Hubbry Logo
logo
Sonnet 11
Community hub

Sonnet 11

logo
0 subscribers
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Contribute something to knowledge base
Hub AI

Sonnet 11 AI simulator

(@Sonnet 11_simulator)

Sonnet 11

Sonnet 11 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a procreation sonnet within the 126 sonnets of the Fair Youth sequence, a grouping of Shakespeare's sonnets addressed to an unknown young man. While the order in which the sonnets were composed is undetermined (though it is mostly agreed that they were not written in the order in which modern readers know them), Sonnet 11 was first published in a collection, the Quarto, alongside Shakespeare's other sonnets in 1609.

In the sonnet, the speaker reasons that though the young man will age his beauty will never fade so long as he passes his beauty on to a child. The speaker insists it is nature's will that someone of his beauty should procreate and make a copy of himself, going so far as to comment on the foolish effects of ignoring the necessity and inevitability of such procreation upon both the youth and mankind.

Sonnet 11 is part of the first block of 17 sonnets in the Fair Youth sequence (sonnets 1–126) and describes Shakespeare's call for the preservation of the Youth's beauty through procreation. Shakespeare urges the Fair Youth to copulate with a woman in marriage and conceive a boy so that the child may inherit and preserve the beauty of the Fair Youth. For, Shakespeare reasons, in fathering a child, the Youth can keep himself in youth and tenderness, as he has created another copy of himself to attested to the loveliness he loses as he ages. Then in further manipulating the Youth to this idea, Shakespeare delves into what about the Fair Youth is worth preserving. Namely everything, as "Nature gave abundantly to those whom she endowed with the best qualities" (paraphrase, lines 11–12), flattering the Youth while showing his waste in not complying to "print more".

Sonnet 11 is composed in the traditional form of what has come to be called the "Shakespearean" sonnet, also known as a "Surreyan" or "English" sonnet. The form, having evolved from the "Petrarchan" sonnet (originated in the thirteenth or fourteenth century by Italian poet Francesco Petrarch), entered the style as Shakespeare would have known it within the works of sixteenth century English poets the Earl of Surrey and Sir Thomas Wyatt. However, as it came to be the most popular sonnet form with which Shakespeare wrote his poetry, it took on his name.

An English sonnet is made up of fourteen lines grouped into three quatrains and an ending couplet, with the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Sonnet 11 exhibits this structure.

The sonnet has four feminine endings (accepting the Quarto's contraction of "grow'st" and "bestow'st"). "Convertest" would have been pronounced as a perfect rhyme with the second line's "departest", a holdover from Medieval English. Carl D. Atkins notes "This is a sonnet of contrasts: feminine lines, regular lines; regular iambs, irregular line 10; no midline pauses, multiple midline pauses; waning, growth, beauty, harshness, life and death, beginning and end."

This sonnet, like all but one of Shakespeare's sonnets, employs iambic pentameter throughout. The first line can be scanned as a regular iambic pentameter.

The tenth-line irregularity alluded to by Atkins consists of two quite ordinary pentameter variations: a midline reversal, and a final extrametrical syllable (or feminine ending). However, their coincidence, together with their context, makes them stand out:

See all
eleventh of 154 by William Shakespeare
User Avatar
No comments yet.