Sonnet 109

Sonnet 109 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It's a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man.

The poet denies that he has been emotionally unfaithful even though he has been absent. He can no more be untrue to the youth than to himself. If he has wandered away, he has returned, and washed away his own guilt. Even though the poet is capable of shameful behavior, he could never be so corrupted that he would lose the perfection of the youth.

Sonnet 109 explores the uncertainty of a fulfillment of a promise made by the poet to his apparent love. The poet's promised love is inextricable from the fact that the poet is lamenting over a long lost lover who, moreover, has not seen him for quite some time. In the sonnet a sense of forced separation is felt in each quatrain, along with an inconsolable tone which Shakespeare uses to convey an anachronism of revisiting a time of ephemeral love. The poet ends the sonnet with a magnanimous confession of love which is most likely unrequited.

Sonnet 109 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet. The English sonnet has three quatrains, followed by a final rhyming couplet. It follows the typical rhyme scheme of the form abab cdcd efef gg and is composed in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions. The 12th line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:

Line 9 has an initial reversal, a common metrical variant:

There is also an initial reversal in line 5, and potentially in lines 7 and 8. Line 13 may be scanned with a rightward movement of the second ictus (resulting in a four-position figure, × × / /, sometimes referred to as a minor ionic):

The meter demands that line 11's "preposterously" be pronounced with four syllables (prepost'rously).

Sonnet 109 was originally published in 1609 with the rest of Shakespeare's sonnets as a collection dedicated to "Mr. W.H." and now referred to as the 1609 Quarto or Quarto 1. Sonnet 109 belongs to the group of sonnets (1-126) that are commonly categorized as "sonnets to a fair youth." This group of sonnets, according to Arthur F. Marotti, "consists of poems written to a younger man who is clearly treated as a patron". The identity of this young patron, who is likely the "Mr. W.H." to whom Shakespeare dedicated the sonnets, is considered by many historians and Shakespearean analysts to be Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton. Martin Green supports this hypothesis with the evidence that Shakespeare never wrote dedications in of his works to any person besides Wriothesley. Shakespeare's relationship with this young man as interpreted from this group of sonnets is not entirely clear; his words of love and affection could be a bid for more favor, or as Judith Kegan Gardiner maintains, a true love that surprised and startled Shakespeare. Even if Shakespeare's sonnets are accepted as an expression of genuine love, there is still no consensus in academia whether this love was sexual in nature. Many critics argue that Shakespeare was homosexual, while others maintain that he was heterosexual, including the noteworthy Shakespeare analyst A. L. Rowse, who has claimed "Shakespeare is the bawdiest of the Elizabethan dramatists, with the natural bawdy of the highly sexed normal heterosexual".