Linguistic Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets 97-99

While my favorite sonnet will always be the beautiful and inspiring 116, I was taken by a new group of Shakespearean lines as I read through them this time. Sonnets 97-99, equally as passionate as my preferred, speak to the troubled hearts of separated lovers. I appreciated the connection between the three of them, and thought it would be interesting and informative for my own learning to analyze their linguistic relation.

As these three sonnets appear to build consecutively upon each other, it seems the author intends to convey the lovers’ separation in three distinct parts, ostensibly signifying three stages of passing time. In the first sonnet, the poet directly names three seasons: “winter,” “summer,” and “autumn” (sonnet 97, lines 1-6). The following two continue this pattern, picking it up with language of Spring. By employing seasonal lexicon across all three poems, it is evident the speaker desires to use the concept of passing time as a means of framing the themes of loss and broken-heartedness that are central to the trio.

In sonnet 97, words like “freezings,” “barrenness,” “dull,” and “pale” paint a vivid picture of winter’s depravity, mirroring similar sensations within the poet’s heart (sonnet 97, lines 3-14). While this poem presents the deadness of winter, the poet expresses that the season in which he writes is actually summertime. It is the summer when the lover’s absence begins, the depravity of which renders life cold and barren, like winter, in the speaker’s mind. The arrival of spring in the following, sonnet 98, indicates three seasons have passed since the lovers’ separation. The seasonal lexicon continues in the second poem, but it bears the language of spring rather than winter, and it is this vernal diction that spills into the last sonnet and concludes them, ultimately depicting the passage of a whole year.

Along with lexical connections across the three poems, we see poetic devices pass from one to another as well. The first sonnet is replete with alliterations: “freezings I have felt,” “dark days,” “widowed wombs,” “unfathered fruit,” and in the final line we see “leaves look” (sonnet 97, lines 1-14). The second, sonnet 98, carries this device through the first two quatrains with the alliterations, “proud-pied,” “laughed and leapt,” “sweet smell,” and “summer’s story.” The poet then temporarily abandons alliteration and introduces strong floral and pigmentary diction, as well as repetition, devices which continue through the final poem, sonnet 99, and demonstrate a form of phonetic gradience throughout the trio. This transition begins with the word “flowers” (line 6) in the second quatrain of sonnet 98, introducing the floral diction that permeates the lines through the end of sonnet 99. The poet writes “lily’s white,” and “deep vermilion in the rose” (sonnet 98, lines 9-10), the first instances of this vivid language of flowers and color. Regarding repetition, we see anaphora in the first two lines of the third quatrain with the word “nor” (sonnet 98, lines 9-10), then again, in the same quatrain the repetition of the word “you” (sonnet 98, line 12). In sonnet 99, the word “sweet” (lines 2, 14) is repeated three times, and the floral, pigmentary diction increases. The words “violet,” “purple,” “dyed,” “lily,” “roses,” “blushing,” “white,” “red,” “flowers,” and “color” illustrate the emphatic language carried over from the preceding sonnet. With the diction in such a contrast to that of the first sonnet (the dull vocabulary of wintertime), it appears the poet is experiencing an increase of hope, verbally illustrated by the increase of cheerful words. Linguistically, this could symbolize the nearing reunion of the lovers as their separation approaches the one-year mark.

Following this idea of a nearing reunion, we can see potential evidence for the occurrence through the pronoun selection the poet makes for each of the three sonnets. In sonnet 97, the speaker addresses the beloved with the intimate pronoun “thee” (line 2). This informal address not only depicts their relational and emotional closeness, but could also point to the recency of their separation. The poet may have departed from his lover just the day before sitting down to write the grieving lines, and thus we see intimacy expressed both in the emotional connection and in the rawness of the lonely sensation as well. As time passes, the initial shock of grief becomes more distant. The poet appears to express this distance in sonnet 98 by addressing the beloved with the pronoun “you” (lines 1, 12-13). It is evident here that the lovers are still very intimate, thus the pronoun choice is not an emotional retreat, but rather, it is an acknowledgement of the distance that time has placed between them, and a manner of emphasizing the physical distance that they still feel. Finally, in sonnet 99, the poet returns to the informal address with “thou,” “thy,” and “thee” (lines 4, 5-6, 14). This linguistically indicates a return to intimacy, or perhaps points to a nearing reunion of the long-separated lovers.

30 September 2019

Works Cited:

Shakespeare, William. “Sonnet 97: How like a winter hath my absence been from thee;” “Sonnet 98: From you have I been absent in the spring;” “Sonnet 99: The forward violet thus did I chide.” Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Poems, ed. Barbra A. Mowat and Paul Werstine, Simon and Schuster Inc., 2009, pp. 213-217.