Sonnet 99: The Forward Violet Thus Did I Chide
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The forward violet thus did I chide:
'Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells, If not from my love's breath? The purple pride Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells In my love's veins thou hast too grossly dyed.' The lily I condemned for thy hand, And buds of marjoram had stolen thy hair; The roses fearfully on thorns did stand: One blushing shame, another white despair. A third, nor red nor white, had stolen of both And to his robbery had annexed thy breath, But for his theft, in pride of all his growth, A vengeful canker eat him up to death. More flowers I noted, yet I none could see, But sweet or colour it had stolen from thee. |
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The forward violet thus did I chide:
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I chided or admonished the presumptuous or possibly early blossoming violet as follows:
'Forward' can mean 'early', in which case the emphasis here is on this violet – especially if it is the sweet violet or Violet odora, commonly found in England – as a species that blooms comparatively early in the spring, often as early as February or March, and that is therefore associated with the onset of spring: it is thus 'forward' and in a sense precocious, for coming into its own ahead of many other flowers. In the context of what follows though, the word can also mean presumptuous, similar to how we use the word when saying, 'that's a very forward question to ask', for example, because the violet appears to claim all its qualities as its own, when in fact it has stolen them from you, my lover, who you are, as other sonnets, including the one that immediately precedes this one in the collection have established, the 'pattern' or template, the original form of beauty. As so often in these sonnets, it is more than a little likely that Shakespeare fully intends to convey both meanings and enjoys their layering in this one word. |
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'Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my love's breath? |
'You lovely thief, from where did you steal your sweet or again lovely fragrance, if not from the breath of my lover?'
The question is, of course, rhetorical, as the answer is implied: you couldn't possibly have stolen it from anywhere or anyone else, because my lover's breath is the sweetest there is. 'Sweet thief', as it happens, is exactly how Shakespeare describes the young man himself, after he has his affair with Shakespeare's mistress, in Sonnet 35, and this connection may well be of significance, because another reference to Sonnet 35 is tucked away in this sonnet a little later, as we shall see. Editors cite this second line with its enjambment into the third as an indication of the sonnet being perhaps unpolished or even unfinished, or possibly an early work that has found its way here into this position in the collection by mistake, since it is one of very few lines to consist entirely of monosyllabic words. It also has an almost insistent sequence of sibilant alliterations that make it sound almost a bit like an experiment in language, unless of course Shakespeare intends to convey a meaning or message with this that to our ear and frame of reference is now sadly lost. Or, and this is another possibility not to be dismissed, he here as elsewhere and as he did in the previous sonnet, draws attention to the language because there is something contained within it that is of significance. |
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The purple pride
Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells In my love's veins thou hast too grossly dyed.' |
The admonishment or indeed accusation directed at the flower continues:
'You have obtained the purple splendour that now rests on your soft cheek, meaning the petals of your flower, and that gives them their colour by dyeing them in the blood of my lover, and you have done so too crudely, with no sense of modesty, taste, or decorum.' Implied are many things, and referenced possibly even more: 'Purple pride', apart from delivering a much more gratifying alliteration than the previous line, evokes two elements at once: firstly, a rich and glorious type of red. In the English of the time, the word 'purple' can mean a whole range of reds, as editors point out, from a crimson right through to the actual violet of the violet. More importantly, purple – as in the hue that we today mostly associate with it – is the colour of high status, and this not just symbolically, but legally: the sumptuary laws, in force in England from the late 13th right through to the early 17th century, stipulated what colours and fabrics could be worn by whom, and purple was exclusively reserved for royalty and high nobility or people of similarly high status. So for the humble little violet to wear purple could indeed be viewed as presumptuous... 'Pride' we discussed on numerous occasions, and here more than anything it suggests an ostentation or, as also on previous occasions and very recently in Sonnet 98, showiness. There, in Sonnet 98, we referred to the potential the word also has for sexual connotation, as we believe we strongly found it in Sonnet 52 with its "new unfolding his imprisoned pride." Whether we can read any such allusion into 'pride' here at this point really remains to be seen: there is no strong suggestion of it here, but Shakespeare, as we know well by now, is a master of disguising and layering his meanings, and so we need to hold out a bit, because the word appears once more in this sonnet and by then the context, if not the connotations, may have become a little clearer. For 'soft cheek' to mean the flower's genuinely soft blossom is relatively unproblematic, although in combination with 'complexion' and the charge that it has been 'too grossly dyed', it acquires an interesting dimension. Because we know how dim a view Shakespeare takes of make-up and artifice when it comes to beauty. You may remember during the Rival Poet sequence in Sonnet 82 how he compared other people's writing to his: Thou, truly fair, wert truly sympathised In true plain words by thy true-telling friend, And their gross painting might be better used Where cheeks need blood, in thee it is abused. Here, the fact that the 'forward' violet is using his lover's purple blood to 'dye' its cheeks 'grossly' is telling: Shakespeare compares the violet's flower to the cheek or face of a 'painted', as in heavily made-up, person, and that is something he thoroughly disapproves of, as we saw in Sonnets 67 & 68 in particular, and also noted, though less forcefully, with Sonnets 20 and 21. And this link to the Rival Poet sonnets may also be significant because contained within the existence of this sonnet as a whole may be a reference to either the Rival Poet or to another poet, as we also shall see. The idea of a flower obtaining its hue from the blood of a beautiful human is not new, of course. It appears repeatedly in Greek mythology: the hyacinth takes its name from Hyacinthus, the beautiful youth loved by both Apollo and Zephyrus, the latter of whom, in his jealousy, kills him with a discus. And Adonis – still lending his name to our language as the epitome of male beauty – when gored to death by a boar while out hunting has his blood seep into the ground and produce a flower, something Shakespeare himself relates in his narrative poem Venus and Adonis which he dedicates to a young man who is not only quite astonishingly beautiful and unfathomably rich, but who bears many other characteristics that tally well with his own lover and who may well therefore – as we have also noted before and as we will discuss in much more detail soon – be one of the candidates for him, Henry Wriothesley, Third Earl of Southampton: By this, the boy that by her side lay killed Was melted like a vapour from her sight, And in his blood that on the ground lay spilled A purple flower sprung up, checked red and white, Resembling well his pale cheeks and the blood Which in round drops upon their whiteness stood. (Lines 1165-70) Whether this link is of significance, we cannot immediately tell either, but it is certainly worth noting, not least in view of what Shakespeare tells us specifically about the flower that is neither red nor white but both in a moment... |
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The lily I condemned for thy hand,
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This, too, is not a novel idea, although the phrasing is unusual:
I condemned, meaning accused and also found guilty, therefore, the lily for taking its traditionally pure white colour from your hand. We have discussed the Elizabethan ideal of white as a symbol of purity and beauty also in our episode on Sonnet 67. PRONUNCIATION: Note that condemned here has three syllables: condemnèd. |
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And buds of marjoram had stolen thy hair;
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Similarly, marjoram had stolen its lovely qualities from your hair. Known to us mostly as oregano, marjoram is a herb that produces tiny flowers in thick growth among densely packed leaves, which together and in combination with the sunlight, especially during their early bloom, give it a golden glow, and what is especially beautiful and evocative about this metaphor is that a bunch of oregano also has a sweet, pleasant smell: this, for our poet, is not just a visual, but also an olfactory experience, and anyone who has ever had the pleasure of finding their face buried in the hair of a beautiful young man will know just what he means.
'Had', meanwhile, reminds us that we are in the narrative of the poet: he is relating events as if they had just recently occurred. PRONUNCIATION: Note that stolen here has one syllable: stol'n. |
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The roses fearfully on thorns did stand:
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Continuing my survey of flowers, I then encountered the roses which of course stood on thorns, because that's what they do, they are positioned above their thorny stems or stalks.
But 'to stand on thorns' was also a proverbial expression, similar to our 'to be on tenterhooks', and Shakespeare emphasises this state of anxiety of the roses by telling us that they did so 'fearfully'. Why they did so 'fearfully' is not further explained. On the one hand this is just what they do, because they always stand on thorns, so they are in a sense always anxious: this is part of their natural state of being. But it has also been suggested that their anxiety may stem from the guilt they feel over their act of appropriation, seeing that the poet is going around chiding and condemning flowers in his sight left, right and centre. This, although it may strike us as a little strained, becomes quite a plausible explanation when we look at the sonnet that serves as the source for this one, in a moment. |
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One blushing shame, another white despair.
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One of these roses was the colour of blushing shame, namely red, the other was the colour of despair, here spelt out for us as white.
In Shakespeare's story, where all these flowers take their qualities from his young lover, and without further elaboration, we must assume that he means that the red roses obtained their red from the blushing shame of the young man and the white roses their white from his despair. This adds yet another fascinating facet and cranks up the stakes a bit, because neither shame nor despair – though common enough and surely found in every human being at certain times in their lives – are particularly flattering states for a flower to copy and so the question presents itself: why would Shakespeare bring these into play here? Unless you know the sonnet this is based on, which is not assumption you can make today but may be one that Shakespeare was able to make at the time, because the poem this sonnet is based on does give an explanation for the flower's shame, as we shall see. |
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A third, nor red nor white, had stolen of both,
And to his robbery had annexed thy breath, |
A third rose was neither red nor white, and so this one had stolen of both your shame and your despair, but had added to this also your breath, meaning that, like the forward violet, it obtained its sweet smell from you.
Again, we need to bear in mind that the red and the white may stem from a more generic shame and despair than specifically the young man's but it is of intriguing interest that Shakespeare here conflates the two. It is impossible for us to know why it would be this rose more than the red or the white one that had acquired its smell in this way, but it may well be that at the time Shakespeare is able to refer to a variety of rose that his contemporaries would recognise as particularly fragrant. Or he once again consciously ties the young man in our minds to this particular rose, the one that is neither red nor white but both. Also, we can't be absolutely certain what colour then this third rose had. Most editors point to either a variegated or damasked rose on the one hand, meaning one that features streaks of red and white in one flower exactly as mentioned in Venus and Adonis, or to a pink one on the other, meaning one that blends the two colours into one. A third option that cannot be ruled out, though it does seem somewhat less likely in the context, is that this third rose is really neither red nor white but a totally different colour, such as yellow, for example. The reason this is less likely quite apart from all the context we have now established is that surely a poet of Shakespeare calibre would make more of a proper third colour than simply referring to it as not being one or the other. PRONUNCIATION: Note that, as above stolen here has one syllable, stol'n, and robbery is pronounced as two syllables: robb'ry. |
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But for his theft, in pride of all his growth,
A vengeful canker eat him up to death. |
But this third rose, effectively as a punishment or direct consequence of its theft, was eaten up to death by a vengeful cankerworm just at the time when it was in the full glory of its bloom or growth, 'pride' as ever carrying at the very least a connotation of ostentation or boastfulness.
And here is where this puzzling poem becomes truly interesting. All the other flowers so far seem fine and get away with their thieving, but this one gets eaten up by a caterpillar that is not just going about its own business of living and doing what it must do, but that is actively vengeful. And we shall want to examine a little further why this might be in just a moment. 'Eat' meanwhile here is simply an old form of the past tense of the verb, which would at the time have been pronounced 'at'. |
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More flowers I noted, yet I none could see,
But sweet or colour it had stolen from thee. |
There were other flowers that on my metaphorical – or possibly literal – walk through the garden or the landscape I noted, but there were none that I could see which had not taken either their sweet, as in their lovely fragrance, or their colour from you.
PRONUNCIATION: Note that flowers here has one syllable, flow'rs, and stolen once again also just one syllable: stol'n. |
In the collection of 154 sonnets by William Shakespeare published in 1609, Sonnet 99 is unique for two reasons that are possibly related: it is the only sonnet to consist of 15 lines instead of the usual 14, and it is the only sonnet that leans directly on a known source and can therefore be said to be a more or less direct reworking of an existing piece by another poet, rather than presenting a mere variation on a well-worn theme. The theme itself though is familiar from both classical and Renaissance poetry, but Shakespeare, as we would probably expect by now, manages to furnish his poem with one twist in particular that suggests he may be engaging in more than just a standard rhetorical exercise of imitatio.
We do not know why Shakespeare gives Sonnet 99 an extra line. It's not a line that particularly stands out: reading the sonnet, even out loud, one does not immediately think: ah, there is one line too many and this is it. Nor is this a complete break with the form as such: editors note that other sonnets consisting of 15 lines exist at the time, and usually cite William Shakespeare's direct contemporary Barnaby Barnes, who was born about five years after him, in approximately 1571 but died aged only 38 in 1609, the year the sonnets happened to be published, with a collection of sonnets entitled Parthenophil and Parthenophe, published in 1593, and Bartholomew Griffin, a man about whom little is known other than that in 1596 he published a collection of sonnets known under the title Fidessa.
There are only two other sonnets in Shakespeare's collection that deviate from the 14-line form: Sonnet 126 which, however, draws explicit attention to this fact by placing brackets around the two empty lines where the closing couplet would normally be, and the much-debated Sonnet 145 which, instead of 14 iambic pentameters, uses 14 tetrameters: lines with eight instead of ten syllables. Both of these sonnets, we will get to in due course, obviously.
The very first question that Sonnet 99 then poses is: why? Why is Shakespeare, who sticks to his form almost consistently throughout, departing from it here? Of course, it could be a mistake. Some scholars argue, and not without reason, that the sonnet on the whole feels like it might be an early or unfinished work and that therefore the inconsistency is simply a slip of the mind, something he would have corrected had he got around to it.
What speaks against this is mostly the fact that the collection otherwise is well curated. Some scholars indeed – as for example Paul Edmondson and Sir Stanley Wells on this podcast – argue that Shakespeare kept going back to these sonnets, revising them, and then put them together himself into the collection that came out in 1609. This would make such a mistake doubly odd, since the collection contains few other 'authorial' errors; what textual issues we have are mainly typesetting and problems.
Also possible, though it has to be said purely conjectural too, is that he is drawing attention to something unusual about the sonnet with something unusual: it could well be that, fully conscious of the fact that he is effectively rewriting an existing sonnet by somebody else, he signals to us that he knows what he's doing, but varying the from just ever so slightly and in a way that other poets at the time also have done, saying: look, I'm doing something different here, but as you can see from other people's work, this isn't therefore 'wrong'.
The second question that presents itself is an easy one to answer: if there is a source, what is it? It's a poem that features in a collection of sonnets known by the title Diana that was published in 1592, so exactly around the time Shakespeare most likely starts writing the bulk of his sonnets, by Henry Constable, another direct contemporary of Shakespeare's, having been born two years before him, in 1562 and living to the age of 51; he died three years before Shakespeare, in 1613:
My lady's presence makes the roses red,
Because to see her lips they blush for shame;
The lily's leaves for envy pale became,
And her white hands in them this envy bred.
The marigold the leaves abroad doth spread,
Because the sun's and her power is the same;
The violet of purple colour came,
Dyed in the blood she made my heart to shed.
In brief, all flowers from her their virtue take,
From her sweet breath their sweet smells do proceed;
The living heat which her eyebeams doth make
Warmeth the ground and quickeneth the seed.
The rain, wherewith she watereth the flowers,
Falls from mine eye, which she dissolves in showers.
The similarities between this and Sonnet 99 are too obvious for me to have to point out individually, and this immediately raises a further question: why this? Why is Shakespeare imitating Constable?
Considering the parallels this almost certainly has to be a conscious act of imitation, whereby imitation, as hinted earlier, here does not have to be understood in a negative sense of idly copying and perhaps pretending to be something else, imitatio is a well established exercise in classical rhetoric, whereby the student takes an existing text, preferably a well crafted and highly respected one, and reworks it in their own style to learn from the practice. So is Shakespeare here simply honing his craft? If so, does that necessarily mean that this has to be an earlier sonnet which has somehow here lodged itself at position 99 in the collection by mistake? This is entirely possible. How likely is it though?
Maybe not very. But, we don't know. Let this be a refrain we rehearse often: we do not know for certain what exactly our Will is doing here, but there is an element to Sonnet 99 which, shall we say, invites, rather than obliges or let alone forces, us to consider the possibility that Shakespeare knows exactly what he's doing. And, having by this time possibly composed anywhere between a quarter and half a million words in amazingly constructed poetry across his plays and poems, that would not be too surprising.
It is entirely possible that Shakespeare borrows Constable's sonnet to make a particular point. We don't know what that particular point is, but we know that Constable is highly regarded and very successful. We also know that sometime around here – we cannot tell precisely when – Shakespeare's young lover pays so much attention to another poet that Shakespeare feels compelled to write half a dozen sonnets just addressing that fact. This does not mean that the Rival Poet of the corresponding sequence has to be Constable: although he is clearly 'eligible' as a candidate, he actually is less often named in the frame than others. But if we imagine there being a period during Shakespeare's relationship with his young man when the young man effectively gets bored with Shakespeare and starts throwing names of other at the time celebrated poets in the ring, then that could quite easily prompt someone like Shakespeare to say: fine, I'll give you a Constable, if you're so keen on him. Or words to that effect. Spoken out loud or thought to himself.
Forever acknowledging the absence of certainty about these matters, such a scenario or situation would be somewhat supported by the presence of the already hinted at twist. Editors don't seem to latch onto this, but it's hard to miss, and even harder to unsee once you've seen it.
We have this poem, clearly pulling the registers of poetic commonplaces, talking of all these flowers getting all their beautiful colour and their lovely sweet smell from you, ladida, nothing new here really: we've seen this in Diana, we've seen this Venus and Adonis, we've heard this in Petrarch and we've heard it in Thomas Campion, just look at his There Is a Garden in Her Face, so we are pretty much on familiar ground and then – behold! but alack and alas! – there is a canker in the rose.
That's not ideal.
This is not how we would portray the perfect situation.
Whence stems this cankerworm? This infestation. This blemish. This thing that eats the pink rose up to death. Or the damask one, as ever the case may be.
Who or what does this pink or damask rose, this flower that has the blushing shame and the white despair and the sweet breath of the young lover represent? What has it done or does it stand for to be so unfortunate, so singled out as the one who gets his comeuppance? And not just by the reaper Time who ultimately cuts down everything, nor by some freak weather event, some storm or early frost, but by a 'vengeful' canker?
What is Shakespeare telling his young man, and through him us? About his young man? Or about anyone else?
Now, the idea that the sweetest buds and therefore the loveliest flowers are most attractive to "loathsome canker" is not new: in Sonnet 35, the one in which Shakespeare refers to his young lover as 'sweet thief', the poem that absolves the young man from any guilt or wrongdoing for getting off with Shakespeare's mistress, Shakespeare tells his young lover:
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud;
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults...
It could of course be the case that Shakespeare here in Sonnet 99 simply reminds us that there is no summer without days when rough winds do shake the darling buds of May or the eye of heaven simply shines too hot, much as there is no outdoor luncheon without the occasional wasp, and no ointment that will not at one point sooner or later have a fly in it: it is possible that Shakespeare simply subverts his idyll of the English garden with a poetic reality check and speaks what is after all a truth: perfection comes with flaws: there is, as Leonard Cohen puts it, "a crack in everything" and that is exactly "how the light gets in," and if that's what Shakespeare is doing here then for that alone we must salute him, because it instantly raises him above the rest by adding the dimension to his work that other poets shy away from for fear of 'tarnishing' their romantic ideal and in doing so displeasing their audiences.
On its own, we could gladly leave it at that and say to our Will, hat off, you've done it again, you've taken a poetic trope and made it perfect by giving it permission to be flawed.
But casting as it does an arc so pointedly towards his own Sonnet 35 and the entirely obvious incident that prompted that, we are now more than merely invited, we are now almost encouraged, so as not to say coerced into entertaining the thought that maybe Shakespeare is subverting his Constablean idyll to remind his young lover that – perfect as in every way he is and by the sounds thinks he is – such perfection, in the real world, the world that both he and Shakespeare inhabit, comes with faults with flaws. And some of these faults, some of these flaws, we know, Shakespeare knows, the young man knows, in their era even more than in ours, can be lethal. Particularly if they are of a romantically advanced, as in sexual, nature. And if there were to be an allusion to this, then the pink rose being visited, just in the pride of all its growth, by an unwelcome parasite that eats it up to death could well be just that.
And so perhaps, with its oddly conspicuous position at number 99 just after a couple of sonnets that speak of an extended absence and may, though subtly, as we saw, hint at some infidelities on quite possibly both sides, and before four sonnets that talk of nothing so much as of how sometimes talking of love and your lover is hard, this sonnet turns out to be neither trivial nor misplaced.
Maybe our poet here does precisely what he does best: put into words what – for one reason or another, and the exact reason is one we may never know – needs to be expressed...
We do not know why Shakespeare gives Sonnet 99 an extra line. It's not a line that particularly stands out: reading the sonnet, even out loud, one does not immediately think: ah, there is one line too many and this is it. Nor is this a complete break with the form as such: editors note that other sonnets consisting of 15 lines exist at the time, and usually cite William Shakespeare's direct contemporary Barnaby Barnes, who was born about five years after him, in approximately 1571 but died aged only 38 in 1609, the year the sonnets happened to be published, with a collection of sonnets entitled Parthenophil and Parthenophe, published in 1593, and Bartholomew Griffin, a man about whom little is known other than that in 1596 he published a collection of sonnets known under the title Fidessa.
There are only two other sonnets in Shakespeare's collection that deviate from the 14-line form: Sonnet 126 which, however, draws explicit attention to this fact by placing brackets around the two empty lines where the closing couplet would normally be, and the much-debated Sonnet 145 which, instead of 14 iambic pentameters, uses 14 tetrameters: lines with eight instead of ten syllables. Both of these sonnets, we will get to in due course, obviously.
The very first question that Sonnet 99 then poses is: why? Why is Shakespeare, who sticks to his form almost consistently throughout, departing from it here? Of course, it could be a mistake. Some scholars argue, and not without reason, that the sonnet on the whole feels like it might be an early or unfinished work and that therefore the inconsistency is simply a slip of the mind, something he would have corrected had he got around to it.
What speaks against this is mostly the fact that the collection otherwise is well curated. Some scholars indeed – as for example Paul Edmondson and Sir Stanley Wells on this podcast – argue that Shakespeare kept going back to these sonnets, revising them, and then put them together himself into the collection that came out in 1609. This would make such a mistake doubly odd, since the collection contains few other 'authorial' errors; what textual issues we have are mainly typesetting and problems.
Also possible, though it has to be said purely conjectural too, is that he is drawing attention to something unusual about the sonnet with something unusual: it could well be that, fully conscious of the fact that he is effectively rewriting an existing sonnet by somebody else, he signals to us that he knows what he's doing, but varying the from just ever so slightly and in a way that other poets at the time also have done, saying: look, I'm doing something different here, but as you can see from other people's work, this isn't therefore 'wrong'.
The second question that presents itself is an easy one to answer: if there is a source, what is it? It's a poem that features in a collection of sonnets known by the title Diana that was published in 1592, so exactly around the time Shakespeare most likely starts writing the bulk of his sonnets, by Henry Constable, another direct contemporary of Shakespeare's, having been born two years before him, in 1562 and living to the age of 51; he died three years before Shakespeare, in 1613:
My lady's presence makes the roses red,
Because to see her lips they blush for shame;
The lily's leaves for envy pale became,
And her white hands in them this envy bred.
The marigold the leaves abroad doth spread,
Because the sun's and her power is the same;
The violet of purple colour came,
Dyed in the blood she made my heart to shed.
In brief, all flowers from her their virtue take,
From her sweet breath their sweet smells do proceed;
The living heat which her eyebeams doth make
Warmeth the ground and quickeneth the seed.
The rain, wherewith she watereth the flowers,
Falls from mine eye, which she dissolves in showers.
The similarities between this and Sonnet 99 are too obvious for me to have to point out individually, and this immediately raises a further question: why this? Why is Shakespeare imitating Constable?
Considering the parallels this almost certainly has to be a conscious act of imitation, whereby imitation, as hinted earlier, here does not have to be understood in a negative sense of idly copying and perhaps pretending to be something else, imitatio is a well established exercise in classical rhetoric, whereby the student takes an existing text, preferably a well crafted and highly respected one, and reworks it in their own style to learn from the practice. So is Shakespeare here simply honing his craft? If so, does that necessarily mean that this has to be an earlier sonnet which has somehow here lodged itself at position 99 in the collection by mistake? This is entirely possible. How likely is it though?
Maybe not very. But, we don't know. Let this be a refrain we rehearse often: we do not know for certain what exactly our Will is doing here, but there is an element to Sonnet 99 which, shall we say, invites, rather than obliges or let alone forces, us to consider the possibility that Shakespeare knows exactly what he's doing. And, having by this time possibly composed anywhere between a quarter and half a million words in amazingly constructed poetry across his plays and poems, that would not be too surprising.
It is entirely possible that Shakespeare borrows Constable's sonnet to make a particular point. We don't know what that particular point is, but we know that Constable is highly regarded and very successful. We also know that sometime around here – we cannot tell precisely when – Shakespeare's young lover pays so much attention to another poet that Shakespeare feels compelled to write half a dozen sonnets just addressing that fact. This does not mean that the Rival Poet of the corresponding sequence has to be Constable: although he is clearly 'eligible' as a candidate, he actually is less often named in the frame than others. But if we imagine there being a period during Shakespeare's relationship with his young man when the young man effectively gets bored with Shakespeare and starts throwing names of other at the time celebrated poets in the ring, then that could quite easily prompt someone like Shakespeare to say: fine, I'll give you a Constable, if you're so keen on him. Or words to that effect. Spoken out loud or thought to himself.
Forever acknowledging the absence of certainty about these matters, such a scenario or situation would be somewhat supported by the presence of the already hinted at twist. Editors don't seem to latch onto this, but it's hard to miss, and even harder to unsee once you've seen it.
We have this poem, clearly pulling the registers of poetic commonplaces, talking of all these flowers getting all their beautiful colour and their lovely sweet smell from you, ladida, nothing new here really: we've seen this in Diana, we've seen this Venus and Adonis, we've heard this in Petrarch and we've heard it in Thomas Campion, just look at his There Is a Garden in Her Face, so we are pretty much on familiar ground and then – behold! but alack and alas! – there is a canker in the rose.
That's not ideal.
This is not how we would portray the perfect situation.
Whence stems this cankerworm? This infestation. This blemish. This thing that eats the pink rose up to death. Or the damask one, as ever the case may be.
Who or what does this pink or damask rose, this flower that has the blushing shame and the white despair and the sweet breath of the young lover represent? What has it done or does it stand for to be so unfortunate, so singled out as the one who gets his comeuppance? And not just by the reaper Time who ultimately cuts down everything, nor by some freak weather event, some storm or early frost, but by a 'vengeful' canker?
What is Shakespeare telling his young man, and through him us? About his young man? Or about anyone else?
Now, the idea that the sweetest buds and therefore the loveliest flowers are most attractive to "loathsome canker" is not new: in Sonnet 35, the one in which Shakespeare refers to his young lover as 'sweet thief', the poem that absolves the young man from any guilt or wrongdoing for getting off with Shakespeare's mistress, Shakespeare tells his young lover:
No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud;
Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun,
And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud.
All men make faults...
It could of course be the case that Shakespeare here in Sonnet 99 simply reminds us that there is no summer without days when rough winds do shake the darling buds of May or the eye of heaven simply shines too hot, much as there is no outdoor luncheon without the occasional wasp, and no ointment that will not at one point sooner or later have a fly in it: it is possible that Shakespeare simply subverts his idyll of the English garden with a poetic reality check and speaks what is after all a truth: perfection comes with flaws: there is, as Leonard Cohen puts it, "a crack in everything" and that is exactly "how the light gets in," and if that's what Shakespeare is doing here then for that alone we must salute him, because it instantly raises him above the rest by adding the dimension to his work that other poets shy away from for fear of 'tarnishing' their romantic ideal and in doing so displeasing their audiences.
On its own, we could gladly leave it at that and say to our Will, hat off, you've done it again, you've taken a poetic trope and made it perfect by giving it permission to be flawed.
But casting as it does an arc so pointedly towards his own Sonnet 35 and the entirely obvious incident that prompted that, we are now more than merely invited, we are now almost encouraged, so as not to say coerced into entertaining the thought that maybe Shakespeare is subverting his Constablean idyll to remind his young lover that – perfect as in every way he is and by the sounds thinks he is – such perfection, in the real world, the world that both he and Shakespeare inhabit, comes with faults with flaws. And some of these faults, some of these flaws, we know, Shakespeare knows, the young man knows, in their era even more than in ours, can be lethal. Particularly if they are of a romantically advanced, as in sexual, nature. And if there were to be an allusion to this, then the pink rose being visited, just in the pride of all its growth, by an unwelcome parasite that eats it up to death could well be just that.
And so perhaps, with its oddly conspicuous position at number 99 just after a couple of sonnets that speak of an extended absence and may, though subtly, as we saw, hint at some infidelities on quite possibly both sides, and before four sonnets that talk of nothing so much as of how sometimes talking of love and your lover is hard, this sonnet turns out to be neither trivial nor misplaced.
Maybe our poet here does precisely what he does best: put into words what – for one reason or another, and the exact reason is one we may never know – needs to be expressed...
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