ABSTRACT
Although sonnets 20-126 echo much of the praise, anxiety and ironic insight as expressed in their immediate predecessors, the dif ferences between the two groups of poems are more striking than are the similarities.1 Certainly, for example, in the later sonnets the aristocratic youth is imaged again as a figure of sun-like resplendence and pre-eminence; but one has merely to juxtapose sonnets 7 and 33 in order to illustrate the important dissimilarities between earlier and later comparisons of the youth to the sun. Sonnet 7 represents the young man as virtually another sun to the world: supposedly above all in status and beauty, yet nonetheless subject to time and therefore destined to decline and to suffer disregard. Sonnet 33, on the other hand, pictures the youth as the sun of the speaker’s life, suggesting that, in his role as the sun of the speaker’s existence (‘my sun’, 1. 9), the young man is not merely brilliant, and not merely trapped in time, but necessarily flawed. He is subject to contamination because he is a sun in and of the world, being indeed a son of the world, and not even the sun in the heavens is free from imperfections. Moreover, he is one of a class (social and otherwise), not singular. As Shakespeare’s speaker says in reconciling himself to the young man’s imperfection: ‘Suns o f the world may stain when heav’n ’s sun staineth’ (1. 14).2
