Sonnet 54

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Sonnet 54 in the 1609 Quarto
Q1 Q2 Q3 C O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem By that sweet ornament which truth doth give! The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem For that sweet odour which doth in it live. The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye As the perfumed tincture of the roses, Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly When summer’s breath their masked buds discloses: But, for their virtue only is their show, They live unwoo’d and unrespected fade; Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so; Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made: And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth, When that shall vade, my verse distills your truth. 4 8 12 14 —William Shakespeare

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Q2



Q3



C

O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!
The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live.
The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer’s breath their masked buds discloses:
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo’d and unrespected fade;
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made:
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall vade, my verse distills your truth.

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12

14

Sonnet 54 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence. These sonnets are written from the perspective of an older man displaying his fondness of a younger man. It uses an extended metaphor to develop the theme of the beauty of the beloved and the preservative power of verse.

The sonnets were first published together in 1609, although evidence points to Shakespeare finishing them at least 12 years earlier. A. Kent Hieatt, Charles W. Hieatt, and Anne Lake Prescott published an article in Vol. 88 of Studies in Philology detailing a computer assisted study which partially confirmed this conjecture. It determined that Sonnets 1-60 were first composed sometime in between 1590 and 1595, but then likely revised after the turn of the century. In order to determine this, they looked at how Shakespeare's use of words changed over time and what current events and works he references.

Sonnet 54 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet. The English sonnet contains three quatrains followed by a final rhyming couplet. This poem follows the typical rhyme scheme of the English sonnet, 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 per line. The fifth line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter: