16 pages • 32 minutes read
William ShakespeareSonnet 29
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1609A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Outcast
For the speaker, being a pariah is incredibly troubling and difficult. After some kind of public shame, either unfortunate financial circumstances or a stain on his reputation, he feels “in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes” (Line 2). This scornful and disapproving scrutiny makes the speaker withdraw, and he “all alone beweep my outcast state” (Line 3). But suffering the consequences all alone makes his pain worse, as contemporary readers would have seen in the word “outcast” the unforgiving and strict society of the day, in which exile and excommunication were common punishments. Feeling that the world has turned its back on him makes the speaker question even the intercession of God, as his prayers are now “bootless” and cannot even get a response from “deaf heaven” (Line 3). Only love can restore the speaker to fellowship.
The Lark
The lark symbolizes the speaker’s fundamental change in mood and affect after he remembers his love. No longer trapped in the darkness of depression, the speaker’s emotional state lifts “Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth” (Line 11). This almost Homeric simile, a device that extends a comparison for several lines rather than making it a quick aside, demonstrates the speaker’s inner life rejoining the world it had left behind. Like the bird famous for its morning call, the renewed speaker now feels like he could sing “hymns at heaven’s gate” (Line 12). Shakespeare often used the lark in his writing as a timekeeper—most famously in Romeo and Juliet, when the lovers bemoan the fact that the lark’s cry means it is morning and they must part. In “Sonnet 29,” just as the lark signals the earth moving from night to day, it symbolizes the speaker moving from despair to joy.
Kings
The poem pays special attention to the speaker’s finances, giving financial difficulty a particular power over the speaker’s life. One circumstance that can send him into a depressive state is monetary ill-luck or being “in disgrace with fortune” (Line 1). When he envies another’s better mindset, he describes that man as “rich in hope” (Line 5)—word choice that equates good emotions with wealth. This focus makes it all the more striking that after remembering his love, the speaker rejects the idea of being a king. Love gives the speaker such emotional riches that there is nothing worth trading it for: it “such wealth brings / That I then scorn to change my state with kings” (Lines 13-14).
Related Titles
By William Shakespeare
