Sonnet 35

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< Sonnet 35 >

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud:
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults, and even I in this,
Authorizing thy trespass with compare,
Myself corrupting, salving thy amiss,
Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are;
For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense,
Thy adverse party is thy advocate,
And 'gainst myself a lawful plea commence:
Such civil war is in my love and hate,
That I an accessory needs must be,
To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.
–William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's Sonnet 35 is part of the sonnet sequence commonly agreed to be addressed to a young man; more narrowly, it is part of a sequence running from 33 to 42, in which the speaker considers a sin committed against him by the young man, which the speaker struggles to forgive.

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[edit] Paraphrase

Don't feel sorry for what you did; everything in nature is flawed or subject to imperfection. All people commit errors; I am making in error in this (ie, this effort to make you feel better). I'm using these natural comparisons to exonerate you, and thus corrupting myself by forgiving you. (Lines 7 and 8 are obscure and contested.) To forgive your sensual fault, I use my sense (presumably common sense or reason); though you have wronged me I am defending you, and as a result, I am forced to argue against my own interests. Indeed, my feelings of love and hate are so confused that I have become an accomplice to you, the very person who is sinning against me.

[edit] Source and analysis

C. Knox Pooler notes that line 4 echoes a simile in The Two Gentlemen of Verona that was derived from Plutarch; Stephen Booth notes several adaptations of proverbs, applied against one another in a manner that tends to reinforce the contradictory emotions of the speaker. Fleay perceived an allusion to Elizabeth in the "moon" of line 3, and to Southampton in the "bud" of line 4.

The poem is among the better-known and more frequently anthologized of the sonnets. It is commonly regarded as exemplary of Shakespeare's skill at evoking ambivalence and at creating complex personae. L. C. Knights regarded the first quatrain as typically Elizabethan, but praises the phonic and syntactic complexity of the second quatrain. As Booth writes, "The facts the poem reports should make the speaker seem admirable in a reader's eyes; the speaker's manner, however, gives conviction to the idea that he is worthy of the contempt he says he deserves" (192).

Lines 7 and 8 are sometimes seen as a crux, and are universally recognized as ambiguous. Knights notes the potential doubleness of line 7, either "I corrupt myself by excusing you" or "I myself corrupt you more by forgiving you." George Steevens glosses 8: "Making the excuse more than proportioned to the offence", while Bullen has it "Making this excuse: Their sins are more than thine." Both Bullen and Steevens amended the quarto's "their" to "thy," as is now standard practice.

[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.
  • Hubler, Edwin. The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952.
  • Knights, L. C. "Shakespeare's Sonnets." Elizabethan Poetry. Paul Alpers, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

[edit] External links