For example, the popular New International Version (NIV) translation expresses the passage this way: 18 This famous sonnet is often included beside the words of Paul from 1 Corinthians 13:4–8, which is usually read aloud from a modern translation that renders the central term as “love”. It seems a rare experience to attend a wedding in an English-speaking country in which Sonnet 116 does not make an appearance, and it has been popular with “enerations of readers have understood this poem to constitute a lyrical definition of true love, that is, love that transcends time and is unperturbed by age and change”. Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), 62.ġ9 This is not to say, however, that the philosophical heights of a Bembo have no place in Shakespeare’s sonnets-such heights are scaled, most notably in a sonnet often used in perhaps the most inappropriate context of all: wedding ceremonies. It starts with a seemingly orthodox statement of the ephemerality of all things in this world of flux and change: Sonnet 15 rejects these ideas in no uncertain terms. What Diotima teaches, what Bembo describes, and what Sidney’s Astrophil struggles to believe and act upon, is the idea that individual beauty-no matter how compelling-is only a doorway to wider spaces and greater wonders, a window through which one can see the light, though it is not the light itself. In Neoplatonic terms, even in Petrarchan terms, this is only a problem of incorrect perception and valuation. 9 Everything and everyone, in the terms of Sonnet 15, is a thing of a moment, soon to disappear. In Goethe’s formulation, “Art is long! And our life is short”. Reproduction through children, though still encouraged in this poem, and a number of those that follow, is no longer put forward as the most effective preservation technique. Goethe rev (.)ġ1 But something has changed. 9 “Die Kunst ist lang! Und kurz ist unser Leben” (Goethe.The young man is asked to consider his mother: As with the troubadour poems, the individual takes center stage here, a flesh-and-blood mortal who is of worth in himself.Ĩ In Sonnet 3 the young man is placed in a sequence of acts of memory-each generation’s beauty serving, not to remind onlookers of Beauty itself, but to remind them of the beauty of those individuals Time and Death have taken or will soon take. That can take care of itself the poems speak of preserving the all-too-ephemeral beauty of an individual subject to time, decay, and death.
These sonnets focus on the value inherent in the person, not on preserving the form of Beauty for the next generation. Their power depends on the tragic sense of watching as a beautiful individual slowly but surely fades away. 5Ħ The shift in emphasis is already clear-rather than being primarily concerned with “beauty’s rose”, the form of beauty, or with any God-given command to reproduce, this poem is concerned with the preservation of the individual rose (the young man himself), or at least with the preservation of the memory of that rose.ħ The next several sonnets make that concern obvious. To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee. Within thine own bud buriest thy content,Īnd tender churl mak’st waste in niggarding: Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament, In the terms of the sonnet, “we” want to see a proliferation of such copies in order that the form or idea will not disappear from the world: Rather than treating the individual as a means to an end, the lowest rung on the ladder of love, Shakespeare’s sonnets reverse this emphasis, valuing the individual as an end in itself, not a means to some higher goal.Ģ In effecting this reversal, Sonnet 1 begins with a recognizably Platonic image, “beauty’s rose”, which is something like the form of rose, rather than the tangible flower which, for a good Platonist or Neoplatonist, is merely a copy of the higher reality. 1 Most truly “of the English strain”, Shakespeare’s sonnets are a reversing, even a mocking of the Petrarchan mode and the Neoplatonic sublimation of passion into worship that sometimes marks the poetry of Sidney. 1 The true recovery of the troubadour tradition comes with Shakespeare, the poet and playwright who “towers like a mountain peak above the surrounding foothills, but is one substance and structure with them”.