Sonnet 94 by William Shakespeare

First published: 1609, in Sonnets

Type of poem: Sonnet

The Poem

Sonnet 94 is a typical English or Shakespearean sonnet: fourteen lines of iambic pentameter rhymed abab, cdcd, efef, gg. This rhyme scheme effectively divides the poem into three quatrains and a closing couplet, unlike the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet, which tends to be structured as an octave and sestet. In Sonnet 94, William Shakespeare’s first-person voice of the lover extols the virtue of stoic restraint and suggests that acting on emotions corrupts the natural nobility of a person’s character and, thus, compromises identity itself.

The first line opens the poem with a subject and a restrictive clause that describes the stoic character: Such persons have the power to act, to hurt others, but refuse to do so. The next three lines of the quatrain elaborate on this quality through a series of restrictive clauses: Though such persons may seem to threaten to act, they do not; they move others to act but are themselves unmoved, show little emotion, and restrain themselves from temptation.

Having defined the subject with these restrictive clauses, this rather long opening sentence finally arrives at the verb in line 5: “do inherit.” Persons who can exercise such restraint are the proper recipients of grace (divine assistance or protection) and, in turn, protect the earthly manifestations of grace (“nature’s riches”) from waste. Those who can restrain their emotions and actions, moreover, are in control of their own identities—that is, they are not fickle or quick to change but constant. Such persons truly may be said to follow the advice voiced by Polonius in Hamlet (c. 1600-1601): “To thine own self be true.” Others, the poem continues, rightly must be subservient to the virtues kept alive by such stoic characters.

In line 9, the formal “turn” in the sonnet, the poem shifts to a new conceit, that of the “summer’s flower” as a metaphor for human identity. Though as an individual one recognizes one’s value to oneself as self-evident in the fact of one’s existence, one’s life also has a value to the age and community in which one flourishes: The flowers of summer are “sweet” to the summer itself and contribute to making the summer the pleasant season it is. The speaker adds, however, that if that flower allows itself to be corrupted, then the value of that flower’s identity—not simply to itself, but to its community as well—becomes lost, and, in that event, even weeds seem more dignified.

The couplet reiterates this point: Virtue may be corrupted by actions—“Sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds”—and such corrupted virtue is far more damaging to a community than the baseness and vices of individuals—“weeds”—who had no potential for beauty and virtue in the first place.

Forms and Devices

The most striking device in the opening five lines of Sonnet 94 is the repeated use of the word “do” in the sense of “perform” (“do none,” line 1); as an intensifier (“do show,” line 2); in both senses (“do not do,” line 2); and finally, again, as an intensifier to emphasize the verb (“do inherit,” line 5). Although the poem is about persons who restrain their actions, this repetition of the most basic word for performing an action, “do,” suggests that actions are being performed. In fact, though, if one looks at the grammar of this first sentence, one sees that all but one of these instances of the word are contained within restrictive clauses, and the main verb of the subject “they” is restrained, as it were, until the second quatrain: “do inherit” in line 5. The sentence thus echoes the sense that the “thing they most do show,” like the appearance of grammatical action in “do,” is restrained. When one does get to that main verb, moreover, it is a verb not of doing but of receiving, of inheriting.

The poem introduces its most significant metaphor in the second quatrain. The speaker compares this stoicism to legal inheritance and ownership of land, land that is then cultivated and made productive. Ownership of land was, in the sixteenth century, a traditional privilege of the nobility, although this rapidly was changing as members of the mercantile middle class accumulated more and more wealth. In lines 7 and 8, this metaphor depicts the relationship between the stoic personality and others in terms of social rank: The former is a lord for whom others are but servants. (It should be noted, however, that both types are, in effect, “stewards,” with some serving the stoic’s “excellence” and the stoic himself serving to protect “nature’s riches.”)

The third quatrain makes a surprising leap from these images of land and social rank to the image of the summer flower. The suddenness of this shift from one image to another seemingly unrelated one is characteristic of Shakespeare’s methods in the sonnets. It is also perhaps one reason that his contemporary, Ben Jonson, said of Shakespeare, sufflaminandus erat (that he needed to put on the brakes, to restrain his free ways with the language). One need not share, however, in Jonson’s criticism of his illustrious friend. Instead, one should see this leap as a device that, like metaphor itself, leads one to new and surprising perspectives on its subject.

The natural beauty of the flower is also responsible to its environs, as the stoic is to nature’s riches and as others are to the stoic himself. Additionally, its natural beauty, like the nobility of the stoic, can be so corrupted by “deeds” that it becomes inferior to those of less beauty or those of lower social rank—“weeds.” The final rhyme of these two words, “deeds” and “weeds,” makes emphatic the connection between unrestrained action and the corruption of personal identity and social responsibility.