Sonnet 94 Man and the Natural World Quotes

We know what you're probably thinking: what could be more unnatural than these weird, powerful people who can manipulate other people while keeping their own emotions under wraps? But nature has some pretty weird stuff in it—like magnets, for example. In these lines, Shakespeare compares the powerful people to a lodestone (an old word for magnet), which has exactly the same ability as the powerful people: it can attract other things to it (or repel them from it) while remaining motionless itself.

In these lines, we learn that the powerful people are actually in charge of preventing "nature's riches" from being wasted ("expense" means "wastage" in this context). So you could say that they are the original environmentalists, but that might be stretching it a bit. But, as the poem as a whole makes clear, this is probably just a metaphor; it's likely that the powerful people themselves are "nature's riches," which means they take care of nature by taking care of themselves, by preventing themselves from being corrupted. So these lines could be thought of as paving the way for the flower imagery in lines 9-12.

Here begins the most extended comparison of the powerful people to nature. Why do you think Shakespeare chose this particular image from nature—the isolated "summer's flow'r." What does the "summer" represent in this context? (This is assuming, of course, that it represents anything, and isn't just being itself—which it could be.)

One of the key points of the nature imagery in this poem seems to be that nature doesn't have a point: it's simply there, existing in and of itself. Could the idea be that the powerful people are like nature because they're good simply by existing? Is this really an appropriate way to think about people? Don't people have responsibilities to one another, as well as to themselves?

Doesn't it seem like the nature imagery breaks down in these lines? Do flowers really have "dignity"? (Personification alert!) Are weeds really "base"—except in the eyes of human gardeners? If Shakespeare began this quatrain by comparing humans to flowers, it looks like he's ending it by comparing flowers to humans. What effect does this turnaround have on the poem?

This final bit of nature imagery shows the same contradictions as Lines 11-12. On the one hand, it's clear that people are being compared to flowers: the "Lilies that fester" are like the powerful people, once they do bad things and hurt people. But this badness is all relative. Nature doesn't care about how lilies or weeds smell (though maybe some animals, who are part of nature, do); it's humans who find the smell of rotting lilies gross. Does this mean that Shakespeare doesn't take the nature imagery entirely seriously—and that the poem is really all about human perceptions after all?