January 4, 2023 – Shakespeare’s Sonnet #2

For Sonnet #2 we’ll begin with the same level of analysis that Spurgeon recommended for the 2nd Psalm, division into a four-fold picture.

Sonnet #2

By William Shakespeare

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 use
If thou couldst answer “This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse”,
Proving his beauty by succession thine.
    This were to be new made when thou art old,
    And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

What happens when you age, when you get old? How do you behave when you know you are not the young man (or young woman) you used to be? It’s a question of existence, since, if we live, we will get old. I think this is a central question for Sonnet #2.

First four lines: At age 40, the sonnet’s subject starts showing his age in his face, lines, wrinkles, etc., his value in terms of facial beauty in a depreciating state. The baby face is the first to go, perhaps. There is also an element of Dante’s Divine Comedy here, “Midway upon the journey of our life/I found myself in a dark wilderness,/for I had wandered from the straight and true.” Scholars agree that while Shakespeare didn’t speak Italian, he had probably been exposed to Dante’s work.

Second four lines: People may ask of the sonnet’s subject (“then being asked where all thy beauty lies- where all the treasure of thy lusty days -” ), what happened to your youthful beauty, the source of your vanity as a younger, active person. Eyes sunken from aging, the subject acknowledges his now lost opportunities, while longing for the faint (thriftless) praise that fed his ego in earlier days. But is no more.

Here we also sense the end of the opening argument, the octet (first eight lines), which encapsulated the motive for action in his earlier life, the seeking of societal praise. With all due respect to Spurgeon, the Italian sonnet division (eight and six) outweighs the British stanza form for explanation. There is a volta, a turnabout, as the action relocates to the sestet, or the last six lines. The alternative view in the first four lines of the sestet questions the value of youth without the transference of that youth to a newer model, a student, or an offspring, perhaps, “proving his beauty by succession thine.”

The closing couplet, also a part of the sestet’s response, opens and shuts the possibility of a new beginning of narcissistic self-appreciation (“this were to be new made”) at so advanced an age, imagining the warm blood of youth when the sensation of aging contradicts that reality. Act your age.

I’m not really seeing a strong correlation between this and what we discussed in the 2nd Psalm. I can stretch and make a weak correlation across the idea of the futility of individual self-deception in the sonnet and of the body politic in the psalm. Perhaps the correlation is the illusion of the rulers and the people in Psalm 2 (the people imagine a vain thing) compared to the illusion of Sonnet #2’s subject, entering middle age, that he still has some “wind in his sail.” We see a repetition of “fairest creature” in Sonnet #1 and “fair child of mine” in Sonnet #2 that may not be accidental.

It’s just a try, but these are really stretches. We may come back to this one later. Sometimes poetry is just hard!