The first quatrain of Sonnet 2 also serves as a small example of how Shakespeare’s word choice and word order operate to create the visual and musical effects that distinguish the Sonnets. While this topic is so large that we can only touch on it here, it seems appropriate to look at least briefly at two of the Sonnets’ most important poetic techniques—metaphor and metrical effects.
The metaphor, a primary device of poetry, can be defined as a play on words in which one object or idea is expressed as if it were something else, something with which it is said to share common features. Consider its many uses in the first quatrain of Sonnet 2:
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 tattered weed of small worth held.
The young man’s forehead, “so gazed on now,” is imaged as a “field” that Time places under siege, digging “deep trenches” in its now youthful smoothness. The metaphor fast-forwards the aging process, turning the youth’s smooth forehead in imagination into a furrowed, lined brow. While the word “field” could allude to any kind of open land or plain, the words “besiege” and “trenches” make it more specifically a battlefield ravaged by the armies of “forty winters.”
In line 3 the metaphor shifts, and the young man’s youthful beauty is imaged as his “livery,” a kind of uniform or splendid clothing that under the onslaught of time will become a “tattered weed” (weed having here the meaning “garment”). The quatrain seems, then, divided into two parts, with the metaphor shifting from that of the brow as a field to the brow (and other youthful features) as clothing. But the word weed carries its inevitable, though here secondary, meaning of an unwanted plant in a “field” of grass or flowers. This wordplay, which expands the scope of the word field, forces the reader to turn from line 4 back to lines 1 and 2, to visualize again the ravaged “field” of the once-smooth brow, and thus to experience with double force the quatrain’s final phrase “of small worth held”—a phrase that syntactically belongs only to the tattered clothing, but that, in the quatrain’s overlapping metaphors, applies more broadly to the young man himself, now “so gazed on,” but moving inevitably toward the day when he, no longer beautiful, will be considered “of small worth.”
We mentioned at the outset that the language of the Sonnets is, like poetic language in general, highly structured. Nowhere is this fact more in evidence than in the rhythm of the Sonnets’ lines. All of the Sonnets (except for Sonnet 145) are written in what is called “iambic pentameter” (that is, each line is composed of five metrical “feet,” with each foot containing two syllables, usually with the first syllable unstressed and the second stressed). But within this general pattern, Shakespeare takes advantage of several features that characterize pronunciation in English—for example, the syllable stresses that inhere in all English words of more than one syllable, as well as the stress patterns in normal English sentences—and he arranges his words to create amazing metrical variety within the structure of the iambic pentameter line.
To return to the first quatrain of Sonnet 2: the first line of the sonnet (“When forty winters shall besiege thy brow”) contains three two-syllable words; two carry stress on the first syllable (“forty” and “winter”) and one of which is stressed on the second syllable (“besiege”). Shakespeare combines these words with four one-syllable words, three of which are unstressed in normal English sentences—a conjunction (“When”), an auxiliary verb (“shall”), and a possessive pronoun (“thy”). The resulting combination of words produces an almost perfect iambic pentameter (the only departure being the pyrrhic third foot, with its two unstressed syllables—“-ters shall”): “When for′ty win′ters shall besiege′ thy brow′ ”.
After thus establishing the meter, the poet can depart radically from the iambic in line 2 without creating confusion about the poem’s overall metric structure. Line 2 (“And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field”) begins with an iamb (“And dig′ ”) but then moves to a “spondee, ” a foot with two stressed syllables (“deep′ trench′-”); the resulting rhythm for the opening of the line is the very strong series of three stressed syllables of “dig′ deep′ trench′-”. The line then moves to the unstressed syllables in the pyrrhic foot (“-es in”) before ending in iambic meter (“thy beau′ty’s field′ ”)—a pattern that produces three unstressed syllables in mid-line.
Line 3 (“Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now”) echoes the opening rhythm of line 2—that is, an iamb followed by a spondee to create three stressed syllables (“Thy youth’s′ proud′ liv′-”) again followed by three unstressed syllables (“-er-y so”); but then, instead of returning to the iambic, as did line 2, the line concludes with another group of three stressed syllables (“gazed′ on′ now′ ”). Line 4 seems to return us to the base of iambic pentameter (“Will be′ a tat′tered weed′ of small′ ”) only to end with a spondee (“worth′ held′ ”), so that the beat of three stressed syllables (heard once in line 2 and twice in line 3) concludes the quatrain. Within the quatrain, rhythms like these direct attention to such key words and phrases as “besiege” and “gazed on now.”
With metaphors and metrics, as with word choice, word order, and sentence structure, every sonnet provides its own richness and its own variations, as well as occasional exceptions to any generalizations we have suggested. (Two of the Sonnets, for example, deviate even from the standard fourteen-line length, with Sonnet 99 having 15 lines and Sonnet 126 having only 12.) But each sonnet provides rich language, a wonderfully controlled tone, and an intellectual challenge sufficient to reward the most patient and dedicated reader.
Adapted from Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine (editors), the New Folger Library Shakespeare edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets. © 2004 Folger Shakespeare Library
