Shakespeare's Sonnets: II

In the Introduction by Robert O. Ballou in the Avenel edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets he says that Robert “Browning found much in them which was banal, yet in praising Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese he could think of no higher tribute than to say they were the finest since Shakespeare.”

Hmmm…I’d be thinking that over several times were I Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Either old Bob was going to be sleeping on the couch or she took the high road and assumed he changed his opinion of Shakespeare.

Browning aside, most scholars consider the sonnets to have “meditative energy and lyric melody.”

Here is Sonnet II.

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,

Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,

Will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held:

Then being ask’d where all thy beauty lies,

Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,

To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,

Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.

How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use,

If thou couldst answer “This fair child of mine

Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,”

Proving his beauty by succession thine!

This were to be new made when thou art old,

And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.