Line by Line Analysis: Sonnet 106

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This video is my take on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106. I've always enjoyed reading poems and trying to come up with something original to say about them. I hope I've done that here. Thanks for listening, and I'm curious to hear your take in the comments.

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Transcription:
This sonnet is about a beautiful person, but it’s also about the idea of beauty and our inability to describe beauty in writing despite our best efforts.

In the first few lines, we learn that the speaker has been reading many books and he’s noticed many descriptions of the “fairest wights” (very beautiful people). He remarks on how beauty serves as endless inspiration for poets. They’ll always find something to say about beauty!

So Shakespeare, naturally, being a poet, sees somebody beautiful and feels inspired to write. He explains that the beauty he sees in the person before him is like an amalgamation of many descriptions of the past.

What does that mean? Well, imagine that you read one hundred poems describing one hundred beautiful people. You read one hundred descriptions of delicate, expressive hands, one hundred descriptions
of dainty, elegant feet, one hundred descriptions of luscious, red lips,
and so on—And as you’re reading, imagine that you’re highlighting your favorite lines so that later you can combine them into a collage—You construct the ideal beauty, combining this person’s ears and that person’s chin until the ultimate description of beauty lies before you!

Shakespeare is basically saying, "Your beauty can only be described if we combine the greatest descriptions of beauty from thousands of poets from the past!” It’s like saying, “You’re a Greatest Hits album of beauty across time!”

Let’s review the first eight lines of the sonnet.

When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights;
Then in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique pen would have expressed
Even such a beauty as you master now.

In the final six lines, Shakespeare explains that these beautiful descriptions from the past predicted the beauty he now sees before him. Beauty, after all, is timeless. One of the world’s oldest love poems is “The Love Song for Shu-Sin” composed around 2000 BC in ancient Mesopotamia:

Bridegroom, dear to my heart,
Goodly is your beauty, honeysweet…
You have captivated me,
Let me stand tremblingly before you.

And more recently, in 1956, Pablo Neruda, a popular Chilean poet
of love poems, wrote “Ode to a Naked Beauty”:

Nakedly beautiful,
whether it is your feet, arching
at a primal touch
of sound or breeze,
or your ears,
tiny spiral shells
from the splendour of America’s oceans.

Neruda goes on to describe his beauty’s breasts and the line of her back.
If Shakespeare were alive today, I don’t think he’d be surprised by the content of Neruda’s poem! He’d say it was another poem “in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best, / Of foot, of ear, of breasts, of back!”

Shakespeare ends his sonnet claiming that writers will never have the necessary skill to describe beauty, to do it justice.

Here are the final six lines:

So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring,
And, for they looked but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing:
For we, which now behold these present days,
Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

This analysis is just one person’s opinion on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106. I hope you enjoyed my take and I’m curious to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Did I use the words “beauty” and “describe” too many times in this analysis? Do you have a favorite love poem that you’d like to share?

Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time.