Sonnet 94 Admiration Quotes

As we talk about in our section on Sonnet 94's "Speaker," one of the weird things about the poem is that the speaker almost never out-and-out tells us what he thinks about the people he's gabbing about. Instead, we just have to look at what he says about those people, decide for ourselves if it's a good thing or a bad thing, and use that to figure out the speaker's emotional attitude. Now, we don't know about you, but we think there is simply something about line 1 that spells admiration. It might be the way it sounds: just try reading it aloud, and hearing those alliterations on "th" at the beginning of the line; the, well, powerful sound of the word "pow'r"; and the punchy, staccato rhythm of the final "and will do none." There's just something about it that makes these people seem impressive—regardless of whether it's praising or criticizing them, don't you think?

From this line we also get a sense of the speaker's amazement. By emphasizing that their ability to hurt others is literally the thing that the powerful people seem most likely to do ("the thing they most do show"), the speaker makes it seem all the more amazing that they don't do it. And he highlights the weirdness through the paradoxical sounding language at the beginning of the line, "That do not do," which gets emphasized by the repeated "do" towards the end of the line. All of these factors suggest that the speaker admires the powerful people, at least in some way—as long as they're not dictators or anything.

Here, once again, even though the speaker doesn't explicitly tell us that he admires the powerful people, the way he uses his words is enough to give us the hint. Line 3 is similar to line 2, in that it draws a striking contrast between how the powerful people appear on the outside and how they are on the inside. But even that isn't enough: line 4 has to go and expand on the idea of "as stone" by adding three new ideas. Given that the sonnet form only gives a poet 14 lines to work with, you can bet that anything he's willing to give up a full line for has got to be pretty important. We're definitely picking up on some admiration here.

Unlike the lines we've seen so far, the admiration here is pretty obvious. First of all, he sticks in the word "rightly," which shows that he approves of how the powerful people turn about. But, more than that, he's saying that they "inherit heaven's graces" for crying out loud. That's some pretty strong praise, if you ask us. But again, it's possible he's only talking about powerful people who also show restraint. It's not like any powerful person gets a one way ticket to heaven.

Pretty much the same goes for this line as goes for line 5. Even if line 6 is a bit less extreme than the one that comes before it, it's still pretty intense to say that these powerful people are actually in charge of making sure that "nature's riches" don't get wasted. That definitely counts as admiration in our books.

These lines are also pretty unambiguous in their admiration. Here, Shakespeare uses a class metaphor to suggest that the powerful people are at the top of the social hierarchy, while everybody else is merely a servant.