Sonnet 26 by Shakespeare

Shakespeare's Sonnet 26 is generally regarded as the end-point or culmination of the group of five preceding sonnets. It encapsulates several themes not only of Sonnets 20-25, but also of the first twenty-five poems together: the function of writing poems, the effect of class differences, and love.

Paraphrase
Beloved, whose own worth has connected me to you in feudal bonds, I send you these writings. I send them as a testament to my duty, not to show off my wit. Indeed, my duty is so great that my poor skill may not represent it adequately. Still, I hope that you will aid it with your own imagination, and give my naked rhymes some standing in the world through your approval. Not until the star under which I was born favors me, allowing me to write more beautifully about my love--not until then will I dare to boast of my love for you, but will rather stay away from places where you might be able to judge my love's value.

Source and analysis
Analysis of this sonnet was at one point focused on its provenance. Edward Capell was the first to note the similarity of content between the first quatrain and the dedication to Southampton in The Rape of Lucrece. Some scholars have speculated that the poem was written to accompany some other of Shakespeare's writings, perhaps the first group of sonnets. The hypothesis remains intriguing but unproven. Edward Massey and Sidney Lee, among others, accept the connection between sonnet and dedication; among the skeptics are Thomas Tyler, Nicolaus Delius, and Hermann Isaac. More specific arguments that the poem's similarities to the Venus dedications indicate that the poem was written to Southampton have not gained wide acceptance. Modern analysts are more likely to remain agnostic on the question of the occasion of the poem, if any; all agree, however, that the sonnet at least dramatizes the type of emotions an older but lower-class poet might express toward a potential noble patron.

Assessments of the sonnets placement within the sequence vary. In conjunction with the biographical hypothesis, some scholars (among them Capell and Edward Dowden) have seen it as an envoy or introduction to a certain set of poems sent to an aristocrat who had commissioned them. On thematic grounds, this group is usually defined as 20-25, but is sometimes extended to all of the first 25 sonnets. Others, among them George Wyndham and Henry Charles Beeching, make it the introduction of a new set, running until Sonnet 32.

Capell and Malone's emendation of the quarto's "their" (line 12) to "thy" is almost universally accepted now.

The poem, like many others in the sequence, is built on a conceit rooted in social class. In this context, the master-servant trope commonplace in Petrarchan love poetry is literalized, by the poem's address to an imagined noble. Helen Vendler argues that the speaker's identification of himself as a slave or vassal invites skepticism rather than identification; however, others have stressed the appropriateness of the metaphor in the context of the speaker's frustrated desire for equality with the beloved.

As Stephen Booth notes, the poem works on a series of "shows": the word appears in four separate lines of the sonnet. Booth perceives a vague sexual pun in the second half of the poem, but G. B. Evans and others describe this reading as "strained."