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Do the final couplets in Shakespeare's sonnets affirm or deny the contentions of the
three preceding quatrains?
Shakespeare's sonnets have an originality in structure
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His sonnet is divided into three quatrains with a concluding, often
epigrammatic couplet
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Shakespeare's sonnet pattern permits logical exposition with its necessary contrast and
opposition ending with a summary of his arguments in the rhyming couplet
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Generally, the final couplet affirms the arguments
developed in the three quatrains
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The basic purpose of the
poet is to show his decrepitude, old age and nearness to death and for this, the
quatrains of his sonnets prove handy to project images through them
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The use of the word
'mayst' suggests that if his friend has the eye to see the poet's present state of life, he
will behold that the poet has fallen into the 'sear', 'yellow' leaf of his life
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Shakespeare experiments with a
complex metaphor of “Bare ruin’d choirs”
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The poet calls forth a buried allusion to the ruins of chapels
and monasteries that were suppressed by Henry VIII over the period of 1535-39
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As the twilight goes on deepening, the sunlight fades in western sky and death's
second self, the black night, conceived as a pre-figuration of death, “seals up all in rest”
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When the

fire dies out, the hearth is not completely extinguished
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Shakespeare compares his state of life
with the unextinguished hearth
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The fire is now
lying on its death-bed, that is, in the smouldering ashes
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In the final couplet, there is a
surprising reversal of the pessimistic note of the three quatrains
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Each of the quatrains provides the picture of happiness
replaced by sorrow giving rise to an aura of pathos
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Thus the final couplet strongly affirms the contentions of the preceding
quatrains
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Shakespeare
brings out the effect of the tide of time on the natural objects
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The time span of ‘summer's lease’ is too
short
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In the second quatrain, the poet establishes that his friend’s beauty
is a model of Archetypal Platonic beauty
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Sooner or later, every
‘fair’ thing of beauty fall away from its beauty, either accidently or gradually, but
inevitably by natural course
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Death is
personified as one proud of his power and boastfully usurping all objects of Nature in
his shadowy domain
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The idea which pervades the three quatrains is rebuild in the final couplet,
well affirming the contentions of the three quatrains, where the poet claims that his

verse would confer an immortality on his friend so long as man can enjoy and
appreciate the beauty of poetry
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Love is eternal, any change or physical alteration that may
come with age cannot tarnish the beauty of love
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In the second quatrain, Shakespeare defines
love as that which may be associated with Pauline concept of Christian love or
philosophical conception of Platonic love
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True love is like a guiding star whose astral position helps navigators
but whose full worth can never be comprehended
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Time or death is personified as a grim
reaper (of lives) with a sickle in hand
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Love bears all afflictions to the
edge of Doomsday
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The final couplet repeats the celebration of love through a kind of challenge,
that if, what the poet so long states in the three quatrains, ‘be error’, then the poet has
never written any verse and no man has ever loved

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