Sonnets 26 and 43

Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream was all supposedly just fantasies of the night, a play of the imagination, a dream. Therefore, it shouldn’t surprise us to find him righting of reveries elsewhere in his work. Two examples are sonnets 27 and 43, both dreams having similar content to one another.

In the first quatrain of sonnet 27, he tells us how even after his body’s work is done his mind carries on, “Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed, / The dear repose for limbs with travel tired; / But then begins a journey in my head, / To work my mind, when body's work's expired:”( 27. 1-4). In the third quatrain he describes to us exactly what his mind’s eye is seeing, “Save that my soul's imaginary sight/ Presents thy shadow to my sightless view, / Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night, / Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.” (27. 9-12). The couplet in this sonnet leads us to believe that the author may be discontented with his dreams, and he seems exasperated that he can find no peace, day or night, from the character that haunts them.

In sonnet 43, similarly to sonnet 27, in the first quatrain he explains to us he is dreaming, “When most I wink, then do mine eyes best see, / For all the day they view things unrespected; / But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee, / And darkly bright are bright in dark directed.”(43. 1-4). However, in this sonnet he is much quicker to move into telling us about the subject of his dream. He praises his subject’s form, which he refers to in both sonnets as a shadow or shade, by saying, “Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make bright, / How would thy shadow's form form happy show / To the clear day with thy much clearer light, / When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!” (43. 5-8). Unlike in sonnet 27, the speaker uses the couplet to make us very aware is happy to have these visions, “All days are nights to see till I see thee,” (43. 13). He also mentions, for the first time, his desire that he be seen in the dreams of the one he is dreaming of, “And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.” (43. 14).

While comparing these two pieces I was careful not to give a specific gender to the character in either of these sonnets. This is because according to Norton Shakespeare, “The Sonnets and ‘A Lover’s complaint’”; Shakespeare cast aside the traditional object of an exalted lady and instead centered many of his poems on homosexual characters and fantasies. Norton states that, “Sonnets 1-126 recount the speaker’s idealized, sometimes painful love for femininely beautiful, well born male youth.”(page 1937). However, a specific gender was never given by the speaker in either of these sonnets. The only time gender was even mentioned was in sonnet 27, “Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.” (27. 12), but I read this as just a metaphor for making something unattractive beautiful.

I think it is beneficial to read these sonnets more as dialogue than simply stand-alone poems. The subject matter of both poems is very similar, however without analyzing them side by side it might be possible to miss the author’s clear emotional differences in each work. In the first sonnet he seems bothered by the dream, but in the second he welcomes it.