Raisa, Austin, and I chose this poem for it is seemingly unique in not directly referencing reproduction. We read the poem through Vendler’s categories of perception and philosophy. The speaker is particularly focused on “summer’s distillation” (9) and and “flower’s distilled” (13), calling to mind perfume. Yet, he seems to use sight and visualization as his main type of perception. He uses strong imagery in lines such as “sap checked with frost” (7) and “liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass” (10). This subtly forces the reader to continue think about physical beauty, even as the poem is ostensibly about essence. Similarly, Shakespeare questions the philosophy of reproduction in this poem by arguing that the poem itself is a way for this man to preserve his beauty, not reproduction. Shakespeare talks a lot in this poem of remembrance vs. forgetting, as well as preserving “substance” (14), and seems to use the poem in order to distill the man’s beauty and essence into 14 lines. Raisa and Austin, all yours!
2 thoughts on “Shakespeare Sonnet #5”
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Great thoughts, Kacie! We also discussed how the form of the sonnet functions as the “walls of the glass”- the form of a sonnet is a constraint to contain the “perfume” or distilled essence of the young man. We also looked at the language and noticed how there is no direct description of the young man (i.e.no description of the color of his eyes or lips ec, ect) but there is the use of the word “beauty”- this means the language itself is distilled into its most concentrated form (like a perfume).
Another topic brought up in our discussion was the sonnet’s reference to a cyclical pattern of time. This can be seen through his comparison of human life: “Those hours that with gentle work did frame / The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,” to the seasons: “For never-resting time leads summer on / To hideous winter and confounds him there” (29). The ever-repeating progression through the seasons implies that the sonnet takes the view that a single human life is part of a larger pattern, rather than placing importance on an individual. However, in doing so, he is not devaluing the importance of someone’s life; rather, he compares the preservation of one’s memory to a perfume from the summer’s flowers saved and its value becoming even more precious, “Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft” (29). Furthermore, because a perfume of the flower “Leese[s] but their show; their substance still lives sweet,” the sonnet refers back to its introduction of a man’s beauty being temporary and therefore less important. I had a lot of thoughts and the above sentences are incredibly scattered because I just wanted to get them out. Sorry!