Shakespeare’s Sonnets 15, 16 and 17 belong to the group of procreation sonnets, running from 1 to 17 in the collection of “Shakespeare’s sonnets”. In this sonnet sequence the speaker urges the young man to marry and to beget children in order to preserve his beauty and achieve everlasting life. The power of the young man to perpetuate himself by biological generation is confronted to poetry as another method to reach immortality (Cheney, 126/128).
In sonnet 15 the speaker depicts the mortality of all living creatures and points out that the young man, too, will fall victim to the transitory nature of things. Nevertheless in the couplet he “sells” himself as a poet whose verse would give his young patron immortality. This idea is immediately dismissed in the following sonnet 16 where he urges the young man not to rely on his sonnets alone and recommends biological procreation as the superior mean to represent the young man’s beauty adequately. In sonnet 17 the persona finally describes how procreation and poetry can work together to reach double immortality. Here again the speaker points out that his poetry is of far lesser worth to give immortality to the young man’s beauty than his own creation of progeny would be.
Dispraising his own works in favour of the begetting of children is very contrary to what one would expect from a poet. Furthermore, it remains open to question how the speaker’s understatement of his own art and his convincingly depiction of the omnipresence of mortality go together with his courageous promise to immortalize the young man in verse. It will therefore be interesting to find out which techniques the speaker applies to make the young man procreate and what this might reveal about the true nature of his interest to immortalize the young man. By responding to these questions, one can only come to the conclusion that the speaker has other reasons than those of personal affection for wishing to keep the young man’s beauty in being.
After having presented some formal aspects of the sonnets, the first main part of the paper will be concerned with the question of how mortality and passage of beauty are depicted in the sonnets. Special emphasis will be put on the concepts of vertex and war contributing to make the young man realize the instability of his beauty and showing him methods to preserve it.
The second main part of the paper will deal with the speaker’s comparison of his poetry to the supposed superior power of procreation.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 Form and Structure
3 The depiction of mortality and passage of beauty
Concept of vertex and helplessness
War against time
4 Modesty vs. magalomania
Fruitlessness of verse
The unreliability of poetic reproduction
5 Conclusion
Research Objectives and Themes
This paper investigates the rhetorical and structural techniques employed by the speaker in Shakespeare's Sonnets 15, 16, and 17 to urge the young man toward procreation. The research explores the complex, often non-selfless motivations behind the poet's desire to immortalize his subject, analyzing the interplay between the concepts of biological generation and poetic immortality.
- The depiction of mortality and the "vertex" concept of human life.
- Structural and semantic analysis of the sonnets' rhyme schemes and imagery.
- The metaphorical "war against time" and the obligation to procreate.
- The speaker’s tension between modesty regarding his art and the ambition to achieve permanence through verse.
- The interplay between "living flowers" of progeny and the "barren rhyme" of poetry.
Excerpt from the Book
Concept of vertex and helplessness
In sonnet 15 and 16 the speaker uses the concept of vertex to make the young man realize that his chance to procreate and thus to preserve his beauty is temporally limited and that it is not under his control when his best time to procreate will be over. The concept of vertex implies that shortly after a living being reached the culmination point of its development, regression sets in. At the very beginning of Sonnet 15 the reader is already confronted to this unpleasant truth: “everything that grows holds in perfection but a little moment” (15.1f). This temporal instability of “perfection” (2) is underlined by the syntax of the sentence itself. When reading the first line of sonnet 15 the reader is tempted to think that: “When I consider everything that grows” would form a perfectly complete sentence with “everything that grows” (15.1) in object position. Consequently, the impression is aroused that the speaker is able to look down on earth from a somewhat higher position. This idea is supported by the original meaning of the verb “consider” which according to its latin root means: “to look at the stars” (Booth, 155) and literally reflects the reversed perspective of the speaker. Already in line 2, however, the illusion of “perfection” is destroyed as “everything that grows” reveals to be the subject of the following subordinated clause: “everything that grows holds in perfection” (Booth, 155). Apart from the enjambment the deceptive impression is primarily created by the omission of the conjunction “that” which would had made it easier for the reader to detect the beginning of the subordinated clause: “When I consider (that) everything that grows holds in perfection but a little moment”.
Summary of Chapters
1 Introduction: This chapter provides an overview of the procreation sonnets and introduces the research question regarding the speaker's true motivations for urging the young man to reproduce.
2 Form and Structure: This section analyzes the formal characteristics of the sonnets, including rhyme schemes, metrical variations, and syntactical links that emphasize the inadequacy of poetry as a means of permanence.
3 The depiction of mortality and passage of beauty: This chapter examines how the speaker utilizes metaphors of "vertex" and "war" to highlight the transience of beauty and the urgent need for procreation.
4 Modesty vs. magalomania: This part focuses on the speaker's ambivalent stance toward his own work, contrasting the perceived fruitlessness of poetry with the hope for poetic immortality.
5 Conclusion: The final chapter synthesizes the findings, confirming that the speaker's desire to immortalize the young man is inextricably linked to the survival of his own poetry.
Keywords
Shakespeare, Sonnets, Procreation, Immortality, Mortality, Vertex, Time, Metaphor, Verse, Beauty, Rhetoric, Generation, Fruitlessness, Poetic reproduction, Manuscript
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the core focus of this work?
The work analyzes the rhetorical strategies used in Shakespeare's Sonnets 15, 16, and 17 to persuade the young man to procreate.
What are the primary thematic areas explored?
The paper explores the themes of mortality, the passage of time, the limitation of artistic creation, and the perceived superiority of biological reproduction.
What is the central research question?
The central question is how the speaker's techniques to encourage procreation reveal his true underlying motives and his struggle to achieve immortality through his verses.
Which methodology does the author employ?
The author uses close literary analysis, focusing on metaphorical imagery, syntax, etymological roots, and structural form to interpret the text.
What is addressed in the main body of the paper?
The main body examines the concept of "vertex," the "war against time," the speaker's self-deprecating modesty regarding his art, and the unreliability of poetic representation.
Which keywords define this study?
Key terms include Shakespeare, Sonnets, Procreation, Mortality, Immortality, Verse, and Metaphor.
How does the concept of "vertex" relate to the young man?
The "vertex" implies a culmination point in life; the speaker uses it to warn the young man that his beauty is at its peak and will inevitably begin to decline.
Why does the speaker refer to his own poetry as "barren"?
The speaker calls his rhyme "barren" to emphasize that his poetry cannot produce life (progeny), contrasting it with the "maiden gardens" of fertile potential.
How does the author interpret the term "counterfeit"?
The term is interpreted as both a literal portrait and a metaphorical "painting in verse," highlighting the poem's inadequacy in capturing the young man's true essence.
Does the speaker's motivation remain entirely selfless?
No, the analysis concludes that the speaker's desire to urge procreation is partially motivated by the hope that the young man's offspring will validate and sustain the credibility of his poetry.
- Citar trabajo
- Francesca Cavaliere (Autor), 2008, Shakespeare's sonnets 15, 16 and 17. The immortalizing power of poetry and procreation, Múnich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/315231
