The Sonnets – Sonnets 34-77 “ Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day…”

The Sonnets – Sonnets 34-77 “ Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day…”

Sonnets 33, 34 and 35 should be read together since they are all about a fracture in the poet's friendship with a friend. If we take the perspective that one of the reasons behind Shakespeare writing sonnets is to play with the sonnet form itself then we can see that it is ironic that he addressing many of the sonnets to a young man since the sonnet form originally would have a man addressing love sentiments to a woman. This playful irony is central to the sonnets as we see throughout the sonnets that Shakespeare plays with metaphors, imagery and the intimacy of the tone of the sonnet form itself:

Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day,

And make me travel forth without my cloak,

To let base clouds o'ertake me in my way,

Hiding thy bravery in their rotten smoke?

'Tis not enough that through the cloud thou break,

To dry the rain on my storm-beaten face,

For no man well of such a salve can speak

That heals the wound and cures not the disgrace:

Nor can thy shame give physic to my grief;

Though thou repent, yet I have still the loss:

The offender's sorrow lends but weak relief

To him that bears the strong offence's cross.

Ah! but those tears are pearl which thy love sheds,

And they are rich and ransom all ill deeds.

Sonnet 34 starts innocuously enough when the poet infers that he is talking to the sun asking why he seemed to promise “such a beauteous day” that when the poet ventured out bad weather emerged. Of course, since in earlier sonnets, the poet refers to his youthful love as the sun, we can guess that the sun represents the youth. This means that when line 4 completes the quatrain and the question with the words “… Hiding thy brav’ry in their rotten smoke?”, the poet is commenting on the way that mist or something clouds the “bravery”, as in forthright or striking appearance, of the youth. This seems to refer to a cloud which also hangs of the relationship between the poet and youth.
Patrick Stewart reads Sonnet 34 here:
https://twitter.com/sirpatstew/status/1252651594962939904

Sonnet 35 uses many metaphors to explore the battle of love and hate inside the poet, presumably for the youth. Patrick Stewart reads it here:

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=528953114656523

Sonnet 36 deals with the fact that the poet and the youth cannot be open about their love and relationship. Patrick Stewart again:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=900537193744717

Sonnet 37 shows the pride and good feeling the poet gets from seeing the youth. Patrick Stewart reads:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1363369333848721

Sonnet 38 looks at how a poet tries to capture the nature of his/her subject in verse. In Sonnet 38, the poet talks of the youth as his muse and reveals the nature of inspiration and suggests that the although the pain of creation belongs to the poet, the praise belongs to the muse. 

Patrick Stewart reads Sonnet 38.

https://www.facebook.com/patrickstewart/videos/264578364676370/?v=264578364676370

This contemplation on the relationship between the muse and the poet continues in Sonnet 39.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=530030744361320

Sonnet 40 examines what the nature of giving and taking love is. Sonnet 40 should be read on its own and speak for itself. It is plays with the various meanings of the word “love”:

“Take all my loves, my love; yea, take them all.

What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?

No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call.

All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.

Then if for my love thou my love receivest,

I cannot blame thee, for my love thou usest.

But yet be blamed, if thou thyself deceivest

By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.

I do forgive thy robb'ry, gentle thief,

Although thou steal thee all my poverty;

And yet love knows it is a greater grief

To bear love’s wrong than hate’s known injury.

Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,

Kill me with spites; yet we must not be foes.”

Sonnet 40 with Patrick Stewart

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=188710275456296

In Sonnet 41 we find out that both the poet and the youth have mistresses and the infidelity of the youth seems to disturb the poet.
https://twitter.com/sirpatstew/status/1255319559818657794?lang=en

This becomes more complicated in Sonnet 42 when it is obvious that the poet and the youth are both sleeping with the poet’s mistress. The suggestion is that the youth only wants the poet’s mistress because she is the poet’s. The irony comes in the final couplet when the poet points out his joyful realization that “… my friend and I are one; sweet flat’ry, Then she loves but me alone.” 
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2590860651172906

Sonnets 43, 44 and 45 deal with the more physical elements of the poet, youth’s love and separation. Sonnet 43 is about the powers of sleep, the night and shadows.
https://twitter.com/sirpatstew/status/1256026428396630018?lang=en

Sonnet 44 is about separation using the elements of Earth and Water.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=711810462960768

Sonnet 45 - This examines the elements of Air and Fire and the theme of desire. Sonnet 45 also deals with the emotional shifts and changes in the actual poet himself. 
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=235421754347417

Sonnets 46, 47 and 48 deal with the poet’s contemplation on the way that an eye captures and possesses the subject. 

Sonnet 46

The second quatrain continues the allusion to the sun breaking through the clouds but parallels can also be made to the sense of the youth breaking through the clouds in the relationship to the poet and this allows a reading where “… the rain on my storm-beaten face…” can be taken to also refer to the tears left from the poet crying and the breaking through to dry the tears can be seen as the youth stopping the poet from crying.  This drying of the tears is not accepted well by the poet since it “…heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace.”

 The third quatrain gives the sense that the poet does not accept the shame and repentance of the youth but rather blames the youth. The poet succinctly reveals this in lines 11 and 12 where he states:

The offender's sorrow lends but weak relief

To him that bears the strong offence's cross.

The final rhyming couplet at the end of the sonnet seems to suggest that the poet, who up to this point has not forgiven his young companion, sees the “tears” shed by the youth as valuable “pearls” which he takes as a rich (which could mean valuable or even obvious) sign of the youth’s love. The poem ends with the poet forgiving the youth and seeing them as just payment or “ransom” for the “ill deeds” which the poet believes the youth has committed. This suggests that either the youth has paid the debt of punishment in tears, or that the poet was trying to exact the “ransom” of tears all along from the youth.

Patrick Stewart reads Sonnet 46:

https://twitter.com/sirpatstew/status/1257486724822859776

Sonnet 47
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=787479605110712

Sonnet 48
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=171297410867563

Sonnet 49 looks at the way that love defies reason.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=230667968263421

In Sonnets 50 and 51, love is explored through the analogy of a journey. Desire and the ebb and flow od love is explored.

Sonnet 50 read by Patrick Stewart still in isolation in the UK on May 9th 2020.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=272718783899332

Sonnet 51

https://twitter.com/sirpatstew/status/1259598488528019456

Sonnet 52 relates love to feasts and special occasions. 

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=266636044721003

Sonnet 53 contemplates, comments on and almost mocks the universal nature of beauty.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1111326462566657

Sonnet 54 points to the ability of the poems to immortalize the beauty of the subject and like roses that become more potent in their smell after their death, “… my verse distills your truth.” 

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=193548815008652

This theme of verse immortalizing the subject continues in Sonnet 55 and ends with stating that the youth will live on both in the verse and in the eyes of the poet who loves him:

“You live in this and dwell in lover’s eyes.”

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=242845180365135

Sonnet 56 sees the poet trying to console his friend pointing out that if we do enter into melancholy then we should call those times winter in anticipation of “summer’s welcome”. 
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=859035561286187

In Sonnets 57 and 58, we can see the lover’s lot, where the poet compares himself to a slave to his love, watching the clock and waiting on the will of his love. The suggestion here is that the poet also bears or allows his lover to give into his desire with others. 
Here is Sonnet 57 with Patrick Stewart and friend Jonathon Frakes:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=246843406402219

Sonnet 58 examines being a slave to love and Shakespeare's internal battle with having a lover who is flawed. Kevin Dunning does this reading:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76EgGXPqsq0

This cycle of contemplation and thought ends with the poet in Sonnet 59 contemplating on the nature of the writing of ages past and the subjects they immortalized in their words and then he thinks on his own love ending with the contemplation that:

“Oh sure I am the wits of former days

To subjects worse have giv’n admiring praise.”

Author Ian Lahey reads it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4aHzhEeHo0

Sonnet 60 explores the way that time passes as it acts upon our lives. The first quatrain, looks at the way that minutes follow one another,

“Like , as the waves make toward the pebbled shore…”

The poet then reflects on how each wave, like each moment in time, takes the place of what came before. The poet or speaker in the second quatrain, compares human life to nature in its relationships, the sun at dawn or birth is “Nativity” and rises over the ocean, “the main of light” and “crawls to maturity” or noon and then ”being crowned” is thwarted by obstacles and by time itself. The poet then moves on in the third quatrain, to transform time into a monster, who “…feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth…” stopping youth forming wrinkles on human’s brows and “…nothing stands but for his scythe to mow…” This sonnet ends with a rhyming couplet where the poet almost stands his own verse in opposition to the ravishes of time itself and says that his verse’s praise of his friend will remain, outlasting time: couplet, the speaker opposes his verse to the ravages of time:

“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

So do our minutes hasten to their end;

Each changing place with that which goes before,

In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

Nativity, once in the main of light,

Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,

Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,

And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.

Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth

And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,

Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,

And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:

And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,

Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.”

Patrick Stewart reads it here:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=554581372154633

Sonnet 61, the poet writes about how he stays up late at night waiting and thinking about his friend while his friend is with someone else.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=585657675389883

Sonnet 62 eludes to the narcissistic undertones in writing poetry:

“’Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,

Painting my age with beauty of thy days.”
https://twitter.com/SirPatStew/status/1263301577638633483

Then in Sonnet 63, we see the poet move back to contemplations on what will happen to the youth when he grows old but ending once again with the belief that he will immortalize the youth and his beauty in his poetry. 
Patrick Stewart reads:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdHrfsb7hzg

Here is Sir John Gielgud's 1961 recording of Sonnet 63:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARwhlio9gaY

Shakespeare moves onto his sense that time will eventually take his love from him in Sonnet 64 and in Sonnet 65 to further thoughtful lingering on mortality and time which leads the poet once again to find solace in the thought that:

“That in black ink my love may still shine bright.”
Here from 2014, the actress Victoria Hamilton reads Sonnet 64:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj06hxuJtJs

Here Patrick Stewart reads Sonnet 64:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFmW1XhCydM

Sonnet 65 is here read by Sir John Gielgud from 1961:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfq5ZzxEuJw
Here Patrick Stewart reads Sonnet 65 in the 2020 COVID 19 Lockdown:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_gg_gNf0Ss

Sonnet 66 contemplates the injustices of the world and the fact that “simple truth” can be often mistaken for “simplicity”. It is a sonnet that should be read in its entirety:

“Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, 


As, to behold desert a beggar born,

And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, 


And purest faith unhappily forsworn, 


And guilded honour shamefully misplaced,


And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, 


And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,


And strength by limping sway disabled, 


And art made tongue-tied by authority, 


And folly doctor-like controlling skill, 


And simple truth miscall'd simplicity, 


And captive good attending captain ill: 


Tired with all these, from these would I be gone,


Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.”

Here is an interesting version of Sonnet 66 read by the blogger and Vlogger ReadMyLips:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzlquQD4X6I

In Sonnet 67, the poet/speaker turns his musings back to the youth and the corruption of the world and beauty. The sense at the end of the poem that Nature herself is storing beauty in the youth is undercut by the sadness in the lament of loss at the end. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmRjgJHtSxs

These contemplations on the youth are continued in Sonnet 68 where the metaphor of a map is used and the poet proclaims that in the youth nature has stored its beauty as a map. 
Here is a video from the Sonnet Project NYC for Sonnet 68:
https://ashortspell.com/in-nspel-thus-is-his-cheek-the-map-of-days-outworn-william-shakespeares-sonnet-68/

The sense that the poet is once more enamored with the youth comes out through the praises he heaps upon his friend in Sonnet 69 but the final couplet suggests that the poet worries that the youth is hanging out with people who are below his station. 
Here Sir John Gielgud reads Sonnet 69:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT2JDotZbgA

This sense continues in Sonnet 70 when the poet reveals that people seem to be slandering the youth but as the poet suggests “…slander’s mark was ever yet the fair…” and the poet suggests that this slander and envy will in fact enrich the reputation of the youth.
Here ReadMyLips reads Sonnet 70:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeVsDxahBIQ

Sonnet 71, although directed towards the youth, sees the poet muse upon how he thinks that when he dies he wants his verse and the youth to be remembered, not “…the hand that writ it…” 
Here is a commentary with some analysis on Sonnet 71.
https://study.com/academy/lesson/shakespeares-sonnet-71-theme-analysis.html

This is taken further when in Sonnet 72, the poet seems to belittle himself and even the worth of what he has produced. Jemma Redgrave reads Sonnet 72 here:

https://vimeo.com/44724253

When we move onto Sonnet 73, we see the poet/speaker use a number of metaphors to reflect on his years and growing age. In the first quatrain, he tells his love that he. The poet is like late autumn, when the leaves have almost fallen from the trees, and the weather has grown cold. Then in the second quatrain, he characterizes his age more as the time after a sunset “As after sunset fadeth in the west…” and “Death’s second self...” The poet compares himself to glowing embers in a fire in the third quatrain – “…the ashes of his youth…” and suggests that he will soon be extinguished and sink into the ashes. The final rhyming couplet, speaks directly to the youth and urges the youth “To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

Here is Sonnet 73 read by Sir John Gielgud:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g1IpAmujwo

Sonnet 74 continues in this morbid and melancholic tone and even asks the youth to see that the greatest worth in the poet lies in the poems he writes. Here is a reading by Octavia Selena Alexandru:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOd8A7TRsfQ

The poet then uses in Sonnet 75 the analogy of food and suggests that the food and lifeblood of his life is the youth. Sonnet 75 is read here by David Tennant.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZaYO2pSXxY

In Sonnet 76, the poet/speaker starts with questioning the worth and ornament of his own poetry,

“So is my verse barren of new pride,

So far from variation or quick change…”

The poet then questions why he doesn’t look to new innovative forms and styles and laments the fact that “…every word doth almost tell my name…” and that the youth and “love” seem to dominate his subject matter. The poet ends this sonnet with a beautiful comparison of the daily sun to the poet’s retelling of the youth and love:

“For as the sun is daily new and old,

So is my love still telling what is told.”

Here is a version of Sonnet 76 sung by David Bryan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zET15rvEmfM

I like to think that if Shakespeare’s sonnets are autobiographical, then somewhere around Sonnet 77, he gives his friend an empty notebook for him to write in. Sonnet 77 begins in the first quatrain in a melancholic vein with the speaker/poet telling his youthful friend that a mirror will show the youth how his beauty is holding up, a sundial or watch will tell him how time and the minutes are slipping away. The beautiful imagery of the vacant leaves or pages of an empty notebook will record or carry the imprint of the thoughts of the youth. The poet then reveals in the second quatrain that what will be seen by the youth in a mirror are wrinkles “of mouthed graves” and that the sundial will reveal that time is passing and stealing away to eternity. The third quatrain asks the youth to commit to the pages of the notebook “…what thy memory cannot contain…” and that these thoughts or the children of the youth’s brain will be like a new acquaintance to the youth’s brain. And so, in the final rhyming couplet, Shakespeare advocates that looking in the mirror and looking at time (as represented by the sundial) shall enrich both the life of the youth and what he write in the empty notebook.

“Thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear,


Thy dial how thy precious minutes waste;


The vacant leaves thy mind's imprint will bear,


And of this book this learning mayst thou taste.


The wrinkles which thy glass will truly show


Of mouthed graves will give thee memory;


Thou by thy dial's shady stealth mayst know


Time's thievish progress to eternity.


Look, what thy memory can not contain


Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find


Those children nursed, deliver'd from thy brain,


To take a new acquaintance of thy mind.


These offices, so oft as thou wilt look,

Shall profit thee and much enrich thy book.”

Here is a reading of Sonnet 77 by The Outcast State:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nb0Cxs29Ql0