The Place 2 Be: Shakespeare's Sonnets

Critique of Sonnet 102

SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

Theme: Unspoken Love.
Content: The author is silenced in his expressions of love for the subject by the Rival Poets who have drowned him out by their number, volume and disingenuous commercial motives.

My love is strengthened, though more weak in seeming.
I love not less, though less the show appear.
That love is merchandised whose rich esteeming
The owner's tongue doth publish everywhere.

The expression of love is cited at the start of the poem but disappears when the author starts to speak of his silence.

Typical Shakespearean paradox of the author's feelings not matching how they are perceived.

A return to the complaint of rival poets publishing their eulogies of the subject, like in Sonnet 21's Chapman-punning end: I will not praise that purpose not to sell.

I suspect a possible pun is at play here on the word though, meant as thou, which would be consistent with the author's theme in this sonnet of not explicitly saying what he means. The author seems to be saying here: My love is strengthened, thou more weak in seeming. I love not less, thou less the show appear so discussing the subject's as well as his own feelings. Explicitly, he uses you to address the subject in the couplet.

Our love was new and then but in the spring
When I was wont to greet it with my lays,
As Philomel in summer's front doth sing,
And stops her pipe in growth of riper days

This quatrain now extends the My love of Q1 into Our love, essentially confirming that he is discussing the love of both the author and subject in the sonnet: now it is My love and thou; but it was Our love.

The author's silence in his later years is correlated with Philomel who had her tongue forcibly cut out and who transformed into a nightingale.

Although the word love explicitly disappears from the sonnet after line 5, it appears silently in Philomel, i.e. philo = love.

Not that the summer is less pleasant now
Than when her mournful hymns did hush the night,
But that wild music burdens every bough,
And sweets grown common lose their dear delight.

The subject is analogous with summer, and is no less pleasant but in a return to the complaint of the rival poet(s) the author's problem is other birds singing about the subject with their wild music which debases the act.

Therefore like her I sometime hold my tongue,
Because I would not dull you with my song.