William Shakespeare
In sonnet 106 by William Shakespeare, the poet of the sonnets is praising her lover by telling him how extraordinarily beautiful he is. She tells him that the great poets of old could not describe him, because they could only guess at his beauty; but the poets of her time could not describe his beauty because they didn't have the skill to do so (Longman). Shakespeare seems to be trying to immortalize his love and defy time by creating his lover's likeness in a poem that will last forever. Sonnet 106 conforms to the standard format of 14 lines concluding with a rhymed couplet, and is written in the natural meter of iambic pentameter, lending them a stress pattern that approximates English language speech. The poem is set in the larger set of the two groups of sonnets (the larger set is Sonnets 1 through 126), and is addressed by the poet to a beloved young man. The 126 poems addressed to the young man comprise a deliberate sequence. The theme of love and infidelity is dominant in the larger grouping and this theme is interwoven with motifs of beauty, immortality, and the ravages of time and with lyrical hints about poetry's power to immortalize the beloved (Mabillard). Sonnet 106 is a perfect example of Shakes
"Who will believe my verse in time to come, If it were fill'd with your most high deserts?" Sonnet 106 however, looks back to a time when knights and ladies led lives of romance and mystery, a time which chroniclers have recorded for posterity in descriptions which appear to foreshadow in some sense the youth's excelling beauty. Yet they did not know the youth that Shakespeare has written of, who was not yet born. He lends his lover an air of immortality through art using his lover's beauty as a source of inspiration for great poets (Webmaster). The break is very evident for two reasons: the immediate transition of past to present tense verbs, and the almost bipolar swing in the mood and feel of the sonnet. Even his choice of adjectives reflects this. For example, both sonnets look forward to a time when the youth will live on through the verse of the poet: Sonnet 17 even considers that the record of the youth's outstanding beauty will not be believed by future generations. Their songs therefore were mere "prefigurings" of his worth and glory, which now is appreciated, even though the present day poets lack the skill to sing of him adequately. However, this defiance of time and the attempt, at least, to immortalize his lover in the form of a sonnet, shows a continuation of the theme of time, which is a prevalent force in Shakespeare's Sonnets. These factors all lend themselves as evidence to the fact that the theme of Sonnet 106, and the majority of Shakespeare's larger half of his Sonnets is the poet's fight against the flow of time in an effort to immortalize his lover. The writers of past ages were aware, through some sort of divination, of a beauty that surpassed all others. His imphasis on the importance of written records is immense and he mentions them often throughout much of his work. Suddenly after speaking of chronicles, "ladies dead", and "their antique pen", we suddenly are brought into the present; speaking of beholding the present days, and the prophecies of old speaking of now. Instead of wasted time, we now see the words "sing", "beauty", "worth", and "praise", as opposed to the mention of death, antiques, and wasted time just a few lines above. Shakespeare is unhappy with the past because he doesn't want to fade away like so many others have done, who were remembered only through song or in the minds of others; only to die with the owners of the memories.
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