Suggestions
Use up and down arrows to review and enter to select.Please wait while we process your payment
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
If you don't see it, please check your spam folder. Sometimes it can end up there.
Please wait while we process your payment
By signing up you agree to our terms and privacy policy.
Don’t have an account? Subscribe now
Create Your Account
Sign up for your FREE 7-day trial
Already have an account? Log in
Your Email
Choose Your Plan
Individual
Group Discount
Save over 50% with a SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan!
Purchasing SparkNotes PLUS for a group?
Get Annual Plans at a discount when you buy 2 or more!
Price
$24.99 $18.74 /subscription + tax
Subtotal $37.48 + tax
Save 25% on 2-49 accounts
Save 30% on 50-99 accounts
Want 100 or more? Contact us for a customized plan.
Your Plan
Payment Details
Payment Summary
SparkNotes Plus
You'll be billed after your free trial ends.
7-Day Free Trial
Not Applicable
Renews October 9, 2023 October 2, 2023
Discounts (applied to next billing)
DUE NOW
US $0.00
SNPLUSROCKS20 | 20% Discount
This is not a valid promo code.
Discount Code (one code per order)
SparkNotes PLUS Annual Plan - Group Discount
Qty: 00
SparkNotes Plus subscription is $4.99/month or $24.99/year as selected above. The free trial period is the first 7 days of your subscription. TO CANCEL YOUR SUBSCRIPTION AND AVOID BEING CHARGED, YOU MUST CANCEL BEFORE THE END OF THE FREE TRIAL PERIOD. You may cancel your subscription on your Subscription and Billing page or contact Customer Support at custserv@bn.com. Your subscription will continue automatically once the free trial period is over. Free trial is available to new customers only.
Choose Your Plan
For the next 7 days, you'll have access to awesome PLUS stuff like AP English test prep, No Fear Shakespeare translations and audio, a note-taking tool, personalized dashboard, & much more!
You’ve successfully purchased a group discount. Your group members can use the joining link below to redeem their group membership. You'll also receive an email with the link.
Members will be prompted to log in or create an account to redeem their group membership.
Thanks for creating a SparkNotes account! Continue to start your free trial.
Please wait while we process your payment
Your PLUS subscription has expired
Please wait while we process your payment
Please wait while we process your payment
They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,
They rightly do inherit heaven’s graces
And husband nature’s riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer’s flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.
The first eight lines of this very difficult sonnet are devoted to the description of a certain kind of impressive, restrained person: “They that have pow’r to hurt” and do not use that power. These people seem not to do the thing they are most apparently able to do—they “do not do the thing they most do show”—and while they may move others, they remain themselves “as stone,” cold and slow to feel temptation. People such as this, the speaker says, inherit “heaven’s graces” and protect the riches of nature from expenditure. They are “the lords and owners of their faces,” completely in control of themselves, and others can only hope to steward a part of their “excellence.”
The next four lines undergo a remarkable shift, as the speaker turns from his description of those that “have pow’r to hurt and will do none” to a look at a flower in the summer. He says that the summer may treasure its flower (it is “to the summer sweet”) even if the flower itself does not feel terribly cognizant of its own importance (“to itself it only live and die”). But if the flower becomes sick—if it meets with a “base infection”—then it becomes more repulsive and less dignified than the “basest weed.” In the couplet, the speaker observes that it is behavior that determines the worth of a person or a thing: sweet things which behave badly turn sour, just as a flower that festers smells worse than a weed.
Read a translation of Sonnet 94
Sonnet
In Elizabethan England, it was very difficult for poets to make money simply by writing and selling their poetry. Many writers sought out aristocratic patrons, who supported them in return for the prestige of having a poet at their beck and call. Very often, poets courted their patrons, and ensured their places in their patrons’ good graces, by writing fawning verses in praise of the patron’s beauty, valor, power, and so on. The first
Read more about Shakespeare and a historical background of the sonnets.
An aristocrat was in no way obligated to treat the poet he supported as an equal; in fact, his superiority was in some ways the entire point of the exchange. The speaker, genuinely in love with the young man, is forced to relate to him not as an equal, but as an inferior. To him, the young man can often seem cold, distant, and grave, and the speaker, who loves him, is forced to try to explain this behavior in a way that will enable him to continue loving the young man. The solution is to praise his very distance and reserve: he is not only “unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,” he is “the lord and owner” of his face, and the inheritor of “heaven’s graces.” But praise of this chilly detachment seems inadequate (after all, the speaker’s tone seems to imply that he has been hurt by the young man’s behavior, so how can he say that the young man “will do none”?), so he makes his argument even more oblique by turning to the metaphor of the flower.
The summer’s flower, like the cold aristocrats of the first two quatrains, is beautiful only in and for itself; it has no interest in the fact that the summer loves it, because “to itself it only live and die.” Like the summer, the speaker hopes he can love the young man simply for his beauty without expecting anything in return. But he is forced to acknowledge that the young man is not so neutral and inactive: he has committed hurtful deeds, which act like a “base infection” in the flower to render it lower than a weed. The couplet brilliantly brings the two parts of the poem into full relation: the first line refers specifically to the first part of the poem (“Sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds”—as opposed to the perfect creatures who “do not do” hurtful deeds), and the second half refers to the metaphor of the flower (“Lilies that fester”—a sour deed—”smell far worse than weeds”).
Read more about flowers and trees as symbols.
The major themes of this poem are continued in the far simpler Sonnet
Please wait while we process your payment