William Shakespeare sonnet 29 analysis

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William Shakespeare sonnet 29 analysis

Assignment:
Read Sonnet 29 analysis. Comment on the approach taken to analyzing the poem. What seems to be the central focus of the essay (is it primarily on attitude? diction? imagery? etc.). How is that focus threaded through the analysis from beginning to end? Lastly, compare your essay written in class today to the one you are analyzing now. Comment on the differences. What are some of the ways you could and from now on should improve your analysis?

Analysis of Sonnet 29
Sonnet 29 opens with a speaker who is emotionally and spiritually bereft. He feels abandoned in this world, at odds with fortune and out of grace with his fellow man. By heaven he feels unheard, for his pleas to remedy his earthbound state have fallen on deaf ears. But the speaker’s sense of abandonment is not lasting, nor is its brevity the result of some divine sign or intervention from on high.
Rather, his movement back into the grace of man, his faith restored in a heavenly presence, comes with his own rejection of the third in this trinity, Fortune, which he sees as lacking in any ultimate worth compared to his newfound wealth found in friend and heaven.

The sonnet begins with the speaker observing his own troubled state, “in disgrace with Fortune
and men’s eyes.” The opening line shows the speaker most aware of his isolation, and he remains alone because his self-pity keeps him there, apart from all things. Self-removed, he weeps and attempts to “trouble deaf heaven with [his] bootless cries.” At the opening, then, we see a man who is powerless, who feels an inability to change his “outcast state,” and so can only “beweep” it.

The mood of this first quatrain is grave. The language is dark and weighty. The speaker, with sullied vision, sees only isolation and loss and speaks the language of melancholy. Words like disgrace, alone, beweep, outcast, trouble, deaf, bootless (useless), cries, curse, all communicate a general state of hopelessness and convey an image of a man firmly down. He is at the bottom of all things, entirely earthbound. Around him and above exist his fellow man, kings, Fortune, and of course, deaf heaven. And though he cries to heaven, his single want is to be possessed of friends, to be welcomed.

Two worlds are noted to stand apart from the speaker in this first quatrain, the world of man and the world of heaven. The speaker looks upon himself in his third and separate world and curses
his fate. It is critical, though, that the speaker looks upon himself, for if he doesn’t, he would have no
ability to change his fate, which comes sequentially in the following quatrains. In this sense, the three
quatrains will work as a kind of ladder, with each quatrain structured as a step upwards, out from the
shadows of disgrace.

Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets are estimated to have been written between 1595 and 1609--their
date of publication. But Sonnet 29 is thought to have been written around the time when London’s
theaters had been closed in 1592 due to a severe outbreak of the plague. An obvious result of those
closures was that playwrights as well as actors were immediately out of work, and had to eke out a
living in other ways. This being so, Shakespeare, if we are to accept a common reading that he is in
fact the speaker of his sonnets, would surely have found himself out of grace with Fortune, cursing his
fate, for it would have been most difficult for him to pen a living without the theater. Parted from
that world, one which, for the successful writer, could easily be likened to a kind of heaven, it could
easily be understood that he would find himself in an “outcast state,” with the receptive heaven he
once knew now deaf to his “bootless cries.”

But the speaker in sonnet 29, like Shakespeare himself, is remarkably mutable. The first line
of the second quatrain is immediately lightened by three hopeful words: wishing, rich, and hope. At
once the three words convey a different tone. They also show a new direction, more upward. Instead of
“alone” from line two we have the more hopeful singular, “one,” and the phrase “disgrace with
Fortune,” that most downward image from line one, is now countered with the more uplifting “rich in
hope.” Granted, these latter descriptives do not pertain to the speaker himself, as they did in the first
quatrain, but to a general Other, those whom he envies. Still, gone in one line is the expressed self-pity
seen in the previous four. No longer looking darkly within, line five now shows the speaker looking
beyond himself, which at the very least reveals a speaker whose eye has taken aim on brighter
terrain. This fifth line is also a more fluid line of iambic pentameter than the previous four. This has
the coupling effect of hinting that the entire structure of the poem, along with the images contained,
may be breaking free from the first quatrain’s drag.

But line five merely foreshadows the change to come. Its momentary signal is a flash of hope,
though not yet movement. And though the speaker has somewhat lightened, he is still clearly
disempowered, sapped by envy for those “more rich in hope.” The following three lines of the quatrain
elaborate on and complete that image, for what the speaker sees from his lowly vantage are men wellfeatured, possessed of friends, still gainfully engaged in the world of art, and men blessed with “scope,” or opportunity. All of which he longs for and feels he does not have.

Or does he? Line eight shows a suddenly reflective speaker. The seven lines prior summed his
troubled state. The eighth line considers that state, and there he finds that what he most enjoyed--
work, art, greater opportunity--would now content him least. Having observed those atop Fortune’s
wheel, desiring what they have (what he most enjoyed), these things will now no longer be enough.
Line eight, then, is the turning point in the poem. From this point on, images that once looked sideways
or down will now both literally and figuratively look upward. Reflection, especially when one has
fallen, tends to raise the eye. It also, in this case, returns the “I.” This last line of the second quatrain
sees the reappearance of the absented “I,” which disappeared early in the first quatrain after having
fallen from grace in “men’s eyes.” This “I,” as noted, is now entirely more reflective, more careful to
consider what it does have, rather than what it does not.

Reflection, however, comes bittersweet. His mood in line nine is momentarily soured in the
space between the sonnet’s first-half inaction and the action that will take place in the second half. In
that dividing moment, the speaker finds himself “in these thoughts...almost despising.” Perhaps this
is so because so much of his time before reflection was spent in a state of depression, so that the answer
to that depression, self-generated, brings him a stinging displeasure. To enhance our sense of the
speaker’s brief falter, his biting pause, line nine also contains an eleventh syllable, which like the
image the line contains, creates a rhythmic stammer, so that our very reading punctuates his own
internal pause.

But while the third quatrain begins with a backwards lean, the second line in the quatrain
lunges way forward, releasing all tensions and leading the rest of the sonnet in a new direction. A
dramatic “Haply” opens the sonnet’s final phase, dramatic in that it refers solely to the speaker
himself, not of the envied other. The upbeat adverbial also stands in sharp contrast to the negative
self-referentials that came prior. “Haply” begins the lift that was foreshadowed in the second
quatrain. The thought of his friend, whom he “Haply...think[s] on,” lifts his spirit to heights that
now soar. His “state” now sings “Like the lark at break of day arising.” The speaker here reveals, most
importantly to himself, that indeed he is possessed of friends, at least one, referred to here in the
nominative “thee.” This single friend clearly brings him great joy and sends his spirit soaring like the
song-spirited bird. And unlike the dividing lark in Romeo and Juliet (3.5, 1-34), this lark instead
symbolizes unification: of body and spirit, man and heaven. The simile alludes to the dual state of our
earthbound selves in relation to our more vertical, higher selves. His expression shows that he has at
last broken free from his earthbound weight, his depression, and connected with his lighter, more
spacious “state.” His earthly pangs have given way to a soaring liberation.

The final line of quatrain three shows the speaker has indeed lift “From sullen earth” to a
place where he now sees the world with renewed perception, for soaring above it he now has new
vantage. Positioned in that higher state, a heaven that once had deaf ears now has visible gates. This
image of “heaven’s gate,” when considered in relation to a more upbeat speaker, implies more of a
welcoming than a shutting out, especially when coupled with a singing of hymns at that gate,
suggesting further a majestic release within the speaker, a profound flood of outward, upward
experience that wings still further away from the weighed, near-collapse of self seen earlier in the
sonnet.

The sonnet’s end couplet weds the high image of love with his beloved friend, and the
transitioning word at its opening, “For,” connects backwards to line twelve’s “heaven’s gate,” thereby
adding deeper meaning to the subsequent image of “wealth,” which no longer carries with it a
monetary, terrestrial significance but rather a higher, heavenly significance.

More than just “Haply,” we now see in the final couplet a more profound sense of love, a “sweet
love remember'd.” This is an extraordinary expression, especially considering what came prior,
signifying huge movement away from the sonnet’s initial lines. The speaker in the final couplet no
longer lays flat to the world but is now buoyantly aloft, above the now lowly common who are merely
fortunate in their travails. The idea, the surety, of knowing that he indeed does have a friend and
that he has indeed known love, brings the speaker a deepened sense of newfound wealth, enough so
that he would “scorn to change [his] state with kings.”

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