Sonnet 99


Sonnet 99 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man. The sonnet is generally grouped with the preceding two in the sequence, with which it shares a dominant trope and image set: the beloved is described in terms of, and judged superior to, nature and its beauties.

Paraphrase

I criticized the violet, telling it that it had stolen its sweet smell from my beloved's breath, and its purple color from my beloved's veins. I told the lily it had stolen the whiteness of your hands, and marjoram had stolen the beloved's hair; a third flower had stolen from both; in fact, all flowers had stolen something from the person of the beloved.

Structure

Sonnet 99 is one of only three irregular sonnets in Shakespeare's sequence. Whereas a typical English or Shakespearean sonnet has three quatrains, followed by a final rhyming couplet, with the rhyme scheme ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, this sonnet begins with a quintain yielding the rhyme scheme ABABA CDCD EFEF GG. Like the other sonnets it is composed in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions. The 8th line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:

 × / × / × / × / × / 
The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,

The meter demands several variant pronunciations: line 1's "violet" is pronounced with three syllables, line 6's "condemnèd" also with three, line 11's "robbery" with two. Line 14's "flowers" is pronounced as one syllable, and "stol'n" always appears as one syllable.
Line 13's "eate" equals modern past tense "ate".
As to its fifteen lines, sonnet structure has never been absolutely fixed, and Sidney Lee adduces many examples of fifteen line sonnets. An extra line is particularly common in linked sonnets, and this sonnet is linked to 98; Malone ended 98 with a colon to demonstrate the connection. However, other scholars have remarked on the clumsiness of the first line and suggested that the quarto text represents an unrevised draft that found its way into print.