In Sonnet 33 a lover's betrayal is as ordinary as a cloudy morning
Sonnet 33 opens with some of Shakespeare's most gorgeous weather: sunrise gilding mountains, meadows and streams. Then low clouds smother the sun. The speaker's own sun, his beloved, shone on him for just one hour before being hidden. Yet he refuses to hold it against him, since even heaven's sun gets stained.
The first eight lines paint a morning with lavish, courtly language. The sun, pictured as a monarch with a sovereign eye, flatters the mountain tops, kisses green meadows with a golden face and gilds pale streams through what the poem calls heavenly alchemy. Every verb suggests a generous king bestowing favours on his subjects.
Then the same sun allows the basest clouds to ride across its celestial face in ugly rack, hiding itself from the abandoned world and slipping away westward in disgrace. The word permit matters. The sun is not simply overpowered; it lets itself be obscured, which prepares the ground for the human story that follows.
At line nine the comparison is revealed. Even so, the speaker says, his own sun shone on his brow one early morning in triumphant splendour, but, alas, was his for only an hour before the region cloud masked him. The exclamation of grief is compressed into a few syllables, and the lost intimacy is never explained. The couplet chooses forgiveness through analogy: "Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth; / Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth." If the real sun can be dimmed, earthly ones can hardly be blamed.
Who this faithless sun was has never been settled, and Shakespeare's life offers little help. His whereabouts in the late 1580s are so obscure that later writers filled the gap with stories. One had him holding the horses of London playgoers; John Aubrey claimed he had been a country schoolmaster; and some twentieth-century scholars linked him to a William Shakeshafte named in the will of Alexander Hoghton, a Catholic landowner in Lancashire, though Shakeshafte was a common local name.
Source: Sonnet 33: Full many a glorious morning have I seen
