Sonnet 84: Who Is it That Says Most, Which Can Say More

SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, Relived

With Sonnet 84, William Shakespeare continues and underpins his defence of himself against the charge, referenced explicitly in Sonnet 83, that he has failed to present his young lover with sufficiently effusive praise and instead remained silent about his unparalleled qualities: not only is it the case – as he told the young man there – that you do not need 'painting' in elaborate words since these words, no matter how they try, can never actually do you justice, but in fact the greatest compliment anyone can pay you, this sonnet now postulates, is that you are exactly as you are: what a poet really needs to do is bring out the essence in you, and if he succeeds in this, then and only then can he truly lay a claim to fame as a writer.

And more true to his word than perhaps his argument sets out to be, Shakespeare closes this sonnet with his strongest rebuke of the young man since Sonnet 69, but unlike there, he doesn't follow this with a hasty absolution, but with one more poem to drive home his point...