Sonnet 59: If There Be Nothing New, But That Which Is

Sonnet 59 is Shakespeare questioning whether his own praise of the youth is original — and arriving at a resolution that is more clever than it first appears.

Sonnet 59 (Full Poem)

If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguil’d,
Which labouring for invention bear amiss
The second burthen of a former child!

O, that record could with a backward look,
Even of five hundred courses of the sun,
Show me your image in some antique book,
Since mind at first in character was done!

That I might see what the old world could say
To this composed wonder of your frame;
Whether we are mended, or whether better they,
Or whether revolution be the same.

O sure I am the wits of former days
To subjects worse have given admiring praise.

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At a Glance

Here are the key facts about Sonnet 59 for quick reference.

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Why It Still Matters

Sonnet 59 is usually read as a general meditation on time and originality — does anything truly new exist, or does history simply repeat itself? That reading is accurate but incomplete. The poem is also specifically about Shakespeare’s own situation as a poet who has spent nearly sixty sonnets writing praise of the youth and who is now wondering whether that praise is original.

“How are our brains beguil’d, / Which labouring for invention bear amiss / The second burthen of a former child” — the phrase “labouring for invention” is the key. Invention in Renaissance poetic theory was one of the principal virtues of the poet: the discovery or finding of new matter. A poet who labours for invention but produces only what has been said before has been deceived — beguiled — into thinking he is creating when he is only repeating.

The imagined antique book — some record five hundred years old that might contain the youth’s image — is not simply a philosophical thought experiment. It is the speaker asking: has this been done before? Is the youth unprecedented, or has someone else with this beauty existed, and been praised, and been forgotten? If so, then the speaker’s own praise is not original. He has been carrying a former child, labouring under the illusion that he was bringing something new into the world.

The couplet’s answer — that the wits of former days gave admiring praise to subjects worse than this one — resolves the anxiety neatly. Even if the praise is not original, the subject is. The beloved is better than anyone the old poets praised. Therefore the praise, however repeated in form, is unprecedented in its object.

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Key Themes

Sonnet 59 develops two ideas that interact throughout the poem — the philosophical question of repetition, and the personal question of whether the speaker’s own creativity is original.

Nothing New Under the Sun. The poem opens with one of the oldest of philosophical positions: that history is cyclical, that everything which exists has existed before, that what seems new is only a variation on what has already been. The Preacher of Ecclesiastes states it plainly — “there is no new thing under the sun” — and the Renaissance inherited the idea from classical sources. Shakespeare takes it seriously rather than dismissing it. If it is true, then the brain is “beguil’d” in its effort at originality — deceived into thinking it is producing something new when it is only reproducing something old.

The Poet’s Specific Predicament. The philosophical question becomes personal through the phrase “labouring for invention.” This is the speaker reflecting on his own creative effort — the fifty-eight sonnets of praise already written, the attempt at finding something new to say about the youth’s beauty. If nothing is new, then all that labour has only reproduced what someone else said before. The imagined antique book is the speaker’s thought experiment about whether his own work is original or derivative.

The Youth as Unprecedented. The couplet’s resolution turns the philosophical question into a compliment. Even if history repeats, even if the old poets gave admiring praise, they gave it to subjects worse than this one. The youth is the exception to the cycle — the beauty that no antique book could have recorded, because no such beauty existed before. The argument is circular but emotionally satisfying: originality does not matter when the subject is genuinely beyond comparison.

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Key Literary Devices

The poem’s devices all serve the philosophical argument about repetition and the personal question about creative originality.

“The Second Burthen of a Former Child.” The metaphor is one of Shakespeare’s most compressed. A burthen is a burden — but also, in musical terms, a refrain, the repeated portion of a song. And a child is what a poet produces in giving birth to a poem. “The second burthen of a former child” therefore means both: carrying the weight of an already-existing poem, and repeating a refrain that has already been sung. The double meaning holds the philosopher’s concern (repetition in history) and the poet’s concern (repetition in creative work) in the same phrase.

The Imagined Antique Book. “O, that record could with a backward look, / Even of five hundred courses of the sun, / Show me your image in some antique book” — the imagined book is the poem’s central thought experiment. Five hundred years is chosen deliberately: far enough back to predate living memory, close enough that records might theoretically survive. The speaker wants evidence, not speculation. If the youth’s image appears in some ancient text, the philosophical point about repetition is proved. If it does not, the youth is unprecedented and the praise is original.

“Composed Wonder of Your Frame.” The phrase is carefully chosen. “Composed” means both assembled with skill and tranquil — the youth’s beauty is both artfully arranged and harmonious. “Wonder” signals that the beauty exceeds ordinary expectation. “Frame” means the body, but also a constructed structure — again holding both the natural and the artful. The phrase positions the youth as something between a natural occurrence and a work of art, which is the tension the sequence has been exploring since Sonnet 1.

The Triple Question. “Whether we are mended, or whether better they, / Or whether revolution be the same” — three possibilities arranged in sequence: improvement, decline, or endless recurrence. The third — “revolution be the same” — is the most philosophically significant, because it is the option that removes the question of progress entirely. If history revolves — cycles back — then neither improvement nor decline is the right frame; the same patterns simply return. Shakespeare does not resolve which of the three is true. He presents them as genuinely open questions, which is more honest than most philosophical poetry manages.

The Couplet’s Compliment. “O sure I am the wits of former days / To subjects worse have given admiring praise.” The certainty — “O sure I am” — arrives after twelve lines of genuine philosophical uncertainty, and it arrives without argument. The speaker does not prove that the old wits praised lesser subjects; he asserts it. The assertion is a compliment — the beloved is better than anyone the old poets found worthy — and the confidence is the compliment’s vehicle. After all the uncertainty of the three quatrains, the couplet’s certainty is itself the answer: whatever the old world said, it was not said about this.

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Stanza by Stanza

Lines 1–4. The poem opens with a conditional — “if there be nothing new” — that the speaker takes seriously rather than dismissing. The consequence of that conditional is that brains labouring for invention are beguiled: deceived into thinking they are creating when they are only repeating. “Bear amiss / The second burthen of a former child” — the metaphor of carrying a former child’s burden holds the weight of creative labour and the disappointment of discovering it was not original. The quatrain establishes both the philosophical question (is anything new?) and the personal one (has the speaker been deceived about his own creativity?).

Lines 5–8. The second quatrain turns from the general philosophical question to a specific thought experiment. The speaker imagines a record — historical writing — that could show him the youth’s image in a text five hundred years old. “Since mind at first in character was done” — since the beginning of writing, since human thought was first put into letters. The scope is vast: from the very beginning of written record to the present moment, the speaker wants to search for evidence of whether beauty like the youth’s has appeared before. The imagined antique book is the test case for the philosophical hypothesis.

Lines 9–12. The third quatrain specifies what the speaker would want to know from the antique book: what the old world would say to the youth’s beauty, and what that would reveal about progress, decline, or recurrence. The three possibilities — “whether we are mended, or whether better they, / Or whether revolution be the same” — are presented as genuinely open. “Revolution” here carries its astronomical sense: the turning of a cycle, the completion of a rotation that brings things back to where they started. If history revolves, then the philosophical question of originality becomes irrelevant — there is no improvement or decline, only return.

Lines 13–14. The couplet resolves the poem’s anxiety with a confident assertion that bypasses the philosophical questions rather than answering them. The old wits praised subjects worse than the youth — therefore the youth is unprecedented regardless of whether praise-patterns repeat. The argument is circular but emotionally exact: even if the form of the praise is not original, its object is. The beloved exceeds what the cycle of repetition has produced before. The couplet does not answer whether anything is new. It simply asserts that this is.

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Analysis

Sonnet 59 is the sequence’s most philosophically self-aware poem about creative originality, and its self-awareness is specific: the speaker is not musing about originality in the abstract but questioning whether his own fifty-eight poems of praise have been saying something new. The philosophical hypothesis — that nothing is new — is the hypothesis that would render the sequence derivative. The imagined antique book is the speaker’s attempt to test that hypothesis by looking for evidence that the youth has existed before.

The three quatrains are genuinely uncertain in a way that Shakespeare’s more confident sonnets are not. The “if” of the opening, the “O that” of the second quatrain, the triple “whether” of the third — the poem holds its questions open rather than resolving them. This is philosophically honest: the question of whether anything is truly original does not have a clean answer, and the poem does not pretend it does.

The couplet’s resolution is the poem’s cleverest move. Instead of answering the philosophical question, it sidesteps it. Even if praise repeats, this subject is better than any subject the old wits found praiseworthy. The originality of the beloved replaces the originality of the praise. The speaker does not need to have invented a new form of admiration; he only needs to have found a subject that exceeds what came before. And in the couplet he asserts — with the confidence that has been conspicuously absent from the preceding twelve lines — that he has.

The poem sits in the sequence at a moment when the relationship with the youth has been complicated by the submissions and waitings of Sonnets 57 and 58. Sonnet 59’s return to philosophical meditation, to the question of the youth’s beauty and how it stands in relation to time, is a kind of recalibration — stepping back from the personal anguish of those two poems into a wider, more abstracted consideration of what the youth means and whether he is truly unprecedented. The conclusion — that he is — restores the admiration that the immediately preceding poems had pushed into the background.

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Related Sonnets

Three sonnets speak directly to the concerns of Sonnet 59.

Sonnet 60: The immediate successor and the most direct continuation of the time-meditation. Where Sonnet 59 asks whether beauty repeats across history, Sonnet 60 describes time’s systematic destruction of beauty in the present — waves, the life cycle, the scythe. The two poems together form a meditation on time from two angles: historical recurrence in Sonnet 59, present destruction in Sonnet 60.

Sonnet 55: The sequence’s most confident assertion that the poem preserves what time destroys — that the beloved will outlive marble and the gilded monuments of princes. Sonnet 59’s philosophical uncertainty about originality stands in interesting contrast to Sonnet 55’s absolute confidence. Reading them together shows the range of the speaker’s relationship to his own creative powers.

Sonnet 106: The later meditation on the same historical-repetition theme — the speaker finding in old poetry “the blazon of sweet beauty’s best” and recognising the youth in descriptions written for other beloveds. Where Sonnet 59 imagines the antique book as a thought experiment, Sonnet 106 claims to have found it — and concludes that the old poets were prophets of the youth’s beauty without knowing it.

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