Sonnet 78

Sonnet 78 is one of 154 sonnets published by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare in 1609. It is one of the Fair Youth sequence, and the first of the mini-sequence known as the Rival Poet sonnets, thought to be composed some time from 1598 to 1600.

Invoking the youth as his muse, the speaker finds, has helped his poetry by providing direct inspiration, and this perhaps also refers to the help provided through patronage. The speaker notes that other poets have appropriated his way of invoking the young man, and this has helped them distribute their poetry, perhaps by being published, or by otherwise finding readers. The poet's strategy in this sonnet is to portray himself as ignorant and lacking in talent, but the second quatrain in lines 5 and 6 introduces sarcastic mock humility, by the ridiculousness of the image of croaking ("taught the dumb on high to sing"), paired with the image of heavy objects flying about ("heavy ignorance aloft to fly"). This is followed by the hyperbole of young men adding double majesty to grace. The poet encourages the youth to appreciate his work more, because the youth has wholly inspired the poet's works, and this primacy of his invocation has elevated him to the level of the most learned.

Sonnet 78 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet. The English sonnet has three quatrains, followed by a final rhyming couplet. It follows the rhyme scheme, abab cdcd efef gg and is composed in iambic pentameter, a metre based on five feet in each line, and two syllables in each foot, accented weak/strong. Most of the lines are regular iambic pentameter, including the 5th line:

According to Helen Vendler, "Shakespeare excels in a form of verbal emphasis pointing up the conceptual oppositions of his verse." In this first poem of the Rival Poet sequence, "a firm antithesis is drawn between the putatively rude speaker and the other poets clustered round the young man." They are all "learned" and practicing both art and style, while "the poor speaker's ignorance is twice insisted on, as is his muteness (he was dumb) before he saw the young man."

The poem gives us directions as to how we should read it and which words we should emphasize: "The words of the couplet tie — art, high, learning [learnèd], ignorance — repeat in little the topics that are under dispute."

Michael Schoenfeldt notes, "the more whimsical complimentary sonnets, such as 78… such sonnets may be fanciful, but they are not frivolous… Read from the right angle, so to speak, they can be very beautiful, or at least delightful; and in them, as elsewhere Shakespeare is inventing some game or other and playing it out to its conclusion in deft and surprising ways.

The words "pen", "feather", and "style" — used in stanza 1, 2, and 3 respectively — seem to be related. The word "pen" derives from the Latin word penna meaning feather, and in the Renaissance referred to a quill pen, and also was occasionally used to indicate a "feather". The word "style" in line 11 means a writer's literary style, though it also could be used as a synonym for "pen"; it derives from the Latin stilus meaning a writing instrument.

"Dumb", "ignorance", "learned's", and "grace" are nouns that occur in the second stanza. The words "dumb" and "ignorance" could indicate the poet. "Learned" and "grace" could indicate a particular rival.