Max’s Musings: Shakespeare Sonnet

What is a poet without their muse?

William Shakespeare is most known for his skills as a playwright. His powerhouse plays showcase his extensive range, from whimsical comedies like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, to diverse histories like King Lear and Julius Caesar, to dark tragedies like Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, and Othello.

In addition to his plays, Shakespeare crafted over 150 sonnets over the course of his life. Shakespeare’s poetry is no exception to his craftsmanship. His sonnets, fueled with consistent rhyme scheme and rhythmic iambic pentameter, offer a healing and rejuvenating quality for the readers.

After high school drowned me out in Shakespeare, I fell out of love with his works. It wasn’t until I took a Shakespeare class in college that my love and respect for him and his literary works revitalized itself. Whether or not you went through your own anti-Shakespeare phase, I encourage you to broaden your literary horizons and set sail on this sonnet sea with me.

Shakespeare’s thought provoking, gut-wrenching, and philosophical sonnets hold their own weight and intrinsic merit. Tempted with many different pinpoints of poetry to discuss, I ended up selecting “Sonnet 100” due to its depiction of a poet’s relationship with their melodious muse and how it allows its readers to contemplate relationships both past and present, and how they still play into their lives today.

Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget’st so long
To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?
Spend’st thou thy fury on some worthless song,
Darkening thy power, to lend base subjects light?
Return, forgetful muse, and straight redeem
In gentle numbers time so idly spent;
Sing to the ear that doth thy lays esteem
And gives thy pen both skill and argument.
Rise; resty muse, my love’s sweet face survey
If Time have any wrinkle graven there;
If any, be a satire to decay,
And make Time’s spoils despised everywhere.
   Give my love fame faster than Time wastes life;
   So thou prevent’st his scythe and crooked knife.

At the beginning of the poem, the speaker acknowledges a rift in their relationship with their unnamed muse. They subsequently call, while in a mournful longing, for the relationship to be repaired. There is an outpouring of vulnerability in the speaker’s struggle with not being able to create prior to their muse departing from their life.

The speaker pays homage to all that the muse has inspired them to write with “both skill and argument”. They acknowledge that their work is just as much the muse’s as theirs and hopes to regain common ground again.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare next to Shakespeare bobblehead

The Evergreen Echo

Time may change the muse physically but will not affect the speaker’s feelings for them. The muse is eternally memorialized in the poet’s heart and within their own words regardless of the possible and potential rekindling. Although it is not clear what will happen, there is hope for their relationship to live anew.

After reading “Sonnet 100”, I wanted to reflect on my own myriads of muses. There is a symbolic relationship between a poet and a muse. Muses take many different forms and transcend more than just a mere person. They can surface from a place, an object, a memory, a personification, an identity, or anything that a poet can tap into to render a poem.

Constantly changing, what works one day may not work the next day. It is crucial for poets to say goodbye to their muses when they have served their purpose in their literary spaces.

When I first dabbled in writing poetry, sonnets were my poem of choice as they were the form I was predisposed to. Every sonnet felt like a puzzle trying to get the rhyme scheme to fit my narrative. As my writing has evolved, I have learned to drift from standard forms and experiment with free verse and free form.

With poetry, most people think a poet must stick to a standard rhyme scheme interlaced with flowery language like that of Shakespeare’s to make a “good” poem. How can one place limits on something so pure and vulnerable?

At the end of the day, poetry has no rules and restrictions. Poetry is a process that asks so much and so little of the poet simultaneously. Are you willing to give yourself over?