“O’er-Green My Bad” (Sonnet 112): Nature Writing in the Sonnets

Abstract

The Sonnets are fraught with references to nature and much has already been said of the tropes related to flowers and the seasonal cycle. Yet Shakespeare’s green world remains to be probed from a different perspective: far from being equated with wilderness, his poetic environment is fashioned by man. But if the sonnets abound with references to good husbandry, they also deploy an anti-pastoral approach to nature, depicted as imperfect, corrupt and malign. What is ‘green’ is not simply appealing and fresh, it is also unripe and immature, and it appears that only the “black lines” of the poet can appropriately render the young man’s fairness (Sonnet 63). Compellingly, throughout his sonnet sequence as a whole, Shakespeare goes well beyond the traditional opposition between the human and the non-human. Lovers groan like beasts; mountains take the shape of the absent beloved. These collapsing boundaries allow the poet to give unprecedented agency to a peculiarly hostile environment, in which “the canker in the fragrant rose” (Sonnet 95) dangerously threatens life’s beauty. So, in this ecocritical reading of the Sonnets, what I ultimately seek to show is the way the amorous ordeal of the poet is conveyed in terms of ecological crisis.