty he owns, unlike the soul or a summers day. Somehow, he will grow “in eternal lines to time” as in sonnet 19 time is personified in a prominent way but in the 13th line  Shakespeare realises it is useless to plead time as the patron will survive as a icon of beauty more than a metaphorical life for in order to reach eternity the visual apparatus of writing must be remembered who speaks the poems words.

Shakespeare provides a ringing endorsement of verse as something better than the gilded monuments of princess in sonnet 55 that the youth will shine in this poems than those stones tat crumble to dust, blackened by time until the judgement day “ending doom” when you are raised up, the youth will live this poetry and in the eyes of lover who  reads this.

 

Shakespeare explores the proposition that whatever he feels for his friend may be preserved through the literary art of poetry by eternalising his memory, immortalising it that in sonnet 60 by describing the ravages of time that it devours the choicest specimens of natures but yet his verses will last into the future praising his worth despite times cruel hand and eventually in sonnet 63 as he defends himself against the cruel knife of time, ensuing that he never cuts from his memory the beauty of his sweet love even if time takes his lovers life.

His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,

And they shall live, and he in them still green.

Demonstrates the power to live and breathe beyond the page and thus to survive.

The “confined doom” of sonnet 107 may also be a place: the small tomb or grave assigned to the poet’s love, the young man. But now, “my love looks fresh,” treated it seems “with the drops of this balmy time.” And so, “thou in this shalt find thy monument” (107.4, 9-10). The aristocratic beloved will be embalmed in effect and placed in the expansive mausoleum of the poet’s words, not in a confined grave.

Shakespeare also explores the idea that love, as an ideal that is inviolable and impervious to times erosive effects, thus in sonnet 115, Shakespeare explains that his earlier sonnets were overwhelmed by the fear of times tyranny ( alas, why, fearing of times tyranny,”) and too little aware of the continually growing and counteracting power of love to outlive time, and eventually in sonnet 116 Shakespeare returns to the same theme, explains that “love is not love/which alters when it alteration finds,” and he refers to it as “an ever fixed mark”.

The image of ideal love that the poet feels towards the fair youth stands in direct contrast to the lustful love the poet feels towards the dark lady, where the lust is transient and inevitably passes with time, but the pure and ideal love that the poet feels towards the fair youth, is capable of evading times tyranny and surviving for eternity

Shakespeare’s sonnets are still fervently read today, four centuries after they were published, is testament to the ability of poetry to transcend time and his poetry still remains to recount the story of his love for youth. Moreover, the fact that many essays about the fair youth and his immortalisation have been written in the centuries since Shakespeare’s death demonstrates that the youth’s legacy still survives as he himself wrote

“so long as men can breathe or eyes can see,” (sonnet 18).

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