Shakespeare's sonnets 15 16 and 17. The immortalizing power of poetry and procreation

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature grade: 17 University of Potsdam (Anglistik) course: Shakespeare's Sonnets language: English abstract: Shakespeare's Sonnets 15 16 and 17 belong to the group of procreation sonnets running from 1 to 17 in the collection of Shakespeare's sonnets. In this sonnet sequence the speaker urges the young man to marry and to beget children in order to preserve his beauty and achieve everlasting life. The power of the young man to perpetuate himself by biological generation is confronted to poetry as another method to reach immortality (Cheney 126/128).In sonnet 15 the speaker depicts the mortality of all living creatures and points out that the young man too will fall victim to the transitory nature of things. Nevertheless in the couplet he sells himself as a poet whose verse would give his young patron immortality. This idea is immediately dismissed in the following sonnet 16 where he urges the young man not to rely on his sonnets alone and recommends biological procreation as the superior mean to represent the young man's beauty adequately. In sonnet 17 the persona finally describes how procreation and poetry can work together to reach double immortality. Here again the speaker points out that his poetry is of far lesser worth to give immortality to the young man's beauty than his own creation of progeny would be.Dispraising his own works in favour of the begetting of children is very contrary to what one would expect from a poet. Furthermore it remains open to question how the speaker's understatement of his own art and his convincingly depiction of the omnipresence of mortality go together with his courageous promise to immortalize the young man in verse. It will therefore be interesting to find out which techniques the speaker applies to make the young man procreate and what this might reveal about the true nature of his interest to immortalize the you