Cosmos.
Time and season. Many of Shakespeare’s sonnets compare stages of life to time passing from dawn to midday to sunset, and from spring to summer to fall and winter. Youth is like a blazing sunrise, maturing at high noon, declining in old age, and dying at sunset. The rising sun kisses earth’s mountaintops, meadows, and streams, but clouds of disgrace sometimes emerge to hide its brilliance. Time turns youthful black curls silver, and green meadows fall to the scythe. Time is a tyrant that drives summer onward to winter and death, leaving behind the fragrance of summer flowers. A lover’s absence seems bleak like winter, even though it may be spring, and Nature is reproducing so extravagantly that the gloomy planet Saturn laughs.
Gardens. Several sonnets compare a lover’s faults to flaws in nature: thorns on roses, mud in silver fountains, clouds and eclipses that hide the Sun and the Moon, and the worm inside a rosebud. Except for their thorns, wild roses are as colorful and smell as sweet as cultivated roses. Cold, unemotional people are like stones, while lovers are like lilies. If lilies become infected, they smell worse than weeds that choke them out. The speaker accuses flowers (other lovers) of stealing color and scent from the youth’s cheeks and breath, white from his hand, gold from his hair, roses from his blush, and white from his low spirits. In retaliation, worms soon steal life from the flowers.
Familiar settings. Familiar Elizabethan settings appear in many sonnets. For example, one speaker compares his stage of life to ruins of a deserted chapel, where trees are bare and no birds sing, to twilight after sunset, and to the dying embers of a once-glowing fire. In another, a family’s heritage is like a house needing constant repair–through its heirs–so it can withstand storms of misfortune and death. Lawyers in a courtroom argue over whether a lover belongs to the defendant or to the plaintiff; the jury decides in the defendant’s favor.
In another sonnet, two men are imprisoned in the steel cell of a woman’s heart; the speaker begs the woman to release his friend and in return promises to remain her prisoner. Elsewhere, a mirror reflects a speaker’s aging face; a clock reminds him of time wasted, and blank pages in his journal reflect his lack of creativity. While a woman plays a spinet, admirers wish they were the wooden keys being caressed by her fingers; they kiss her hand, but the speaker wishes to kiss her lips. Although marble monuments may be overturned during wars, and memorial stones in church floors may be effaced, the poet claims his verse will last until Judgment Day.