Flowers and Trees
Flowers and trees appear throughout
the sonnets to illustrate the passage of time, the transience of life, the
aging process, and beauty. Rich, lush foliage symbolizes youth, whereas barren
trees symbolize old age and death, often in the same poem, as in Sonnet 12.
Traditionally, roses signify romantic love, a symbol Shakespeare employs in the
sonnets, discussing their attractiveness and fragrance in relation to the young
man. Sometimes Shakespeare compares flowers and weeds to contrast beauty and
ugliness. In these comparisons, marred, rotten flowers are worse than
weeds—that is, beauty that turns rotten from bad character is worse than
initial ugliness. Giddy with love, elsewhere the speaker compares blooming
flowers to the beauty of the young man, concluding in Sonnets 98 and 99 that
flowers received their bloom and smell from him. The sheer ridiculousness of
this statement—flowers smell sweet for chemical and biological
reasons—underscores the hyperbole and exaggeration that plague typical sonnets.
Stars
Shakespeare uses stars to stand in
for fate, a common poetic trope, but also to explore the nature of free
will. Many sonneteers resort to employing fate, symbolized by the stars, to
prove that their love is permanent and predestined. In contrast, Shakespeare’s
speaker claims that he relies on his eyes, rather than on the hands of fate, to
make decisions. Using his eyes, the speaker “reads” that the young man’s good
fortune and beauty shall pass to his children, should he have them. During
Shakespeare’s time, people generally believed in astrology, even as scholars
were making great gains in astronomy and cosmology, a metaphysical system for
ordering the universe. According to Elizabethan astrology, a cosmic order
determined the place of everything in the universe, from planets and stars to
people. Although humans had some free will, the heavenly spheres, with the help
of God, predetermined fate. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 25, the speaker
acknowledges that he has been unlucky in the stars but lucky in love, thereby
removing his happiness from the heavenly bodies and transposing it onto the
human body of his beloved.
Weather and the Seasons
Shakespeare employed the pathetic
fallacy, or the attribution of human characteristics or emotions to elements
in nature or inanimate objects, throughout his plays. In the sonnets, the
speaker frequently employs the pathetic fallacy, associating his absence from
the young man to the freezing days of December and the promise of their reunion
to a pregnant spring. Weather and the seasons also stand in for human emotions:
the speaker conveys his sense of foreboding about death by likening himself to
autumn, a time in which nature’s objects begin to decay and ready themselves
for winter, or death. Similarly, despite the arrival of “proud-pied April” (2)
in Sonnet 98, the speaker still feels as if it were winter because he and the
young man are apart. The speaker in Sonnet 18, one of Shakespeare’s most famous
poems, begins by rhetorically asking the young man, “Shall I compare thee to a
summer’s day?” (1). He spends the remainder of the poem explaining the multiple
ways in which the young man is superior to a summer day, ultimately concluding
that while summer ends, the young man’s beauty lives on in the permanence of
poetry.
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