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William ShakespeareSonnet 104
William ShakespeareFiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1609A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Sonnet 105” by William Shakespeare (1609)
“Sonnet 104” emphasizes physical beauty without mentioning any other qualities in the “fair friend” (Line 1) that might go along with it. However, in “Sonnet 105,” which immediately follows, the speaker presents his friend as having moral virtues as well as beauty. These are kindness and constancy: “Kind is my love today, tomorrow kind, / Still constant in a wondrous excellence” (105.5-6). These two qualities added to beauty lead the speaker to describe his friend three times as “Fair, kind, and true” (105.9, 10, 13).
“Sonnet 106” by William Shakespeare (1609)
This sonnet elaborates on an idea mentioned in “Sonnet 104,” that the friend is the embodiment of “beauty’s summer” (Line 14); beauty has never before attained such perfection. In 106, the speaker consults descriptions of beautiful people as they have been depicted by poets of the past. All their praises of beauty were really just “prophecies” (106.9) of the beauty that his friend presently embodies—they were “all [...] prefiguring” (106.10), foreshadowing the friend’s appearance.
“Sonnet 116” by William Shakespeare (1609)
While “Sonnet 104” extols the beauty of the “fair friend,” this sonnet celebrates the constancy of love. Even though youth is cut down by the sickle that time wields, “Love’s not Time’s fool” (116.9). Love is unmoving, even when everything else, including the loved one, may go through changes: “Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds” (116.2-3).
Further Literary Resources
The World of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: An Introduction by Robert Matz (2007)
Matz explores the culture, customs, and social conventions of Shakespeare’s time in order to shed light on the sonnets. He writes in a style that is likely to appeal to the student or general reader as he discusses, among many other topics, issues relating to gender, class, and race. He argues that the sonnets are pervaded by misogyny, and in the later section of the sequence he finds “lust and revulsion reserved for women, love reserved for men” (p. 112). On “Sonnet 104,” Matz states that the young friend is presented, due to the emphasis on physical appearance, as an “an object of sexual desire” (p. 103). The same applies, according to Matz, in “Sonnet 110,” in which the friend is referred to as a “god in love” (p. 103).
“Form and Content: A Critical Appreciation of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 104” by Nnadube Jonathan Ejiogu (2022)
This essay is an examination of form and content in “Sonnet 104.” In this concise critical assessment, Ejiogu examines “philosophical issues” that include the themes of beauty, ugliness, and mortality; according to the author, the sonnet “shows how man exists and grows organically in the midst of conflicting or irreconcilable opposites” (p. 119).
Essays on Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Kenneth J. Larsen (2014)
This work, published in the University Press of Auckland, New Zealand, is a thorough examination of the sonnets, with commentary on each individual sonnet. Larsen believes that Sonnets 104-26 were written in the early years of the 17th century. He argues that in “Sonnet 104,” the three-year span in which the poet has known the friend should not be taken literally: “[A] span of three years for love to blossom or lapse, was a traditional trope.” He regards the phrase “first your eye I eyed” (Line 2) as a “complexly ambiguous phrase” with several levels of meaning.
Listen to Poem
Caedmon Records published this recording by Sir John Gielgud, an Oscar–winning Shakespearean actor of the 20th century, in 1961.
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By William Shakespeare
