SHAKSPEARE'S SONNETS

PERSONAL AND DRAMATIC

WRITTEN TO AND FOR THE

EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON.

Our most observant Man, most unobserved;
Maker of Portraits for Humanity!

He held the Mirror up to Nature's face,
Forgetting with colossal carelessness
To look into it and reflect his own:
Even in the Sonnets he put on the Mask
And was, at times, a Player as in the Plays.

PERSONAL SONNETS.

The earliest Sonnets personal to Shakspeare commending marriage to his young friend the Earl of Southampton.

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby Beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender Heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial
fuel,

Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel :
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content
And, tender churl! mak'st waste in niggarding:

Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and
thee.
(1)

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tattered weed, of small worth held:
Then being asked where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise:
How much more praise deserved thy beauty's

Thou art thy Mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime :
So thou, through windows of thine age, shalt

see,

Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time:
But if thou live-remembered not to be-
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.
(3)

Unthrifty loveliness! why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty's legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And, being frank, she lends to those are free:
Then, beauteous niggard! why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer! why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For, having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive:
Then how, when Nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?

Thy unused beauty must be tombed with
thee,

Which, used, lives thy executor to be.

(4)

Those hours, that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same,
And that unfair, which fairly doth excel:
For never-resting Time leads summer on
To hideous winter, and confounds him there;
Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite
gone,

Beauty o'er-snowed, and bareness everywhere:
Then, were not Summer's distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was!
But flowers distilled, though they with winter
meet,

Leese but their show; their substance still
lives sweet.
(5)

Then let not Winter's rugged hand deface
In thee thy summer, ere thou be distilled :

When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And Summer's green all girded up in sheaves,
Borne on the bier with white and bristly
beard ;-

Then of thy beauty do I question make,

That thou amongst the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;

And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make
defence,

Save breed, to brave him when he takes
thee hence.
(12)

O, that you were yourself! but Love, you are
No longer yours, than you yourself here live:

Against this coming end you should prepare,
And your sweet semblance to some other give:
So should that beauty which you hold in lease,
Find no determination; then you were
Yourself again after yourself's decease,
When your sweet issue your sweet form should
bear:

Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,
Which husbandry in honour might uphold
Against the stormy gusts of winter's day,
And barren rage of Death's eternal cold?
O none but unthrifts! Dear, my Love, you
know

You had a Father; let your Son say so.

(13)

In my previous treatment of the Sonnets I did not dare to date the earliest of them quite early enough; nor did I fully apprehend all that depended on getting the chronology absolutely right. I then said, "In this first group the Poet advises and persuades his young friend the Earl of Southampton to get married. A very practical object in writing the Sonnets! This of itself shows that he did not set out to write after the fashion of Drayton and Daniel, and dally with 'Idea' as they did. Here is a young noble of nature's own making; a youth of quick and kindling blood, apt to take fire at a touch, whether of pleasure or of pain; likely enough to be enticed into the garden of Armida and the palace of sin. He is left without the guidance of a father, and the Poet feels for him an affection all the more protecting and paternal. We may perceive that underneath the pretty conceits sparkling on the surface of these Earlier Sonnets there lies a grave purpose, a profound depth of wisdom. This urgency on the score of marriage is no mere sonneteering trick, or playing with the shadows of things. The writer knows well enough that there is nothing like true marriage, a worthy wife, the love of children, and a happy home, to bring the exuberant life into the keeping of the highest, holiest law. Nothing like the wifely influence, and the clinging of children's wee fingers, for twining winningly about the lusty energies of youth, and realizing the antique image of Love riding on a lion; the laughing mite triumphantly leading captive the fettered might, having taken him 'prisoner, in a red rose chain!' Seeing his young friend surrounded with temptations, his personal beauty of mien and manner being so prominent a mark for the darts of the wicked one, he would fain have him safely shielded by the sacred shelter of marriage. Accordingly he assails him with suggestion and argument in many forms of natural appeal; and whilst harping much on the main object for which marriage was designed, the harmony of the life truly wedded rises like a strain of exquisite music, as it were, wooing the youth from within the doors of the marriage sanctuary." This has now to be modified. And here let me say, it is a great advantage as well as a privilege to be able to write one's work over again after many years. It is like having had the benefit of experience in being married a second time. The carliest Sonnets on marriage could not have been written until after Shakspeare had read the Arcadia of Sir Philip Sidney. So great is the likeness between Sidney's writing and Shakspeare's Sonnets, that Sir Walter Scott fancied these must have been read by Sidney. The likeness remains, but the