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Topic: Imagery in Shakespearean Sonnets
The theme of Shakespearean sonnets is mainly love and friendship
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The best estimation of the sonnets, as to their literary
value, will probably be an analysis of the machinery of imagery employed in the
sonnets
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Shakespeare's sonnets
are not merely idealistic appraisals of love, but also grand specimens of art
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Marlow, Spencer, Lyly all have a stock –intrade of images which are emblems of the ideal
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Shakespeare's sonnets are so conceived with images
that they become caskets enclosing the finest pearls of Elizabethan poetry
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Of course, he is no philosopher of Nature like Wordsworth, but of course, he
is a sensuous painter of Nature
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In the Sonnet 18, Shall I compare thee to a summer's day,
Shakespeare compares his friend’s youth and beauty to that of a summer's day, but
finds the analogy inadequate
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The rough winds destroy the fair buds of 'May' before they fully
blossom
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The timespan of "summer's
lease" is "too short"
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Here the evanescence of
summer is hinted at , in contrast to his friend's intransient beauty
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' the eye of heaven', a commonplace metaphor
for sun, is sometimes 'too hot" but sometimes its golden splendor is dimmed by the
shadowy cloud
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The poet contrasts the
'eternal summer' , a transferred epithet for his friend's unfading beauty, to the fading

charms of Summer
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His friend would never 'lose possesion' of his beauty for it is his personal
possesion, owned by him and not leased
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The poet is
confident of making his friend immortal through his love verse which is not a boast but
only a conventional stock idea of Elizabethan sonneteers
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In Sonnet 73, That time of year thou mayst in me behold, three powerfully wrought
images of aging and decay, not of the beloved friend, but of the poet himself , are
proposed in the three quatrains, counterpointed by a dramatic reversal in the final
couplet
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Life is taken to be
equivalent to an annum and his present state of life is the season of autumn
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Shakespeare creates an exquisite picture of nature in autumn, where leaves wither
away, turn yellow and fall off, leaving only few hanging on the boughs, bearing the blow
of autumn solitarily
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The starkness of bare boughs in winter suggests the frail
trembling body of an old man
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Choirs literally mean that part of a Cathedral where divine service
is performed, to which, when in ruins, the poet compares the trees at the end of
autumn, stripped of foliage
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There is a buried allusion to the ruins of chapels and monasteries
that were suppressed by Henry VIII over the period 1535- 39
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As twilight goes on deepening, as the
sunlight fades in western Sky, "death's second self" , the black night, conceived as a

pre-figuration of death, 'seals up all in rest"
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The last quatrain of Shakespeare makes use of the imagery of
the smoldering ember
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Shakespeare
compares his state of life with the unextinguished hearth
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The poet employs another image; the fire is now lying on its deathbed, that
is, in the smoldering ashes
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The poet means that the
embers of his youth's fire, self consumed, still lingers before its final extinction into
dead ashes
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The image here is quite close to the legendary Phoenix, the mythical
bird ,which after living for centuries in Arabian desert, burns itself on a funeral pyre
and rises from its own ashes with renewed youth to live through another cycle
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The Sonnet 116, Let me not to the marriage of true minds, is often seen as a meditative
attempt to redefine perfect love that is ideal and eternal
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Shakespeare here alludes to the phrasing of the Anglican marriage- service
when the priest exhorts the Assembly:' if anyone of you know cause or just
impediment, why these two persons should not be joined together in holy Matrimony,
you are to declare it"
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Love is eternal; any change of attitude or
physical alterations that may come with age, cannot tarnish the strength and
magnanimity of love
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The poet seems to be embarking on a triumphant redefinition of love,
conceived of as sublime and immovable, unaffected by earthly concerns, and thus
distant, supra personal and even somewhat cold
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Love is
an ever static pole star ( an object desired in figurative sense) to every "wand'ring bark"
( reminiscent of the Petrarchan image of storm tossed individual lover)
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This suggests the mystic and philosophic Platonic experience of love,
which is beyond comprehension
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Time / death is personified as a grim reaper (of lives) with a
sickle in hand
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It mobilizes the agrarian metaphor in a dramatic
manner, almost with cruel savagery
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Love
bears all afflictions to the edge of Doomsday
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Shakespeare's sonnets re-enact a personal relationship but are best appreciated as
lyric poems, pregnant with imageries
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The style and imagery
cast in them are fresh and natural, not burdened by classical reminiscences

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