Sonnet 26

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The first eleven lines of Sonnet 26 in the 1609 Quarto
Q1 Q2 Q3 C Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit, To thee I send this written ambassage, To witness duty, not to show my wit: Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it, But that I hope some good conceit of thine In thy soul’s thought, all naked, will bestow it; Till whatsoever star that guides my moving, Points on me graciously with fair aspect, And puts apparel on my tatter’d loving, To show me worthy of thy sweet respect: Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee; Till then not show my head where thou mayst prove me. 4 8 12 14 —William Shakespeare

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Q2



Q3



C

Lord of my love, to whom in vassalage
Thy merit hath my duty strongly knit,
To thee I send this written ambassage,
To witness duty, not to show my wit:
Duty so great, which wit so poor as mine
May make seem bare, in wanting words to show it,
But that I hope some good conceit of thine
In thy soul’s thought, all naked, will bestow it;
Till whatsoever star that guides my moving,
Points on me graciously with fair aspect,
And puts apparel on my tatter’d loving,
To show me worthy of thy sweet respect:
Then may I dare to boast how I do love thee;
Till then not show my head where thou mayst prove me.

4



8



12

14

Sonnet 26 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare, and is a part of the Fair Youth sequence.

The sonnet is generally regarded as the end-point or culmination of the group of five preceding poems. It encapsulates several themes not only of Sonnets 20-25, but also of the first thirty-two poems together: the function of writing poems, the effect of class differences, and love.

Sonnet 26 is a typical English or Shakespearean sonnet, formed of three quatrains and a couplet, having a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. It is composed in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions per line.

The seventh line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter line. The next contains a final extrametrical syllable or feminine ending, of which this sonnet has six; it also exhibits an ictus moved to the right (resulting in a four-position figure, × × / /, sometimes referred to as a minor ionic):

As Stephen Booth notes, Sonnet 26 works on a series of "shows": the word appears in four separate lines of the sonnet. Booth perceives a vague sexual pun in the second half of the poem, but G. B. Evans and others describe this reading as "strained." The first "show" in the sonnet is directed to Cupid, to whom in servitude the poet's duty is "knit". The connection is compounded by the later "bare" and "all naked." The figure of the naked Cupid can be traced back to Ovid's Amores.