Shakespeare mocks rival poets who compare their lovers to the sun
In Sonnet 21, Shakespeare takes aim at poets who drag the sun, the moon, jewels and spring flowers into every love poem. His speaker promises something plainer: a beloved as lovely as any human child, though dimmer than the stars. The closing couplet lands a merchant's jab at flattery for sale.
The poem opens by setting its speaker apart from another writer, called only "that Muse", who is moved to verse by a painted beauty. That rival borrows heaven itself as decoration and pairs his darling with every fine thing going: sun and moon, the gems of earth and sea, the first flowers of April, all the rare treasures enclosed by the vast sphere of the sky. Shakespeare packs these comparisons into a single breathless sentence that runs across eight lines, so the pile-up of ornament becomes the joke.
At line nine the tone turns. The speaker asks to be allowed, being true in love, simply to write truly. His claim for his beloved is deliberately modest: lovely as anyone ever born to a mother, yet outshone by the stars, which he pictures as "those gold candles fix'd in heaven's air". The downgrade is itself a compliment, since it implies a real person who needs no cosmic inflation.
The couplet sharpens the point with commerce. Let those who enjoy hearsay say more, the speaker shrugs, and then: "I will not praise that purpose not to sell." Overblown praise, in this view, is the patter of a trader hawking goods, and honest love has nothing to advertise.
The sonnet is one of 154 Shakespeare wrote, alongside some 39 plays and three long narrative poems. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon around April 1564, he built his career in London as actor, writer and sharer in the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and produced most of his known work between 1589 and 1613 before retiring to Stratford, where he died in 1616. So little survives about his private life that the identities behind poems like this one invite endless speculation.
Source: Sonnet 21: So is it not with me as with that Muse
