Bard & Java

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"A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted" •
Reader: .ig
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“Sonnet 20” is a poem by the Renaissance playwright and poet William Shakespeare. The poem belongs to a sequence of Shakespeare's sonnets addressing an unidentified “fair youth", a young man for whom the speaker of the poems expresses love and attraction. In this particular sonnet, the speaker praises the fair youth for his beauty, which encompasses both feminine and masculine qualities. While acknowledging that this fair youth may continue to have physical relationships with women, the speaker affirms the depth of the love between the youth and himself. “Sonnet 20” was included in a collection of Shakespeare’s sonnets first published in 1609.

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• "From fairest creatures we desire increase" •

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Summary

The first sonnet takes it as a given that “From fairest creatures we desire increase”—that is, that we desire beautiful creatures to multiply, in order to preserve their “beauty’s rose” for the world. That way, when the parent dies (“as the riper should by time decease”), the child might continue its beauty (“His tender heir might bear his memory”). In the second quatrain, the speaker chides the young man he loves for being too self-absorbed to think of procreation: he is “contracted” to his own “bright eyes,” and feeds his light with the fuel of his own loveliness. The speaker says that this makes the young man his own unwitting enemy, for it makes “a famine where abundance lies,” and hoards all the young man’s beauty for himself. In the third quatrain, he argues that the young man may now be beautiful—he is “the world’s fresh ornament / And only herald to the gaudy spring”—but that, in time, his beauty will fade, and he will bury his “content” within his flower’s own bud (that is, he will not pass his beauty on; it will wither with him). In the couplet, the speaker asks the young man to “pity the world” and reproduce, or else be a glutton who, like the grave, eats the beauty he owes to the whole world.♡

"Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws" 📚☕❤
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Summary:
In Sonnet 19, the poet addresses Time. Using vivid animal imagery, he describes Time's effects on nature. The poet then asks Time not to age the young man and ends by boldly asserting that the poet's own creative talent will make the youth permanently young and beautiful.
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The sonnet's first seven lines address the ravages of nature that "Devouring Time" can wreak. Then, in line 8, the poet inserts the counter-statement, one line earlier than usual: "But I forbid thee one most heinous crime." The poet wants Time to leave the young man's beauty untouched.
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Although the poet begs Time to leave the young man's beauty "untainted" as an example of perfection ("beauty's pattern") upon which all can gaze, the concluding couplet, especially line 13's beginning "Yet," underscores the poet's insecurity of what he asks for. However, nature's threat to the youth's beauty does not matter, for the poet confidently asserts that the youth will gain immortality as the subject of the sonnets. Because poetry, according to the poet, is eternal, it only stands to reason that his poetry about the young man will ensure the youth's immortality. The youth as the physical subject of the sonnets will age and eventually die, but in the sonnets themselves he will remain young and beautiful.♡

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"O! how I faint when I of you do write"

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Summary:
The poet acknowledges that the rival poet displaces him in the youth's favor. Feeling discouraged by the superiority of the "better spirit" of the rival poet, whom he describes throughout the sonnet using nautical imagery, the poet complains of being "tongue-tied," unable to compete with his rival's exalted verse.
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The poet's phrasing is courteous, but the exaggerated language indicates a serious mood. One detects an ironic purpose in the poet's devotion in the face of rejection when he sarcastically compares his verse to the rival poet's as "My saucy bark, inferior far to his." He forgives his own abject behavior with the excuse that love for the young man is his sole reason for living and the sole reason for his destruction: "Then if he thrive, and I be cast away, / The worst was this: my love was my decay."♡

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"As an unperfect actor on the stage"

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In Sonnet 23, the speaker is not able to adequately speak of his love, because of the intensity of his feelings. He compares himself to an actor onstage who is struck by fear and cannot perform his part, or like a ferocious beast or a passionate human filled with rage, and whose over-abundant emotion defeats the expressing of it. He forgets the correct words that the rituals of love deserve. The passion of his love seems to fall apart, as it is over-burdened with emotion. So he encourages his young friend to read and then respond to the poet's written expressions of his love. The sonnet ends with the paradoxes — books that cannot speak will speak, if eyes will hear.♡