Figures of Delight: How the Environment Relates to Our Emotions
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 98 provides an emotional & sensitive reminder of how nature helps us process the intensity of love & longing.
By Jesse Julian | March 2025
Arthur Frank, a professor emeritus from Canada who specializes in narrative medicine, recently presented at BC’s Lowell Humanities Series. In his talk titled “Polyphonic Suffering: Reading Shakespeare to Respond to Illness,” he examined human suffering as a multi-voiced space which Shakespeare navigates through his plays. Although the rise of ecopoetry in the late 20th-century feels quite far from Shakespeare’s 16th-century work, we can still utilize this critical approach to analyze a classic form of poetry: the English, or Shakespearean, sonnet. Specifically, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 98 expresses feelings of love and longing, yet these emotional states are further understood by the narrator’s perception of the environment.
The narrator begins by placing us in a gleaming natural environment, during a “proud-pied April” with a “spirit of youth in everything.” Yet, the reader is immediately made aware in the first line of an absence that haunts him, to which this poem is directed. His use of the second-person and the romantic connotations of a rhyming sonnet allow readers to infer that he speaks of a loved one.
Shakespeare reminds us of the interconnectedness of human emotion and the environment. We quickly recognize this stark contrast between the scene and the narrator’s emotions—the sweet flowers and birds fail to move him beyond his mournful mood. What he craves and desires are merely reflected in nature, described as “figures of delight.” The beauty of nature is parallel to the joy this loved one brings him.
The volta, or turn, of the sonnet reminds us that his feelings are those of winter—cold, isolated, and melancholic—in contrast with the vitality of summertime. The narrator’s distress signifies a strong disconnect from that which once brought him life, metaphorically conveyed through his affection for the environment.
Although sonnets are often mistaken as simple love poems, Shakespeare connects subjective feelings and environmental perception despite the constraints of the form. He shows us the ways that our emotional state deeply impacts our perception of the natural world. As we begin to enter springtime in the upcoming weeks, ecopoetry can remind us that our feelings are genuinely informed by the way nature cares for us, and what we do for it in return.