In the numerous sonnets in which Shakespeare boasted that his verse was so certain of immortality that it was capable of immortalising the person to whom it was addressed, he gave voice to no conviction that was peculiar to his mental constitution, to no involuntary exaltation of spirit, or spontaneous
ebullition of feeling. He was merely proving that he could at will, and with superior effect, handle a theme that Ronsard and Desportes, emulating Pindar, Horace, Ovid, and other classical poets, had lately made a commonplace of the poetry of Europe. [114a] Sir Philip Sidney, in his ‘Apologie for Poetrie’ (1595) wrote that it was the common habit of poets to tell you that they will make you immortal by their verses. [114b] ‘Men of great calling,’ Nash wrote in his ‘Pierce Pennilesse,’ 1593, ‘take it of merit to have their names eternised by poets.’ [114c] In the hands of Elizabethan sonnetteers the ‘eternising’ faculty of their
verse became a staple and indeed an inevitable topic. Spenser wrote in his ‘Amoretti’ (1595, Sonnet lxxv.)
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.
Drayton and Daniel developed the conceit with unblushing iteration. Drayton, who spoke of his efforts as ‘my immortal song’ (Idea, vi. 14) and ‘my world-out-wearing rhymes’ (xliv. 7), embodied the vaunt in such lines as:
While thus my pen strives to eternize thee (Idea xliv. 1).
Ensuing ages yet my rhymes shall cherish (ib. xliv. 11).
My name shall mount unto eternity (ib. xliv. 14).
All that I seek is to eternize thee (ib. xlvii. 54).
Daniel was no less explicit
This [sc. verse] may remain thy lasting monument (Delia, xxxvii. 9).
Thou mayst in after ages live esteemed,
Unburied in these lines (ib. xxxix. 9-10).
These [sc. my verses] are the arks, the trophies I erect
That fortify thy name against old age;
And these [sc. verses] thy sacred virtues must protect
Against the dark and time’s consuming rage (ib. l. 9-12).
Conceits in sonnets addressed to a woman.
Shakespeare, in his references to his ‘eternal lines’ (xviii. 12) and in the assurances that he gives the subject of his addresses that the sonnets are, in Daniel’s exact phrase, his ‘monument’ (lxxxi. 9, cvii. 13), was merely accommodating himself to the prevailing taste. Characteristically in Sonnet lv. he invested the topic with a splendour that was not approached by any other poet: [115]