Shakespeare's sonnets 15, 16 and 17. The immortalizing power of poetry and procreation (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Potsdam (Anglistik), course: Shakespeare's Sonnets, language: English, abstract: Shakespeare's Sonnets 15, 16 and 17 belong to the group of procreation sonnets, running from 1 to 17 in the collection of "Shakespeare's sonnets". In this sonnet sequence the speaker urges the young man to marry and to beget children in order to preserve his beauty and achieve everlasting life. The power of the young man to perpetuate himself by biological generation is confronted to poetry as another method to reach immortality (Cheney, 126/128).

In sonnet 15 the speaker depicts the mortality of all living creatures and points out that the young man, too, will fall victim to the transitory nature of things. Nevertheless in the couplet he "sells" himself as a poet whose verse would give his young patron immortality. This idea is immediately dismissed in the following sonnet 16 where he urges the young man not to rely on his sonnets alone and recommends biological procreation as the superior mean to represent the young man's beauty adequately. In sonnet 17 the persona finally describes how procreation and poetry can work together to reach double immortality. Here again the speaker points out that his poetry is of far lesser worth to give immortality to the young man's beauty than his own creation of progeny would be.

Dispraising his own works in favour of the begetting of children is very contrary to what one would expect from a poet. Furthermore, it remains open to question how the speaker's understatement of his own art and his convincingly depiction of the omnipresence of mortality go together with his courageous promise to immortalize the young man in verse. It will therefore be interesting to find out which techniques the speaker applies to make the young man procreate and what this might reveal about the true nature of his interest to immortalize the young man. By responding to these questions, one can only come to the conclusion that the speaker has other reasons than those of personal affection for wishing to keep the young man's beauty in being.

After having presented some formal aspects of the sonnets, the first main part of the paper will be concerned with the question of how mortality and passage of beauty are depicted in the sonnets. Special emphasis will be put on the concepts of vertex and war contributing to make the young man realize the instability of his beauty and showing him methods to preserve it.

The second main part of the paper will deal with the speaker's comparison of his poetry to the supposed superior power of procreation.