I am interested in how this poem works structurally, especially as a continuation of Sonnet 5. In the most basic sense, Sonnet 5 starts with summer, leads to winter, and shows how summer is sustained through the distilled flowers. The structure makes sense to me even though, as a few of you pointed out last week, Shakespeare completely skips fall. In Sonnet 6 it seems that Shakespeare wants to start where he left off and tie the two sonnets together through the words - various forms of fair, distilled, and the obvious repetition of winter and summer. We start with the distilled flowers -- I get it, that makes sense -- but after the first two lines it dissolves into a poem about money, interest, and death. It seems as though he tries to tie it back in at the end with "for thou art much too fair" which echoes the first lines of Sonnet 5 with "And that unfair which fairly doth excel." But this last attempt of rescuing this poem from the number 10 is negated by the last line: "To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir." So while Sonnet 5 ends with lovely distilled flowers that make summer live on, Sonnet 6 ends with words that just make me think of worms eating a dead body. Perhaps this ending would have been more satisfying for me if we had some sense of how the worms connect to this summer/winter relationship that Shakespeare so brilliantly captured in the distilled flowers of Sonnet 5. Instead, I feel like we're just left with an awkward image here at the end.
Any other thoughts about the structure and how Shakespeare tried to tie these two poems together? Further, is it fair for me to read these poems as a pair? Is there merit in this poem if we read it as a stand-alone poem rather than a continuation of the very successful Sonnet 5? Can anyone save Sonnet 6 for me and show me something exciting, interesting, successful that happens in the poem?
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