Shakespeare’s Sonnets 18, 21, and 130: Three Expressions of Love
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When read in numerical order, Sonnets 21 and 130 seemed to disparage the type of romantic poetry exemplified by Sonnet 18. In the first two quatrains of the latter, Shakespeare expressed doubt that language itself would allow a description of the sheer perfection of the object of his love. The young man in the sonnet (Ackroyd) is without the flaws of what Shakespeare considered the best nature had to offer, “a summer’s day.” Such a day sometimes is “too hot,” sometimes cloudy, and, most importantly, lacks permanence, preceding the dying of nature’s beauty with the onset of autumn. The young man was without these flaws, but could become eternal through poetry, as indeed he has become in the immortal first line of the sonnet. Before learning that the object of Shakespeare’s love was a young man, I had imagined a very young and very beautiful “lady” of the aristocracy, and gender was the only change in my image. However, gender became a reason, in addition to youth and social class, for why Shakespeare’s love seemed to be from afar. While it’s hard to imagine interpreting the poet’s feelings as excluding sexual attraction, as some earlier scholars had (Ackroyd), the sonnet is sad in the sense that Shakespeare seemed to know his love for the young man would not be consummated.
In Sonnet 21, the young man was the same but the poet seemed to have changed. In the first two quatrains, Shakespeare disparaged the hyperbole of romantic poetry, where the object of the poet’s love exceeded anything in nature, such as the “seas rich gems,” and even “heaven” itself. Indeed, he specifically disparaged comparisons with the seasons, such as “April’s first-born flowers,” despite the opening comparison with “a summer’s day” in Sonnet 18. He didn’t deny the perfection of the young man, but concluded his own love was “true” and seemed to imply it would be cheapened by exaggeration. In Sonnet 130, the object of his love has changed to an adult woman and the poet seemed to have become more mature, no longer worshipping the beauty of youth. The “fair” young man of Sonnet 18 became the not perfect, but somehow more erotic, woman with “breasts” of “dun.” Indeed, his description of this woman was humorous (with “black wires…on her head” and “breath that…reeks”), but not offensive because he seemed to love her as a real human, a “love as rare” as the exaggerated worship in romantic poetry.
What seemed to be differences in the narrator of the three sonnets might suggest that the interpretation of the sonnets as autobiographical is unwarranted.
Works Cited
Ackroyd, Peter. Shakespeare: The Biography. New York: Anchor Books (2006).
Shakespeare, William. Sonnets 18, 21, and 130. English add course number handout, Fall (?),
2008.
