Shakespeare’s Sonnet No. XX

The sonnet is compiled in the typically Shakespearean manner: three quatrains describe a situation and a final couplet draws the conclusion from the before presented problem. The poet stays on a very graphical level of description, yet makes slight hints at sexual practices and the contemporary life of homosexuals. Obviously, the poet is in a conflict between his love to the man he writes about and the fact that he can not have sex with him for social reasons.
At first, the poet describes the man saying that he has a face which was made by “nature’s own hand”. The personification of nature as the creator of life is an element which recursively comes up throughout the poem and is always used to stress the beauty and completeness of the object of the poem which only later turns out to be a man. Following, the person is said to be the “master mistress of my passion”, a very strong expression of love which creates a strong image of passionate lovers. For the first time also, the poet insinuates that he is writing about a man, when he says that he has a “gentle heart” like women, but which is not as false.
In the second quatrain, the poet describes the external features of the man. He has bright, shining eyes, as is vividly described in a hyperbole: his eyes are said to be “gilding the object” which they look at. The exaggeration gives the impression of the description being not objective. Furthermore, to extend the feeling of over-exaggeration, the poet says that his object of desire is the focal point of his bystanders and amazes women at his sight. To a modern reader it seems as though the person would be the central point of interest for any party. The external features of the man are: astonishing beauty, even for other men, and bright, shining eyes, with which he amazes women.
The final quatrain is a hammer of meaning. It implies that at the creation of the person, nature, again personified, made a mistake and added a penis to what was at first supposed to be a woman. In doing so, nature inhibited the poet of engaging in an open love affair with the should-have-been woman. In saying that he implies that homosexuals back in the seventeenth century were not free to practice their sexuality as they are today – of course that is nothing new but a primary historical source to verify this fact. The poet implies his sadness about this, by saying that the person being a man makes him devoid of any purpose. Saying that the fact, that the person has a penis, rids the poet of any meaning is an allusion to the sexual background underlying this poem in so far that it obviously means that they can not engage in sexual intercourse, showing again the strong feelings the poet has for the man.
The couplet sums up the rest of the poem, saying that because nature made him only usable for women’s sexual pleasure, the poet can not share his love physically but has to do so mentally and openly request that: “Mine be thy love”.
Seen as a whole, the tension in the poem is extended to the point of breaking from the first through the last quatrain. At first, only superficial features are described, only very mild allusions are made to a sexual conflict. The second quatrain changes the situation in so far that it depicts the beauty of the person in an exorbitance, which furthers the anticipation of an open statement of love. Finally, the anticipation is brought to a boiling point in the last quatrain when saying that the poet is in wasted love with the person, because he has a penis, basically saying that he loves him, which was prepared from the first line on. The “showdown” reaction of the last couplet comes from the fact that the reader is still so flabbergasted from the last four lines. One feels overrun by the conclusion, that, now that he can not physically love the man, he will at least demand that he is loved on a mental level by the person. It appears to be pragmatic yet desperate to conclude a discussion with so strong emphatic arguments in such a brief statement which is so devoid of hope for fulfillment.
Sonnet number twenty is so desperate in its expression of the vain love the poet has for the man that it is clear that the writer is in a conflict with his feelings. He obviously can not, for social reasons, engage in a sexual relationship with his friend, yet, does want to know he is still loved by him, since that is a surreptitious process and as such possible between to men in the strict Elizabethan society.