Sonnet 53

Sonnet|53
What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?
Since every one hath, every one, one shade,
And you but one, can every shadow lend.
Describe Adonis, and the counterfeit
Is poorly imitated after you;
On Helen's cheek all art of beauty set,
And you in Grecian tires are painted new:
Speak of the spring, and foison of the year,
The one doth shadow of your beauty show,
The other as your bounty doth appear;
And you in every blessed shape we know.
In all external grace you have some part,
But you like none, none you, for constant heart.
Shakespeare's Sonnet 53, presumably addressed to the same young man as the other sonnets in the first part of the sequence, raises some of the most common themes of the sonnet: the sublime beauty of the beloved, the weight of tradition, and the nature and extent of art's power.

Paraphrase

What are you made of that causes you to be reflected in millions of ways? Everyone else has only one shadow, but you, though you are only one person, are reflected in everything. Someone who attempts to paint Adonis ends up creating only a faint imitation of you; again, someone who attempted to paint Helen would end with a picture of you in Greek dress. If someone speaks of the springtime or the harvest time, then the former is a mere shadow of your beauty, the latter an equally faint shadow of your fruitfulness. We see you in every beautiful thing we see, but there is one way in which you are unlike anything else—in your constancy and fidelity.

ource and analysis

Following George Wyndham, John Bernard notes the neoplatonic underpinnings of the poem, which derive ultimately from Petrarch: the beloved's transcendent beauty is variously diffused through the natural world, but is purer at its source. The reference to Adonis has led numerous scholars, among them Georg Gottfried Gervinus, to explore connections to "Venus and Adonis"; Gerald Massey notes that the twinned references to Adonis and Helen underscore the sense of the beloved's androgyny, most famously delineated in Sonnet 20. Hermann Isaac notes that the first quatrain resembles a sonnet by Tasso. In support of his hypothesis that the person addressed in the sonnet was an actor, Oscar Wilde hypothesized that the poem's "shadows" refer to the young man's roles.

The poem is comparatively free of cruces. "Tires" (l. 8), which generally refers only to a head dress, has been glossed by editors from Edward Dowden to Sidney Lee as referring to the entire outfit. "Foison," a relatively uncommon word even in Shakespeare's time, is glossed by Edmond Malone as "abundance."

The placement of the sonnet in the sequence has also caused some confusion. The last line, which is not evidently sarcastic, appears to contradict the tone of betrayal and reproach of many of its closest neighbors in the sequence as first presented.

References

* Alden, Raymond. "The Sonnets of Shakespeare, with Variorum Reading and Commentary". Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1916.
* Baldwin, T. W. "On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Sonnets". Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950.
* Bernard, John. "'To Constancie Confin'd': the Poetics of Shakespeare's Sonnets." "PMLA" 94 (1979): 77-90.
* Booth, Stephen. "Shakespeare's Sonnets". New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.
* Dowden, Edward. "Shakespeare's Sonnets". London, 1881.
* Hubler, Edwin. "The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets". Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952.

External links

* [http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/53comm.htm Analysis]
* [http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/id-169,pageNum-56.html CliffsNotes]