Sonnet 106 by William Shakespeare

First published: 1609, in Sonnets

Type of poem: Sonnet

The Poem

In William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106, the speaker calls upon the glories of the past to illustrate the present. He perceives that the beauty of his lover has been prophesied by the pens of authors who are now long dead. The initial quatrain establishes the tone as one of courtly elegance. The references to “chronicles,” “ladies,” and “knights” all recall the glorified stereotypical image of a time long past, when a knight was obligated by the chivalric code to behave bravely in the battlefield and solicitously in the community.

This highly elevated rhetoric establishes the mood of Sonnet 106, yet the elegance seemingly gives way to irony in the juxtaposition of adjectives in line 4: “Ladies dead and lovely knights.” The “beauty” of line 2 has been usurped by the truth of mutability: The ladies are literally dead; they live only as images created by the words of the old rhymes. Further, it seems that the adjectives describing the ladies and the knights have been willingly transposed. The common conception of the lady or mistress in the old poetry was of a fair and lovely creature of inspiration; it was the valiant knights who died for her.

The introductory octave continues with a shift in the second quatrain, where the narrator personifies beauty in the form of a coat of arms which accentuates the erotic images of his love’s finest attributes: foot, lip, eye, and brow. These common physical, and even sexual, images initiate a change from the spiritual to the physical. The second quatrain concludes with a vivid image: The narrator visualizes that the earlier poets would have expressed just such a beauty as his love. Thus the initial octave establishes the background from which the sestet will depart.

The sestet begins, in the third quatrain, by connecting the past with the present: The praises of the poets from an earlier age become actual prophecies. The narrator perceives that futuristic visions of his beloved provided the impetus for the old poets’ works; however, this idea is quickly amended. Even though those authors were guided by divine inspiration, they were still unable to praise or describe the beauty of the narrator’s lover adequately.

The concluding couplet emphasizes the futility of such an effort in the composition of love poems. It is clear that the authors of the past, now long dead, have transmitted their words along to the authors of the present. Yet their adoration remains an enigma; it is impossible for an author to describe his love truly by using mere words.

Forms and Devices

Sonnet 106 conforms to the Elizabethan fourteen-line stanzaic form. Each of the lines contains ten syllables, and the poem consists of two sentences. The first encompasses the initial octave, and the second, the final sestet. This form is similar to Shakespeare’s Sonnets 32 and 47. The initial octave may be broken into two distinct quatrains. The first initiates the work with a “when” clause that, while syntactically logical, cannot stand alone.

The second quatrain counters the first with a “then” clause. Through this syntactical convention, logic is used first to divide and then to unite the initial octave. The final sestet similarly depends upon its syntactical sequence first to answer, then to expand upon, the logic conceived in the initial octave. Despite its unification, the sestet is composed of both a distinct quatrain and a concluding couplet.

The quatrain of the sestet begins a new sentence that remarks on the evidence put forward in the preceding sentence. It states that despite the worthy stature of the poets who composed the earlier works, their attempts at prophecy fall short: They were incapable of capturing the beauty of the narrator’s beloved in words. The main point of the work, however, is the narrator’s own seeming inability to put his love’s beauty into words.

The sonnet uses alliteration, particularly of the s sound, throughout the poem. Shakespeare also creates effects by expanding or contracting the number of syllables that appear between certain repeated sounds. In the couplet, for example, a pulsating alliteration emphasizes the poem’s conclusion; the “praise” of line 14 represents a compression of the pr and ay sounds previously heard in the “present days” of line 11. There is also an expanding alliterative pattern in the placement of b and pr sounds. In line 9, the pattern begins with “but prophecies.” The sound is stretched in line 13—“behold the present”—and stretched even further in the final line: “but lack tongues to praise.”

Sonnet 106 exhibits Shakespeare’s uncanny ability to manipulate language into poetic form; the poem is not as simple and straightforward as it may appear. In line 3, the narrator refers to the “beautiful old rhyme” of bygone days, yet he is speaking a poem that both echoes and modifies those old rhymes, a poem that will one day take its place in the canon to which they belong.