Sonnet 100

Constancy and the Muse

1 Where art thou Muse that thou forget'st so long,
2 To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?
3 Spend'st thou thy fury on some worthless song,
4 Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light?
5 Return forgetful Muse, and straight redeem,
6 In gentle numbers time so idly spent;
7 Sing to the ear that doth thy lays esteem
8 And gives thy pen both skill and argument.
9 Rise, resty Muse, my love's sweet face survey,
10 If Time have any wrinkle graven there;
11 If any, be a satire to decay,
12 And make time's spoils despised every where.
13 Give my love fame faster than Time wastes life,
14 So thou prevent'st his scythe and crooked knife.

Notes

TLN 1388classical allusion
“Where art thou Muse that thou forget'st so long”
The poet directly addresses his Muse -- the divine source of poetic inspiration. In classical tradition, the nine Muses were daughters of Zeus and Memory who presided over the arts; invoking them was the standard opening gesture of epic poetry. Shakespeare here adapts the device from solemn invocation to affectionate reproach, treating his Muse as a truant who has wasted her 'fury' -- her sacred frenzy -- on lesser subjects.
historical The sonnet form
TLN 1390archaic vocab
“Spend'st thou thy fury on some worthless song”
'Fury' here means inspired poetic frenzy, not anger -- the Latin furor poeticus, the divine madness breathed into a poet by the Muse. 'Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light' means that pouring her inspiration into trivial poems dims the Muse's own creative force while illuminating unworthy material: the Muse's power is finite and spent on the wrong thing.
TLN 1393archaic vocab
“gentle numbers time so idly spent”
'Numbers' means verses or metrical lines -- the counted syllables of a poem. 'Lays' (line 1394) is an archaic word for songs or lyric poems. 'Argument' (line 1395) means the subject or theme of a poem -- used in its rhetorical sense: the beloved is the Muse's worthy argument, the topic she ought to be addressing. 'Gentle' means both polished and worthy of the beloved's refined nature.
TLN 1401archaic vocab
“prevent'st his scythe and crooked knife”
'Prevent'st' means forestall or arrive before -- to 'prevent Time's scythe' is to get there first, to immortalize the beloved in verse before Time destroys him. 'His scythe and crooked knife' are the traditional tools of Time personified as the harvester of life: the scythe cuts down the living like grain, and the crooked knife (a pruning sickle) trims what regrows. The couplet frames the poem itself as a race against death.