'Look in Thy Glass': Sonnet Form and Meaning

Shakespeare’s sonnets are governed by a highly disciplined format made popular by the Italian poet Petrarch. Sonnets were extremely popular for a short time, mostly between 1584 and 1591, but even in this short window there were developed two major types of sonnets: the English sonnet (Shakespearean), and the Italian sonnet (Petrarchan). The Italian sonnet form is composed of an octave (abba abba) and a sestet (typically cd cd cd). As you may notice, the form of the sonnet facilitates the subject matter by allowing a question to be raised during the octave, and then answered in the sestet. Sometimes an idea is played out in the octave, however, and then complicated in the sestet in order to problematize the subject matter.

Petrarch composed a vast majority of his sonnets about a woman named “Laura,” and thus began the tradition of the sonnet as a love poem. “Laura” is the girl over the horizon that causes the writer great pain, due to his unrequited love. Today many scholars believe the character of “Laura” to be a code for “fame,” referring to the “laurels” which a poet receives, which points to a way in which the strict rules of the sonnet form merely provide more opportunity for the writer to surprise the reader, or play a poetic joke on the reader, thus demonstrating their mastery of his writing ability.

The use of the sonnet as an arena to demonstrate poetic ability under strict guidelines continues in the English sonnet, which is composed of four quatrains (abab cdcd efef) and a single rhyming couplet. Typically the four quatrains raise a problem that finds its resolution or complication in the closing couplet. By the time the English sonnet was developed, Petrarch’s were so popular that the sonnet became a common way for poets to gain financial support, patronage. This explains why the first fourteen of Shakespeare’s sonnets are very clearly written for a patron, as in Sonnet 3:

Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another;
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear'd womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime:
So thou through windows of thine age shall see
Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.
But if thou live, remember'd not to be,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

This sonnet expresses numerous conventions which Shakespeare is demonstrating mastery over, thus showing why the subject should support his poetry. For example, the poem begins in the first two lines by both flattering and warning the subject, as “thy glass” is a reference to the mirror of time. Shakespeare suggests that they acknowledge they are aging, but states that he should “form another” (have a child), implying he is young, handsome, and wealthy enough to do so. He then proceeds to make a pun, a common way for poets of the time to show their superior vocabulary and wit. He asks, “For where is she so fair whose unear'd womb/Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?” He thus conveys that there is no woman so beautiful that she could resist bearing the child of a man with such superior crops, but the pun appears with the conjunction of the words “unear’d womb” and “husbandry,” as “unear’d” means “unplowed.” Thus Shakespeare is suggesting that he is the kind of man any woman would love to be “plowed” by. The rest of the poem warns the man not to die and waste his family’s superiority by letting it die with him. Thus, even the reader of Shakespeare today can appreciate Shakespeare’s (often raunchy) wit, political savvy, and the talent with which his poems are constructed.

--Tom Boice