The Place 2 Be: Shakespeare's Sonnets

Critique of Sonnet 6

SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

Theme: Young Man
Content: Encouragement for the subject to have children in an analogy of children being a return on investment.

Then let not winter's ragged hand deface
In thee thy summer ere thou be distilled.

“Don’t let your death (symbolised by winter) end the pursuance of your beauty.”

Make sweet some vial, treasure thou some place
With beauty's treasure ere it be self-killed.

“Have children before your beauty dies.”

The vial is the female who is to be fertilised with the man's treasure to save the subject's treasure from being wasted.

Triple usage of treasure as the act of love-making, the subject's semen and Elizabethan slang for the female genitalia.

Possible counterpoint in the phonetic resemblance of vial with “vile”.

That use is not forbidden usury
Which happies those that pay the willing loan:
That's for thyself to breed another thee,
Or ten times happier, be it ten for one;

“It is not wrong to put your beauty to good use by having children to carry forward your beauty, and perhaps as many as ten.”

Use of an asset is denied to be usury.

Re-use of the financial metaphors as used in earlier sonnets where a “deposit” yields greater returns.

Happies morphs to happier, demonstrating the greater happiness that can be gained from procreation.

Ten now becomes the key word that is repeatedly used itself and echoed in other words such as forbidden.

Ten times thyself were happier than thou art,
If ten of thineten times refigured thee.

“Children bring happiness, and your happiness would be multiplied 10 times if you had 10 children.”

Use of ten continues to emphasise the greater returns that can be yielded from an investment which is helped by an avalanche of other words that contain the letter t.

The word ten anagrammatically held within the word thine is literally reconfigured to produce a different version of the subject thee.

With the word ten being so significant to this sonnet it is not surprising to find in the tenth line such explicit and anagrammatical emphasis on the word ten and also the word refigured re-emphasising the significance of the figure ten.

Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart,
Leaving thee living in posterity?

“And you would live on after your death in your offspring.”

Ten appears again embedded in Then as in line 1.

Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair
To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir.

“Don’t be selfish and let death kill you and let worms instead of children be your heirs.”

Ten appears again embedded in thine as in line 1. With 5 explicit instances of the word ten, 2 anagrammatically hidden in Then, and 2 more anagrammatically hidden in Thine, one wonders where the 10th. instance of the word ten could be. Perhaps it is the 10th. line itself or the 10 syllables of each line's iambic pentameter.

The opening Then let not in line 1 is coupled with the closing Be not of the closing couplet.