Sonnet 83: I Never Saw That You Did Painting Need
Sonnet 83: I Never Saw That You Did Painting Need - form Summary
A Volta Defends Mute Praise
This is a Shakespearean sonnet that follows the English sonnet structure (three quatrains and a final couplet) and stages a rhetorical turn. The speaker claims he withheld flattering “painting” because the beloved needs no poetic embellishment. The poem’s structural turn culminates in the couplet, where silence is framed as protective: by not praising, the poet preserves the beloved’s living beauty against other writers who would both vivify and bury it in verse.
Read Complete AnalysesI never saw that you did painting need, And therefore to your fair no painting set; I found, or thought I found, you did exceed That barren tender of a poet’s debt; And therefore have I slept in your report, That you yourself being extant well might show How far a modern quill doth come too short, Speaking of worth, what worth in you doth grow. This silence for my sin you did impute, Which shall be most my glory, being dumb, For I impair not beauty, being mute, When others would give life and bring a tomb. There lives more life in one of your fair eyes, Than both your poets can in praise devise.
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