Midlife Crisis in William Shakespeare's Sonnet 138
William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 138” presents an aging man’s rationalization for deceit in an affair with a younger woman. The speaker of the sonnet realizes his mistress lies to him about being faithful. He in turn, portrays himself as younger than he actually is: “When my love swears that she is made of truth / I do believe her though I know she lies, / That she might think me some untutored youth…” (1-3). “Sonnet 138” allows the reader a glimpse into the speaker’s mind, and what one finds is a man suffering from what is commonly known as a midlife crisis. In an effort to reverse “the downslope [sic] of age” (Kermode “Millions”), he takes part in a duplicitous affair with a promiscuous woman possibly “in her early twenties” (Hubler 107). Three main themes permeate the speaker’s “tissue of rationalization” throughout the sonnet (Moore “Shakespeare’s”): dishonesty, aging, and lust.
“Sonnet 138” is written in the first-person voice in iambic pentameter. According to Leslie Dunton-Downer and Alan Riding, “iambic pentameter produce[s] sensations of comfort” (45). In this particular sonnet, though the speaker and his mistress lie to each other, they both find comfort, in the form of sexual gratification, from the affair: “Therefore I lie with her and she with me, / And in our faults by lies we flattered be” (13-4). The sonnet has three parts: the first two quatrains, the last quatrain, and the couplet. The first two quatrains express two distinct, yet complementary ideas (Dunton-Downer and Riding 461). In “Sonnet 138,” the two ideas are the speaker and his mistress’ individual deceits and their mutual deceits (1-8). The last quatrain is signaled by the word “But” (9)....
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"Poetry is the revelation of a feeling that the poet believes to be interior and personal [but] which the reader recognizes as his own." (Salvatore Quasimodo). There is something about the human spirit that causes us to rejoice in shared experience. We can connect on a deep level with our fellow man when we believe that somehow someone else understands us as they relate their own joys and hardships; and perhaps nowhere better is this relationship expressed than in that of the poet and his reader. For the current assignment I had the privilege (and challenge) of writing an imitation of William Shakespeare’s "Sonnet 87". This poem touched a place in my heart because I have actually given this sonnet to someone before as it then communicated my thoughts and feelings far better than I could. For this reason, Sonnet 87 was an easy choice for this project, although not quite so easy an undertaking as I endeavored to match Shakespeare’s structure and bring out his themes through similar word choice.
Shakespeare's Sonnet 138 is one of his sonnets about the Dark Lady. Dark both in appearance, and in her actions, she is once again the subject of the sonnet. The speaker is the lover of the Dark Lady. Whether the speaker is married to her or not is not completely clear. Based on lines regarding age “...she knows my days are past the best” (6), it seems that they have been together for a long time, but not necessarily married. The sonnet doesn't sound like the speaker is talking to anyone, but rather musing to himself. When reading aloud, the sonnet sounds like it could a soliloquy, simply the speakers saying his thoughts out loud to himself.
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The sonnet opens with a seemingly joyous and innocent tribute to the young friend who is vital to the poet's emotional well being. However, the poet quickly establishes the negative aspect of his dependence on his beloved, and the complimentary metaphor that the friend is food for his soul decays into ugly imagery of the poet alternating between starving and gorging himself on that food. The poet is disgusted and frightened by his dependence on the young friend. He is consumed by guilt over his passion. Words with implicit sexual meanings permeate the sonnet -- "enjoyer", "treasure", "pursuing", "possessing", "had" -- as do allusions to five of the seven "deadly" sins -- avarice (4), gluttony (9, 14), pride (5), lust (12), and envy (6).
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Sonnet 130 is Shakespeare’s harsh yet realistic tribute to his quite ordinary mistress. Conventional love poetry of his time would employ Petrarchan imagery and entertain notions of courtly love. Francis Petrarch, often noted for his perfection of the sonnet form, developed a number of techniques for describing love’s pleasures and torments as well as the beauty of the beloved. While Shakespeare adheres to this form, he undermines it as well. Through the use of deliberately subversive wordplay and exaggerated similes, ambiguous concepts, and adherence to the sonnet form, Shakespeare creates a parody of the traditional love sonnet. Although, in the end, Shakespeare embraces the overall Petrarchan theme of total and consuming love.
Steele, Felicia Jean. "Shakespeare's SONNET 130." Explicator 62.3 (2004): 132-137. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Nov. 2013.
Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 well fills and fits the three quatrains and single couplet of the Elizabethan sonnet. We can be sure there is no doubt to believe that some of Shakespeare's sonnets, like Sonnet 73, were well known and he was surely placed at the head of the dramatists and high among the non-dramatic poets. As Bender and Squier claimed (75), in the sixteenth century, Shakespeare is England's greatest playwright and the best of the Elizabethan sonneteers.
Much has been made (by those who have chosen to notice) of the fact that in Shakespeare's sonnets, the beloved is a young man. It is remarkable, from a historical point of view, and raises intriguing, though unanswerable, questions about the nature of Shakespeare's relationship to the young man who inspired these sonnets. Given 16th-Century England's censorious attitudes towards homosexuality, it might seem surprising that Will's beloved is male. However, in terms of the conventions of the poetry of idealized, courtly love, it makes surprisingly little difference whether Will's beloved is male or female; to put the matter more strongly, in some ways it makes more sense for the beloved to be male.
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The fourteen line sonnet is constructed by three quatrains and one couplet. With the organization of the poem, Shakespeare accomplishes to work out a different idea in each of the three quatrains as he writes the sonnet to lend itself naturally. Each of the quatrain contains a pair of images that create one universal idea in the quatrain. The poem is written in a iambic pentameter with a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Giving the poem a smooth rhyming transition from stanza to
Steele, Felicia Jean. "Shakespeare's SONNET 130." Explicator 62.3 (2004): 132-137. Academic Search Complete. Web. 22 Nov. 2013.
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