Shakespeare Sonnet 124

If my dear love were but the child of state

Mar 18, 2009 Linda Sue Grimes

In sonnet 124, the speaker dramatizes the nature of his "dear love," the motivating soul-power that guides his craftsmanship and keeps his creative juices flowing.

The speaker’s love of truth and beauty are consistently his companions in his art. He reveals that these qualities strengthen his talent and his craft.

First Quatrain: “If my dear love were but the child of state”

Addressing a general audience in sonnet 124, the speaker explores the nature of his love by metaphorically comparing it to an orphan, but the comparison is crafted negatively, claiming that if his love were a mere orphan or “child of state,” it would be not only be a “bastard” but left to the vicissitudes of time, “subject of Time’s love or to Time’s hate.” His poor love would be “weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gather’d.”

Second Quatrain: “No, it was builded far from accident”

But such is not the case with his love, which was deliberately, thus divinely, crafted “far from accident.” Unlike the poor bastard child of state, fatherless and depended upon societal scraps and passing good will, his love does not “suffer[ ] in smiling pomp,” neither does it “fall[ ] / Under the blow of thralled discontent” brought on by time’s fickle pleasures.

Third Quatrain: “It fears not policy, that heretic”

The speaker’s love does not suffer the fears of the state’s actions, and to the character of his love, the policies of the state are often traitorous indignities that usurp the individual in fits and starts.

It is necessary to remember that his speaker lived under a monarchy, and the governed had no say in how they were governed. Thus, references to politics or governing by this speaker reveal a radical gulf between the spiritual and the political.

Instead of functioning as a part of the obedient crowd, the love, or soul, of this speaker “all alone stands hugely politic,” but it moves in an alternate universe from ordinary politics because it neither “grows with heat, nor drowns with showers.” His love does not embody the physical but the spiritual, where it is not subject to the ravages of the physical universe and that old nemesis, Time.

The Couplet: “To this I witness call the fools of time”

The speaker then testifies as a “witness” against the “fools of time,” who are subject to Time’s vicissitudes, or the pairs of opposites. His love remains in perfect balance and harmony, because it transcends the common lot of humankind. It cannot be burned by heat, it cannot be drowned by water, and it cannot be forced to suffer the trammels of aging.

Without this awareness and unity with one’s love, or soul, the angry mob will “die for goodness, who have liv’d for crime.” The speaker suggests that it is a crime against the soul not to live in it. It is a crime against one’s individuality to follow blindly the policies of a monarchy without understanding that one’s true life, love, and existence blissfully wait within.

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