Sonnet 75 Lyrics
Or as sweet-season'd showers are to the ground;
And for the peace of you I hold such strife
As 'twixt a miser and his wealth is found.
Now proud as an enjoyer, and anon
Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure;
Now counting best to be with you alone,
Then better'd that the world may see my pleasure:
Sometime all full with feasting on your sight,
And by and by clean starved for a look;
Possessing or pursuing no delight
Save what is had, or must from you be took.
Thus do I pine and surfeit day by day,
Or gluttoning on all, or all away.
About
Sonnet 75 is part of Shakespeare’s “Fair Youth” sequence and, while not considered the finest, it is well regarded. The basic narrative concerns extremes of emotion and passion the speaker feels for the beautiful boy.
In this sonnet the Bard claims he is like a miser, always wanting more of the Fair Youth. His confidence and happiness are balanced against his desperation for the boy, unable to let him out of his sight. This is made more painful by the fact that, as he says, their love is his only source of joy.
For information on the autobiographical nature of the sonnets — whether the “Fair Youth” is fictional or not — this podcast is helpful.
BBC Podcast, Melvyn Bragg, “In Our Time” Shakespeare’s Sonnets
Structure
It is a well unified composition in which Shakespeare experimented structurally. Helen Vendler* views the poem as a restructuring of the typical 4-4-4-2 pattern into a 4-6-4 form. To clarify, the usual Shakespearen sonnet template of three quatrains and a couplet is replaced by a quatrain, a six-line sestet and another quatrain.
Helen Vendler’s ideas can be followed in her publication The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, see below.
For more on sonnets see Genius Glossary.
Language and Imagery
Sonnet 75 uses the language of food and feasting, wealth and poverty, and develops these metaphors throughout the poem. There' is a heavy use of pairing and foils, explained by Helen Vendler as the “couplet tie”. This means that a word or theme appears in the opening lines and is reused in the final couplet. The progression echoes the style of Edmund Spenser, who was Shakespeare’s contemporary. These unify the sonnet.
Sources:
The Spenser Encyclopedia eds. Donald Cheney, A.C. Hamilton, David Richardson, (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1990)
Shakespeare, William, The Oxford Shakespeare: Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Vendler, Helen, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Belknap, 1999)
Note: for further reading on the couplet, the term is discussed in excerpts from The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets and in this review of the same text.
Sonnet 75 from the 1609 Quarto.
Q&A
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning
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