In this text I will analyse Shakespeare’s Sonnet XX and how the sonneteer built the meaning of the poem.

The Sonnet XX is one of the sonnets addressed to a fair youth, and it is included in Shakespeare’s work “Sonnets”. 

It is arranged into 4 stanzas, as Elizabethan’s sonnets require; in particular there are 3 quatrains in alternate rhyme and an ending rhyming-couplet.

Since from the first stanza, you can recognize that the speaking voice is always an lyrical I, while the addressee is a generical “you”. 

In the first stanza the speaking voice starts to describe his beloved as a fair person, both considering esthetic and moral level. Indeed in the first couple of lines the lyrical I identifies the man’s face as woman’s and given by nature face, while in the second couple it considers man’s heart more than a woman’s one, because the first does not fall in shifting change. 

The idea you build reading the first quatrain may consist of an hermaphrodite and pure person, but you must remember the code used by Shakespeare: he wrote with a courteous love code, which usually identifies beloveds as perfect angels, with all the qualities you may imagine for a human being. 

The true message the speaking voice wants to convey is the (illusory) connection between positive qualities and women; indeed it defines the woman’s gentle heart as unstable, overcoming the link between women and perfection, which was typical for courteous lovers: moreover, also a man may be considered as beautiful (line 1, “nature’s own hand painted”) and kind (l.3, “woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted with shifting change).

In the second stanza the speaking voice continues to compare beloved to women. The difference between them is that the man has brighter and purer eyes than women’s ones, even if both sight gilds things and moments. In truth the last affinity is untold, but the theme of greeting, which had been very important for sonneteers like Petrarch, is easy to remember. Another affinity between the beloved and women is that they both capture eyes and souls. 

The eighth line of the sonnet is useful to understand Shakespeare’s idea of pleasure. Indeed men show attraction with eyes, which are an organ, so they remind of body and materiality, while women are attracted with souls, which entail a different vision of love, which is more spiritual, and which was considered better during the Middle Ages. The difference is the message of the second stanza.

In the third quatrain the lyrical I personifies Nature as a being with feelings, especially jealousy . Moreover, it has also fallen in love with the man before he was born, so when it was thought like a woman. In the following lines the speaking voice implicitly tells its true intentions with the man, that is to have a sexual interocurse with him, even if it is impossible because Nature changed his genes. As a result, the third stanza introduces a problem with coexisting the speaking voice desire and the beloved genre .You can easily understand that the messages in the first two stanzas are included in the third one. Indeed Nature is personified as an unstable woman (like women’s hearts in line 4), which is settled for the memory of the beloved as a woman (like women in line 8),  but also you can recognise the speaking voice as a man’s voice, who wants to consume love.

In the ending rhyming couplets the lyrical I solves the problem born before; the voice recognises he has to lose beloved use while he holds only love.

Considering the semantic level the most used field is a body and feelings-one: words such as face, master, mistress, passion, heart,fashion, eye, hue, soul and so on materialise the speaking voice’s love, bringing the listener far from the typical courteous love code.

In the first stanza is clear the oxymoron master-mistress (l.2), which introduces the parallelism between men and women. Very often you can read run-on-lines, which grows the reader’s reading speed; some examples are lines 1-2, 3-4, 11-12.