Sonnet 30 (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

The praise of “Sonnet 30” has been tempered by the strong negative opinions of its final couplet. In Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Kenneth Muir declares the poem “one of the most highly wrought of all the sonnets,” noting the poem’s richly varied meter and extensive word play; however, he also acknowledges that the last two lines destroy the languid, dramatic movement of the first twelve. Quoting from Mark Van Doren’s Shakespeare, Muir agrees that the final couplet of “Sonnet 30” runs with “perfunctory and absurd rapidity to fabricate a concluding statement.”

Other discussions of “Sonnet 30” have centered upon its legal or financial metaphor. In their books on Shakespeare’s sonnets, both Stephen Booth and Gerald Hammond trace the metaphor’s path through the entirety of the poem; Hammond claims in The Reader and Shakespeare’s Young Man that “Sonnet 30” possesses “one of the most exhaustive metaphors in [Shakespeare’s sequence of] sonnets.”