Sonnet 33
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Full many a glorious morning have I seen |
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| –William Shakespeare | ||
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Shakespeare's Sonnet 33 is the first of what are sometimes called the estrangement sonnets (33-36): poems concerned with the speaker's response to an unspecified "sensual fault" (35) committed by his beloved.
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[edit] Paraphrase
I've seen many beautiful mornings on which the sun shines on the mountaintops, the meadows, and streams. Yet soon, clouds overcast the sun, hiding the sun from the world until it sinks in the west. In the same way, my beloved shone on me one morning, making me happy, yet an hour later he too was hidden by clouds. I do not scorn him for this; even the best humans may err when the sun of heaven does so.
[edit] Source and analysis
Nicolaus Delius notes thematic and stylistic parallels to the last scene of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. George Steevens and Edward Dowden were among the first to group the so-called "estrangement sonnets" and to note the parallels to other groups (such as 40 - 42) with similar themes.
The sonnet and the ones that follow have been especially attractive to critics interested in biographical reference in the sonnet; George Wyndham deplores this tendency, as does Stephen Booth.
Hilton Landry notes that the poem is an extended simile with metaphors in each branch of the simile; he also called it the "simplest and sweetest" of the group. Elizabeth Sagaser notes that the poem is counterposed to Sonnet 116.
The poem's conceit has numerous parallels in Shakespeare's plays. Sidney Lee compares "flatter" (line 2) to a similar usage in King John 3.1.77-80. Steevens, Edward Capell, and Henry Brown note parallels in other plays. Edmond Malone glosses "rack" (line 6) as "the quick motion of the clouds"; "region" (10), a term for a division of the atmosphere, echoes and amplifies the reference. Rolfe notes that "forlorn" (line 7) was in Elizabethan pronunciation with the accent on the first syllable when it follows an unaccented syllable.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge analyzes the poem as an instance of how Shakespeare "gives a dignity and passion to the objects that he presents. Unaided by any previous excitement, they burst upon us at once in life and in power."
[edit] 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.
- Booth, Stephen. Shakespeare's Sonnets. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
- Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. Biographia Literaria. London, 1817.
- Landry, Hilton. Interpretation in Shakespeare's Sonnets. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963.
- Sagaser, Elizabeth. "Shakespeare's Sweet Leaves: mourning, pleasure, and the triumph of thought in the Renaissance love lyric." ELH 61 (1994): 1-26.
