Sonnet Cxliii Comments

.shakespeares-sonnets.com/ this sonnet with its chicken chasing imagery might have its counterpart in the works of Ronsard, Du Bellay, Desportes, or their numerous imitators, and an assiduous search might reveal it. However Shakespeare was less slavishly dependent in his sonnets on what had gone before, and in so far as his work was derivative, he tended to draw and absorb materials from a wide variety of sources. Commentators have suggested that he would have recalled an episode from The Nun's Priest's Tale in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales:

Also the description of a fowl from the Faerie Queene by Spenser. As fearefull fowle, that long in secret cave, For dread of soaring hawk herself hath hid, Nor caring how her silly life to save, She her gay painted plumes disorderid etc. FQ.II.3.36.

Although this sonnet follows the previous one in requesting that the woman be kind to him and take pity on him, it differs considerably from its predecessors. It takes the form of a lengthy simile in which the beloved is compared to a flustered housewife, the poet's rival is a chicken in flight, and the poet himself is a tear-stained, blubbering child.

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