Sonnet 6

Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface
In thee thy summer ere thou be distilled.
Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
With beauty’s treasure ere it be self-killed.
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.
If ten of thine ten times refigured thee:
Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart,
Leaving thee living in posterity?
Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair,
To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.

I find Sonnet 6 to be something of a letdown after Sonnet 5. One wonders after reading it if the poet has played out his conceit a bit. The seasonal metaphor (for time, here) is marched out only to be distractedly dispensed with in favor an awkward comment about the distillation of one’s beauty into a waiting receptacle – “make sweet some vial”; I can’t get the image of a sperm donor out of my head – and a more substantial but equally out-of-tune economic image. We’ve said much about the monetary metaphors. Here, “treasure,” “usury,” and “loan” work a nice reversal from the negative connotations (see Merchant of Venice) one might connect to them, but we’ve wandered a long way, in only three lines, from winter and summer. So far, in fact, that I take what is probably a compelling complexity – that “winter” is a natural effect while “summer” is a human condition – and wonder if Shakespeare might have gotten a tad sloppy.

Then things get weird. We’ve had five poems that have argued that our young man should have issue. Fine. But all of a sudden Shakespeare is like that guy in the bar, deep into his fourth bottle of sack who doesn’t know when to stop, either his drinking or his argument: Ten kids, dude! You should have ten kids, then it matters not if you die, like, a thousand deaths, ‘cause there’ll be a whole army of you to live on!

Maybe I’m just a bit jaded by the word “ten” appearing four times in three lines; I get it. Really. In essence, the “ten times happier be ten for one” takes us back to our “willing loan,” specifically to the interest (children) it may pay. I wonder how modern women readers, carrying the image to its logical conclusion, feel being equated to a sperm bank.

Nor does the couplet feel like it offers me much closure, even epigrammatically, to what has gone before. Rather than returning to seasons, or distilled spirits, or sweetheart loans, or mass self-replication, Shakespeare closes with an admonition against narcissism and a back-handed compliment about the young man’s beauty (though I do see the allegiance between “heir” and “posterity”).

And, yes, that’s how I really feel. Perhaps you find greater merit in the poem? Bring it on. Or have I misread the poem’s organization and inter-relatedness? I’m all ears. Should we see this poem more as variation on and echo of the others than as an individual sonnet? I’m not sure. What do you think?

Randall