Sonnet 45

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Sonnet 45 in the 1609 Quarto
Q1 Q2 Q3 C The other two, slight air and purging fire, Are both with thee, wherever I abide; The first my thought, the other my desire, These present-absent with swift motion slide. For when these quicker elements are gone In tender embassy of love to thee, My life, being made of four, with two alone Sinks down to death, oppress’d with melancholy; Until life’s composition be recured By those swift messengers return’d from thee, Who even but now come back again, assured Of thy fair health, recounting it to me: This told, I joy; but then no longer glad, I send them back again, and straight grow sad. 4 8 12 14 —William Shakespeare [1]

Sonnet 45 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man. Sonnet 45 is continued from Sonnet 44 .

Structure

Sonnet 45 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet. The Shakespearean sonnet contains three quatrains followed by a final rhyming couplet. It follows the form's typical rhyme scheme, ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, and is written in a type of poetic metre called iambic pentameter based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions. The final line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:

×  /     ×   /   × /    ×      /       ×   /  I send them back again, and straight grow sad. (45.14) 

/ = ictus, a metrically strong syllabic position. × = nonictus.

The meter demands several contractions: one-syllable "being" in line 7 and "even" in line 11, and — somewhat controversially — a three-syllable "melancholy" (probably pronounced mel-an-ch'ly) in line 8. ^[2]

Recordings

• Paul Kelly, for the 2016 album, Seven Sonnets & a Song

Notes

1. Pooler, C[harles] Knox, ed. (1918). The Works of Shakespeare: Sonnets. The Arden Shakespeare [1st series]. London: Methuen & Company. OCLC   4770201.
2. Atkins 2007, pp 131–32.

References

First edition and facsimile

• Shakespeare, William (1609). Shake-speares Sonnets: Never Before Imprinted. London: Thomas Thorpe.
• Lee, Sidney, ed. (1905). Shakespeares Sonnets: Being a reproduction in facsimile of the first edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. OCLC   458829162.

Variorum editions

• Alden, Raymond Macdonald, ed. (1916). The Sonnets of Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. OCLC   234756.
• Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed. (1944). A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Sonnets [2 Volumes]. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. OCLC   6028485. — Volume I and Volume II at the Internet Archive

Modern critical editions

• Atkins, Carl D., ed. (2007). Shakespeare's Sonnets: With Three Hundred Years of Commentary . Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN   978-0-8386-4163-7. OCLC   86090499.
• Booth, Stephen, ed. (2000) [1st ed. 1977]. Shakespeare's Sonnets (Rev. ed.). New Haven: Yale Nota Bene. ISBN   0-300-01959-9. OCLC   2968040.
• Burrow, Colin, ed. (2002). The Complete Sonnets and Poems . The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0192819338. OCLC   48532938.
• Duncan-Jones, Katherine, ed. (2010) [1st ed. 1997]. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Arden Shakespeare, third series (Rev. ed.). London: Bloomsbury. ISBN   978-1-4080-1797-5. OCLC   755065951. — 1st edition at the Internet Archive
• Evans, G. Blakemore, ed. (1996). The Sonnets . The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-0521294034. OCLC   32272082.
• Kerrigan, John, ed. (1995) [1st ed. 1986]. The Sonnets ; and, A Lover's Complaint . New Penguin Shakespeare (Rev. ed.). Penguin Books. ISBN   0-14-070732-8. OCLC   15018446.
• Mowat, Barbara A.; Werstine, Paul, eds. (2006). Shakespeare's Sonnets & Poems. Folger Shakespeare Library. New York: Washington Square Press. ISBN   978-0743273282. OCLC   64594469.
• Orgel, Stephen, ed. (2001). The Sonnets . The Pelican Shakespeare (Rev. ed.). New York: Penguin Books. ISBN   978-0140714531. OCLC   46683809.
• Vendler, Helen, ed. (1997). The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets . Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN   0-674-63712-7. OCLC   36806589.

External links

• Analysis