Sonnet 99
The forward violet thus did I chide:
nature
beauty
flowers
comparison
The forward violet thus did I chide:
Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that smells,
If not from my love's breath? The purple pride
Which on thy soft cheek for complexion dwells
In my love's veins thou hast too grossly dyed.
The lily I condemned for thy hand,
And buds of marjoram had stol'n thy hair:
The roses fearfully on thorns did stand,
One blushing shame, another white despair;
A third, nor red nor white, had stol'n of both
And to his robbery had annex'd thy breath;
But, for his theft, in pride of all his growth
A vengeful canker eat him up to death.
More flowers I noted, yet I none could see
But sweet or colour it had stol'n from thee.
What It Means
Shakespeare scolds the spring flowers for stealing their qualities from the young man: the violet took its color from his veins, the lily his hand, the rose his cheeks. One rose had everything — the young man's entire beauty, summarized. But it was eaten by a canker-worm. The flowers are plagiarists; even the one that was most like him is destroyed.
Context
Part of the Fair Youth sequence. Unusually, Sonnet 99 has 15 lines instead of 14 — an extra opening line that addresses the violet.
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