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Entrepreneurial Sonneteer: Shakespeare and the Language of Commerce

by Doré Ripley, ©2006

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE'S sonnet sequence, like most Elizabethan cycles, muses over love's discordant humors. Utilizing, while reinterpreting Petrarchan models, the English adapted the form to suit their audience. The language used by Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney, presents the familiar motif of love as a martial conquest. Shakespeare's sonnets, on the other hand, employ the vocabulary of commerce: usury, wealth, speculation, property ownership, economic crime, bookkeeping/accounting terminology, contractual language, and legal rhetoric. Unlike many of his poetic contemporaries, Shakespeare's wealth steadily increased over his lifetime, investing his sonnets with commercial enthusiasm. Nonetheless, critics must use caution when viewing any poetic work as autobiography. Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare share rigorous visions of love using different word types to express the profit and injuries of Cupid's capricious darts.

            The posthumous printing of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella sparked a surge in the circulation of love sonnet sequences making them one of Elizabethan England's most popular literary forms (Marotti 396). Contemporary readers of Astrophil and Stella viewed it as a genuine English work, a sonnet sequence "fit to rank with the most celebrated works from Italy" (Lever 53). Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare, adopted aspects of the Petrarchan legacy (Kimbrough 112), adapting its melodic, metaphysical attitude toward love (Kimbrough 110). These three English poets might well appreciate Danté's attendant introduction to his amorous sonnet cycle: "I decided to compose a sonnet addressed to all of Love's faithful subjects" (Danté qtd. in Neely 364). This legacy of love led Renaissance poets to question, via their works, "what causes a lover's crying out for sleep to come: Cupid's leaden dart, the unobtainable lady who still must be served, or guilty pricks of conscience?" (Kimbrough 112). In addition to setting the themes and motifs of what was styled Petrarchan verse, Danté and Petrarch also contributed to the sequence structure with its assumed piecemeal composition (Neely 360), as asserted by Helen Vendler' reinforces belief that Shakespeare constructed Sonnet 1 later than the other verses, as a prologue to the sequence (47). Even though the English followed the Italianate style, focusing the first part of a sonnet sequence on the stagnant liaison "of the adoring/lamenting poet-lover to an immovable beloved" (Neely 368), they strayed away during the second part, not always ending their sequences with the lover's death. The poet's moods progress along with the forward movement of a sonnet sequence's story, but the imposition of propulsion and plot does not mean the individual sonnets do not function as a complete unit (Hamilton 59). Sidney follows the Petrarchan model, where the poet never consummates his unobtainable love (Maclean 639), leading his contemporary, Thomas Nashe, to comment that Astrophil and Stella is "'the tragicommody of love . . . performed by starlight. . . . The argument cruell chastitie, the Prologue hope, the Epilogue dispaire'" (qtd. in Hamilton 59). Spenser, on the other hand, maintains many of the Petrarchan conceits, while unexpectedly celebrating love's conquest in marriage, thereby elevating the Protestant ideal of sexuality in matrimony over celibacy (Maclean 638). But with an indecent twist, Shakespeare turns the form on its head as "the poet, dark lady and youth descend together in mutual lust, mutual deceit, [and] mutual destruction" (Neely 374).

            In order to examine particular word types and/or imagery, each sonnet studied will be examined individually (See table 1). Most Elizabethan sonnets produce imagery linked to the specific vocabulary the poet selects. But there are exceptions; for example, a case can be made that Shakespeare's Sonnet 1 uses entrepreneurial/legal language while not necessarily evoking a distinctly commercial metaphor. On the contrary, most allusions in Sonnet 1 reflect fecundity, with the poet's plea for the youth to procreate. Even so, when Shakespeare uses the legal term "contracted" in line 5, it turns the prior "increase" (1.1) and "decrease" (1.3) into accounting or bookkeeping terms. "[C]ontracted" (1.5) evokes Elizabethan marriage ceremonies, which were treated as legal business arrangements. But more commonly, business contracts involve non-human commodities, setting prices, quantities, and terms of sale. An increase or decrease in a contract arrangement inevitably involves accounting and/or bookkeeping calculations. This financial interpretation, in turn, makes "world's due" (1.14) a purchase, while "mak'st waste" (1.12) becomes the frivolous spending of capital. Sonnet 1 attempts to appeal to the youth's vanity, in order to ensure his perpetuity through procreation. Katherine Duncan-Jones believes the poet's appeal to immortality reflects "eugenics" (Shakespeare 113), while the Norton Shakespeare intuits a code about the identity (and gender) of the beloved (Greenblatt 569). Stephen Booth expresses a connection, "between investment for profit and miserly self-defeating financial conservatism" (137). A fourth view expressed by Helen Vendler, asserts the poet's "aesthetic" expresses abundance in the same way the Bible commands humankind to be fruitful and multiply (47). Shakespeare chooses word types in Sonnet 1 that progress in a way that forces the reader to re-examine the initial references to natural abundance and fecundity, thereby exposing an entrepreneurial vision. Shakespeare's Petrarchan-style predecessors adopted fiscal word choices on a very limited scale, making Shakespeare's selections unique, highlighting an entrepreneurial vocabulary and a clear grasp of the new English economy.

            Sir Philip Sidney is less concerned with purchasing, borrowing, or contracting love, and more interested in conquering Cupid. Astrophil and Stella acquaints the reader with the amorous desires of a "'young courtier for a married woman' whom [the poet] identifies as Sidney himself and Lady Rich" (Ringler qtd. in Hamilton 63). Like Danté and Petrarch, in over half this sequence's sonnets, Sidney employs the Anacreontic Cupid (Neely 378), shooting love's arrows, thereby creating a war-like atmosphere for affection. In number 72, Cupid must change the Sidney family's blue arrow to "Virtue's gold" (8) (Duncan-Jones Sidney 366). But this "gold" (72.8) is not the entrepreneurial capital of Shakespeare, it is the booty awarded victors or found metaphorically buried deep inside the lover's heart. It would be untrue to say an overlap of themes never occurs in the three Elizabethan sonnet sequences analyzed here; however, preferences are clearly evident. Shakespeare conjures up militaristic word types in only about nine of his 154 sonnets. Sonnet 8 goes so far as to declare, "war not" (2) with melancholy, instructing the youth to do his duty, get married and continue his lineage. But moral pleas are beneath Sidney, who, in addition to being armed against love, escalates authority by attempting to settle love's crimes in court. Sidney's Sonnet 65 tells Anacreaon's fable of the runaway cupid, who, after the poet rescues him, houses Cupid in his heart (Duncan-Jones Sidney 365). The ungrateful boy betrays the poet (65.1-5), leading the narrator to assert, he has legal "proof" (65.1), and his "just cries" (65.2) "bind" (65.3) Cupid to give him the courted. But Cupid unjustly uses his "arms" (65.13) against the speaker, making him a captured slave in the battle of love. A common device, Sidney personifies love in the "nak'd boy" (65.5), while the epizeuxis of "too too wise" (65.6) makes clear that the world recognizes Cupid's tricks. The speaker of the poem gives Cupid the use of "mine eyes" (65.8), which Cupid "scorned" (65.10). The use of anadiplosis to repeat "Mine eyes" at the beginning of line 9, followed by the auxesis ending in "my life" (65.9), reminds the reader that the same eyes Cupid borrowed also took in the poet's unobtainable beloved. The poet contracted with Cupid, allowing Cupid to use his senses for "great services" (65.10), and love's winged warrior took advantage of the narrator with his "tigerish courage" (65.11). Duncan-Jones believes the last line's reference to an arrow again refers to the Sidney's blue-arrowed crest (Sidney 365), perhaps because of the previous line's reference to "thine arms" (65.13). But, while the last line's antanaclasis makes it clear that Cupid shoots his weapon, the "arrow" (65.14), with his "arms" (65.13), the bow, the "arrow head" (65.14) of love, lodges in the bard's heart. The poet made a contract with the armed Cupid and will sue him with "just cries" (65.2) for breaking a legal agreement. While most of Sidney's sonnets contain militaristic visions of love's war, he also employs entrepreneurial or legal rhetoric. Spenser, on the other hand, utilizes Petrarchan conceits by playfully employing Cupid to battle the beloved's pride.

            Edmund Spenser's eighty-nine sonnet Amoretti purportedly tells the story of Spenser's wooing and wedding (Lever 96) to his second wife, Elizabeth Boyle (MacLean 637). Some critics also view Shakespeare's and Sidney's sonnet sequences with an autobiographical eye, causing many to worry this view leads to a tendency for critics to approach sonnets as history, thereby degrading their value as poetry (Lever 96). With that being said, Spenser's sequence is unlike the Petrarchan/Danté model of unattainable love because the Amoretti tells the story of love fulfilled, a woman obtained, a woman married. Instead of ending his sequence with a typical Petrarchan complaint, like Sidney and Shakespeare, Spenser ends his sequence with a "nuptial song" (MacLean 638). Like Sidney, Spenser describes love's conquest or battle, but instead of an impotent war over the unobtainable, this clash involves the beloved's pride. Like a true warrior the poet admires the strength of his lover/enemy. The reader senses the speaker's approach to this clash of personalities as siege-like, hoping eventually to wear down the courted. The poet exalts in his beloved's "faire countenance" (5.11), and to a certain extent admits that, "her too portly pride" (5.2) should be honored because it reflects her good taste. She has "Scorn of base things, and sdeigne of foule dishonor" (5.6). The theme of the lover's overweening pride occurs in over 20 of Spenser's sonnets, with the speaker continually harping on the beloved. Finally, in Sonnet 61, the poet believes he

            Dare not henceforth above the bounds of dewtie,

            T'accuse of pride

            . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

            Such heavenly formes ought rather worshipt be,

            Then dare be loved by men of meane degree. (3-4, 13-14)

The lighthearted nature of the narrator's poetic attacks on his lover's pride, do not reflect the depression and unfilled desire of Sidney's sonnets. Spenser reinterprets standard forms, creating new ones that reflect his humor by directing negative flattery at the beloved.

            Spenser created a sonnet style for the Amoretti which is neither the "Italian (ending as it does with an often snappy couplet) nor the 'Shakespearean' form established by Surrey" (MacLean 638). He also changes the Petrarchan blazon to highlight what the beloved eyes' are not:

            Not to the Sun: for they doo shine by night;

            Nor to the Moone: for they are changéd never;

            Nor to the Starres: for they have purer sight;

            Nor to the fire: for they consume not ever;

            Nor to the lightning: for they still preserver;

            Nor to the Diamond: for they are more tender;

            Nor unto Christall: for nought may them sever;

            Nor unto glasse: such basenesse mought offend her. (9.5-12)

Reinforced through anaphora, the only conclusion the poet can fathom confirms that the lover's eyes must "Then to the Maker selfe they likest be" (9.13). The speaker compares her to God, but soon realizes his mistake when his beloved's pride makes a very human comeback. A typical Petrarchan beloved, she is "cruell faire" (55.4), and the speaker can only wonder from what "mould" (55.3) such a creature was cast. But while Spenser experiments with Petrarchan styles and conceits, he employs Elizabethan contractual language, referencing the marriage contract in Sonnet 65. Like all Renaissance women, the narrator's lover, once married, faces the loss of her freedom. The poet addresses her concern saying, "The league twixt them, that loyal love hath bound" (65.10), including her loss of "liberty" (65.2), will actually make her free, because "[s]weet be the bands, the which true love doth tye, / Without constraynt or dread of any ill" (65.5-6). Consequently, the bard's beloved, once she becomes his wife, "feeles no captivity" (65.7). A happy loving marriage not only brings the poet's siege to a successful conclusion, it will destroy the beloved's conceit, and "pride dare not approach" (65.9). Instead of the already married or dead lover of Sidney and Petrarch, the poet of the Amoretti must battle and conquer his beloved's pride in order to obtain a wife. Conceit again finds itself the centerpiece, when in Shakespeare's opening sonnets the bard addresses a lover's arrogance, although in a far more discreet way.

            The speaker of Shakespeare's sonnets laments the foibles of a narcissistic youth. But, unlike Spenser, Shakespeare uses the words pride and/or conceit rarely, appearing approximately 14 times throughout the 154 sonnet cycle. The speaker does not address the youth's vanity directly, but Shakespeare, the author, instead chooses contractual, mercantile, economic, or legal language to point out the youth's egotism. The economic terminology examined previously in Sonnet 1 was addressed to the youth's conceit, which creates an odd echo of Petrarch's conceits. In Sonnet 2, the poet asks, "How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use / If thou couldst answer, 'This fair child of mine" (2.9-10). The only way the proud young man can excuse his "thriftless praise" (2.8) is through children, who "Shall sum [his] count" (2.11), much as a bookkeeper would. The bard's young man cannot be called the prideful beloved of Spenser, who may simply be fussy about her mate; no, the youth created by Shakespeare engages in "self-love" (3.8), squandering his "Unthrifty loveliness" (4.1) "Upon thyself" (4.2). The young man spends "hours that with gentle work" (5.1) creates a view of "The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell" (5.2). But the profit from that "work" (5.1), only lasts a moment, because Nature does not allow "forbidden usury / Which happies those that pay the willing loan" (6.5-6). Again, the youth needs to procreate, becoming "ten times happier, be it ten for one" (6.8). Even though an exorbitant amount of interest, it is still worth paying, since the only alternative is death, leaving the "worms thine heir" (6.14). By surveying Shakespeare's first six sonnets for word types, an entrepreneurial and economic mindset of vocabulary choice makes itself apparent. A similar assessment of Spenser or Sidney's opening verses does not reveal any particularly consistent word associations.

            The presence of entrepreneurial language in the first six sonnets confirms a commercial knowledge by Shakespeare. They do not indicate a common theme or motif, and making a sonnet-by-sonnet survey of commercial or economic imagery would prove bloated and tedious. Pointing out some financial components in Shakespeare's more famous sonnets makes the sequence economically interesting. For instance, Sonnet 129 presents a legal case:

            Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame

            Is lust in action; and till action, lust

            Is perjured. (129.1-3)

The words "expense," "waste," "action," and "perjured" connote an economic loss along with a wrongful legal action. Regarding line 1, Booth makes note that "the Folio text of Lear 2.1.100 has 'th' expence and waste of his Revenues'" (441), clearly indicating finances. At the same time, line 2's antimetabole draws one to the antimetabole in line 13, "All this the world well knows, yet none knows well." This thought sounds like the age-old adage about money—you can never have enough—extending backwards to line 11's bookkeeping language, "A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe." "Proof" and "proved" have been used in the English language "to test or check correctness" of mathematical [or accounting] problems since 1430 (OED "proof," 4b). In Sonnet 117, another "proof" occurs, reminding readers to "Book both my wilfulness and errors down, / And on just proof surmise accumulate" (117.9-10). This "proof" along with "book," "errors," and "accumulate" give the lines a financial/legal overtone. Shakespeare's proofs like accounting proofs do not always give the desired results; a net operating statement can present a negative worth as well as a positive one.

            Shakespeare's Sonnet 30 presents a "sessions" (1) court where the poet needs to "summon up" (2), both financially, and in the legal sense of evidence, his past failures at love (Duncan-Jones Shakespeare 170). His wounds re-open when remembering his "cancelled woe" (30.7), and he "moan[s] th'expense" (30.8). Next, the double polyptoton reminds the reader that "The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, / Which I new pay, as if not paid before" (30.11-12) is relieved when the poet thinks of his friend, and "All losses are restored" (30.14). In this same legal and financial vein, Sonnet 134 opens with the poet asking his mistress to release his friend into his keeping. Both, Booth (464-465) and Duncan-Jones (Shakespeare 382) argue this sonnet contains predominantly legal, albeit criminal terms. This is especially evident when compared with the preceding Sonnet 133's metaphor on love, jail, and bail: "Prison my heart in thy steel bosom's ward; / But then my friend's heart let my poor heart bail" (133.9-10). While Sonnets 133 and 134 stand alone, they appear connected, and even though the connection may be a criminal prison offense in Sonnet 133, in Sonnet 134 the offender finds himself going to debtor's prison for economic crimes. Since the poet "confessed" (134.1), he admits being "mortgaged to thy will" (134.2). He must "forfeit" (134.3) himself to "restore" (134.4) his friend who, "learned surety-like" (134.7). The poet's "bond" (134.8), or "statute" (134.9), belongs to the "usurer" (134.10), or mistress, which she refuses to give up. Frustrated, the bard laments, to "sue a friend, came debtor for my sake" (134.11); however, the mistress still partakes of both lovers, and "He pays the whole" (134.14). This proclivity for legal and financial language is reflected in the bulk of the contemporary texts regarding Shakespeare. Few though they may be, most are legal documents drawn up regarding financial ventures. Shakespeare's familiarity with economically related words and terms extended beyond economic proofs, legal rhetoric, and usury, to landholding concerns recorded in legal contracts.

            Shakespeare, in Sonnet 197, uses the legal terms "lease" (3), and "forfeit" (4), to preserve his friend through poetry. Later in the sequence, the narrator again uses lease to claim love can outlast the "leases of short-numbered hours" (124.10). Time's inevitable forward progress also finds itself the subject of Sonnet 126, reminding the youth that time's decay will claim his beauty. Nature will be forced to "audit" (126.11) her accounts, and "acquit herself of [time's] debt by handing the [youth] over in payment" (Duncan-Jones Shakespeare 366). In the same sonnet, "Quietus" (126.12) translates as to clear one's accounts, while "render" (126.12) means to pay, "as an acknowledgement of dependence" (Booth 434). The transcendence of love through time is juxtaposed against the inevitable decay time brings leading the speaker to ask, "Why so large cost, having so short a lease, / Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?" (146.5-6). This lease or rent, sounds more familiar in the modern economic sense and is again alluded to in Sonnet 125: "Have I not seen dwellers on form and favour / Lose all, and more, by paying too much rent," (125.5-6). While the poet's mistress has "Robbed others' beds' revenues of their rents" (142.8), the bard will forgive her: "Be it lawful I love thee as thou lov'st those" (142.9). A lease authorizes one to occupy a certain place for a certain space of time for a fee, or rent. It also allows the collection of rents or revenues on those lands. Paying too much rent leads to financial ruin when one pays out more than one brings in, and no one owns time or has the ability to slow its progress; one can only occupy, or lease space on its forward moving axis. Shakespeare's penchant for economic, especially legal, rhetoric and his lifelong accumulation of wealth might help explain his inclination for commercial word types.

            In his work Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt offers the story of a poor young Shakespeare (54) haunting the inns of Shoreditch or Bankside, where he runs across London's great popular dramatists (200). Whether or not Shakespeare and the other Elizabethan playwrights became comrades in cups is questionable; nonetheless, Shakespeare would know of his dramatic colleagues. The group may have earned comparable wages as playwrights and actors, and had similar opportunities to become householders, or shareholders, of the theaters, but only Shakespeare displayed the economic acumen that led to an accumulation of wealth over a lifetime. Sadly, most of his contemporaries did not live long enough to prove any economic expertise, good or bad. Thomas Nashe died in 1601, after upsetting Puritan officials so much that Bishop Bancroft declared, "'all Nasshes bookes . . . be taken wheresoever they maye be found and none of theire bookes bee ever printed hereafter'" (qtd. in Jokinen 1). George Peele, the son of a London salt merchant, spent his wife's dowry (Greenblatt Will 202), and then died from a "'loathsome disease'" (qtd. in Greenblatt Will 212). Robert Greene abandoned his wife and three children (Greenblatt Will 208), and died penniless after a drunken party (Greenblatt Will 210). Christopher Marlowe, the suspected Elizabethan spy (Nicholl 91), died in an argument over a tavern "'recknynge'" before his 30th birthday (Nicholl 17). A year earlier, Marlowe's crony, Thomas Watson, who, at one time stood accused with Marlowe of murder in yet another tavern brawl (Nicholl 178-79), died of unknown causes (Greenblatt Will 201). Thomas Kyd, the author of the wildly popular Spanish Tragedy, found himself arrested with a sacrilegious manuscript attributed to his former roommate, Marlowe. The discovery led to Kyd's torture by the authorities (Nicholl 43) from which he never fully recovered, dying in 1594. The Amoretti's Edmund Spenser, a gentlemen outside this somewhat seedy circle, and one-time owner of Castle Kilcoman in County Cork, died "in distress, if not actual destitution, at a lodging in" London (Drabble 926). The knight, Sir Philip Sidney, died famously at the Battle of Zutphen in 1587. His perceived heroics propelled him to what can only be labeled stardom, and probably contributed to the popularity of Astrophil and Stella. The early death of so many of Shakespeare's contemporaries not only tells the story of hard living, it points to an inability of even learned men to grasp the opportunities of the new cash-based capitalist economy. Shakespeare, on the other hand, had no intention of following his contemporaries' lifeless footsteps into an early grave.

            London in the early 1590s teemed with people striving to access the new mercantile economy. The scholar, L.G. Salingar, records a 1579 opinion of England, saying, "'The realm aboundeth in riches, as may be seen by the general excess of the people in purchasing, in buildings, in meat, drink, and feastings, and most notably apparel,'" and this abundance was directly related to England's new capitalism (17). Wealth was no longer measured in the land owned by aristocrats; it involved speculation, monopolies, and a mercantile economy that ran on cash. The influx of money led to a great loosening of the social fabric (Salingar 17), creating public tension, especially in London. The Elizabethan theater movement arose as a direct result of capitalism, and the theater-going public further reflected the unraveling of the social material. All classes and both genders mixed at the playhouse, and anyone with enough money could purchase extravagant clothes, a sword, and a place on the stage next to a real gentlemen (Cook 310). Even the poorest laborers earned enough disposable income to attend occasional dramatic performances (Whitney 434). This cash-based economy needed ready funds, making usury one of its necessary components, and even though money lending was newly legal, it still evoked disreputable connotations. But old-fashioned morals did not stop those who needed money, from regularly asking those that had money, for loans (Briggs 61), and one of those who had new money was William Shakespeare.

            Shakespeare's financial aptitude came to early in his career. He found himself fiscally responsible for the acting troupe associated with Burbage and Kent in a 1594 agreement (Greenblatt Will 210). Not one to spend frivolously, Shakespeare lived frugally in London, where he rented rooms above a wig-maker's shop. This allowed him to save money to purchase an expensive piece of property in Stratford (Greenblatt Will 361). Shakespeare's financial acumen extended to speculation: he owned shares in the Globe and the Blackfriars theaters (Greenblatt Will 368). He also practiced usury, suing a neighbor for non-repayment of a debt (Greenblatt Will 363). When purchasing an annuity on a land lease that returned £60 per year, he exhibited forethought about his retirement. He protected this annuity when some of the property was enclosed, making the perpetrators grant "'him reasonable satisfaction . . . in yearly rent or a sum of money'" if his annuity should be interrupted (qtd. in Greenblatt Will 383). By the time the 52-year-old Shakespeare died in April 1616, he was quite a wealthy man, a self-made man. His long last will and testament not only includes the infamous, "second-best bed" (qtd. in Greenblatt Norton 720), left to his wife Anne Hathaway, but an extensive list of his accumulated wealth. The catalogue includes "'money, wearing Apparrell, gold and silver Plate, New Place [in Stratford], the Blackfriars gatehouse [apartments in London], . . . barns, stables, orchards, gardens, lands, [and] tenements'" (qtd. in Greenblatt Norton 720-721). Shakespeare made money, bought property, and got out of London with his name and his neck.

            Shakespeare's sonnet cycle reflects the language of the entrepreneur, while Spenser and Sidney's sequences forgo most economic language for militaristic word schemes. Spenser and Sidney forgo most economic language for militaristic word schemes. All three poets utilize, adopt, and even reinterpret Petrarchan models on love and the relationship of the courtier to the beloved. Sidney, the earliest of the three, did not stray far from Petrarch and Danté, whereas Spenser made love obtainable through marriage, only to have Shakespeare turn the form topsy-turvy with his decadent love triangle. Art is not created in a vacuum and the early modern society producing these three poets was vital, vibrant, adaptive, and evolving. The Elizabethan new economy had a language of its own, which Shakespeare utilized deftly in his sonnets, sometimes without notice. While Spenser and Sidney relished the thrill of love's conquest, Shakespeare reckoned love could be bought and sold.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 1

1|    From fairest creatures we desire increase,

2|    That thereby beauty's rose might never die,

3|    But as the riper should by time decease

4|    His tender heir might bear his memory:

5|    But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,

6|    Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,

7|    Making a famine where abundance lies,

8|    Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

9|    Thou that art now the world's fres ornament,

10|  And only herald to the gaudy spring,

11|  Within thine own bud buriest thy content,

12|  And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding.

13|      Pity the world, or else this glutton be,

14|      To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.

Sidney's Astrophil and Stella Sonnet 65

1|     Love, by sure proof I may call thee unkind;

2|    That giv'st no better ear to my just cries;

3|    Thou whom to me such my good turns should bind,

4|    As I may well recount, but none can prize.

5|          For when, nak'd boy, thou could'st no harbour find

6|     In this old world, grown now so too too wise,

7|     I lodged thee in my heart; and being blind

8|     By nature born, I gave to thee mine eyes.

9|          Mine eyes, my light, my heart, my life, alas,

10|   If so great services may scorned be,

11|  Yet let this thought thy tigerish courage pass,

12|  That I perhaps, am somewhat kin to thee:

13|        Since in thine arms, if learn'd fame truth hath spread,

14|        Thou bear'st the arrow, I the arrow head.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 134

1|     So now I have confessed that he is thine,

2|     And I myself am mortgaged to thy will,

3|     Myself I'll forfeit, so that other mine

4|     Thou wilt restore to be my comfort still;

5|     But thou wilt not, nor he will not be free,

6|     For thou art covetous, and he is kind;

7|     He learned but surety-like to write for me,

8|     Under that bond that him as fast doth bind.

9|     The statute of thy beauty thou wilt take,

10|   Thou usurer, that put'st forth all to use,

11|   And sue a friend, came debtor for my sake:

12|   So him I lose through my unkind abuse.

13|        Him have I lost; thou hast both him and me;

14|        He pays the whole, and yet am I not free.

*Categorization of sonnets based on the language selected by the poet, which may or may not be metaphorical. The totals expressed are not all inclusive.

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