Flowers and Trees
Flowers and trees appear throughout the sonnets to illustrate
the passage of time, the transience of life, the aging process,
and beauty. Rich, lush foliage symbolizes youth, whereas barren
trees symbolize old age and death, often in the same poem, as in
Sonnet 12. Traditionally, roses signify romantic
love, a symbol Shakespeare employs in the sonnets, discussing their
attractiveness and fragrance in relation to the young man. Sometimes
Shakespeare compares flowers and weeds to contrast beauty and ugliness.
In these comparisons, marred, rotten flowers are worse than weeds—that
is, beauty that turns rotten from bad character is worse than initial
ugliness. Giddy with love, elsewhere the speaker compares blooming
flowers to the beauty of the young man, concluding in Sonnets 98 and 99 that
flowers received their bloom and smell from him. The sheer ridiculousness
of this statement—flowers smell sweet for chemical and biological
reasons—underscores the hyperbole and exaggeration that plague typical
sonnets.
Stars
Shakespeare uses stars to stand in for fate, a common
poetic trope, but also to explore the nature of free
will. Many sonneteers resort to employing fate, symbolized by the
stars, to prove that their love is permanent and predestined. In
contrast, Shakespeare’s speaker claims that he relies on his eyes,
rather than on the hands of fate, to make decisions. Using his eyes,
the speaker “reads” that the young man’s good fortune and beauty shall
pass to his children, should he have them. During Shakespeare’s
time, people generally believed in astrology, even as scholars were
making great gains in astronomy and cosmology, a metaphysical system
for ordering the universe. According to Elizabethan astrology, a
cosmic order determined the place of everything in the universe,
from planets and stars to people. Although humans had some free
will, the heavenly spheres, with the help of God, predetermined
fate. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 25, the speaker
acknowledges that he has been unlucky in the stars but lucky in
love, thereby removing his happiness from the heavenly bodies and transposing
it onto the human body of his beloved.
Weather and the Seasons
Shakespeare employed the pathetic fallacy,
or the attribution of human characteristics or emotions to elements
in nature or inanimate objects, throughout his plays. In the sonnets,
the speaker frequently employs the pathetic fallacy, associating
his absence from the young man to the freezing days of December
and the promise of their reunion to a pregnant spring. Weather and
the seasons also stand in for human emotions: the speaker conveys
his sense of foreboding about death by likening himself to autumn,
a time in which nature’s objects begin to decay and ready themselves
for winter, or death. Similarly, despite the arrival of “proud-pied April”
(2) in Sonnet 98,
the speaker still feels as if it were winter because he and the
young man are apart. The speaker in Sonnet 18,
one of Shakespeare’s most famous poems, begins by rhetorically asking
the young man, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (1).
He spends the remainder of the poem explaining the multiple ways
in which the young man is superior to a summer day, ultimately concluding
that while summer ends, the young man’s beauty lives on in the permanence
of poetry.
payment page
