Nature and Beauty

Chris, I'm with you, this sonnet is a keeper. This post is in attempt to pull together some of the major themes we've all noted throughout these last few sonnets. Let's see how this goes!

Like Jacob, I was interested in your reading of the choked off words and meter, and how they almost contradict the conclusion that the essence of nature can be preserved. How we get to the preservation in this sonnet is of particular interest to me. I keep coming back to lines 9-14:

Then were not summer's distillation left

A liquid pris'ner pent in walls of glass,

Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.

But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,

Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

The reference to the "walls of glass" sent me back to Sonnet 3 where the speaker demands that the young man "look in thy glass" and admit that it is now time to extend this beauty to another. By the end of Sonnet 3, the young man is told that if he should "die single" this image -- his own beauty -- dies with him. In other words, the image is trapped here, in the glass, not unlike the "liquid pris'ner" of Sonnet 5. How surprising, then, to learn that the "liquid pris'ner pent in walls of glass" would be preserved and more or less untouched by winter or death. What's the difference between this trapped image and the liquid prisoner?

One possible answer brings me back to one of Jacob's earlier posts in which he posed a question about this nature figure that shows up so prominently in Sonnet 4 and clearly extends into Sonnet 5. I think we begin to see a more defined relationship forming between nature, beauty, and this young man. In Sonnet 4, we learn that "nature's bequest gives nothing but doth lend." Nothing -- including beauty and life itself -- is permanent with this nature, and when she calls for this man's death, any beauty he has not passed on to his own child will die with him. The simple force of this nature figure is reiterated in Sonnet 5 when beauty is completely forgotten, eternally erased, and it is the essence of nature that lives on through the winter and beyond flitting beauty.

A bit of a side note: The Folger edition of the sonnets has an interesting note next to line 10 I thought was worth passing on. They direct the reader to Philip Sidney's Arcadia: "Have you ever seen a pure rosewater kept in a crystal glass, how fine it looks, how sweet it smells, while that beautiful glass imprisons it?"

Jacob, love the Marilynn Robinson quote. I'm a huge fan of her work.

Wow, that Heaney poem has got some juicy language! So much fun to read out loud. I think the Heaney poem could be read as a critique of the platonism/gnosticism of the sonnet.

I loved your analysis of all the things that cut off in the poem. I'd just add that it's pretty rare to come across a poem where you transition from summer to winter. If fall was in there, we'd have this smooth passage of time, but instead we just go from trees with leaves to bare bark (that reminds me of dc).

"But flowers distil'd though they with winter meete/ Leefe but their show, their substance still lives sweet."

There's a major devaluation of materiality here. The petals and the stem are just for show; they're just a casing for essential flowerness. And through a distillation process, it's possible to free the wheat from the chafe and preserve the eternal form of flowerhood without the flower.

In Heaney's poem, the narrator reacts to abundance with this "hunger" that sets him out into the briar with pales. But "once off the bush the fruit fermented." In the sonnet, it was only when the essence of the flower was removed from the material plant that the value could be preserved for eternity, but in Heaney, value imbues the physical IN TIME, and the attempt at abstraction (distilling a blackberry bush into a consumer product) causes decomposition and devaluation.

Let me add my own passage into the conversation. It's my favorite passage from an essay by Marilynne Robinson:
"One might as well say that the earth invades the seed, seizes it as occasion to compose itself in some brief shape. Groundwater in a sleeve of tissue, flaunting improbable fragrances and iridescence as the things of this strange world are so inclined to do. So a thriving place is full of intention, a sufficiency awaiting expectation, teasing hope beyond itself."

Sonnet 5

Hi everyone!  The weather turned cooler here this week (down to the 80's!) and winter squash just arrived in the supermarket--delicata, sweet dumpling, sugar pie pumpkins--so it's a good week for a poem about canning.  Sonnet 5 strikes me as a keeper, one that I'll want to come back to over and over.

I actually typed it all out in the modernized version before deciding I just couldn't let the original go. The word that pushed me over the edge was "ore-snowed," which is just so much richer in contradiction and innate potential than the modernized "o'ersnowed."  I did switch the u's and v's because they bug me. (While we're on it, any theories as to why Audit got to be in italics last sonnet?)

Those howers that with gentle worke did frame,
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell
Will play the tirants to the very same,
And that unfaire which fairely doth excell:
For never resting time leads Summer on,
To hidious winter and confounds him there,
Sap checkt with frost and lustie leav's quite gon.
Beauty ore-snow'd and barenes every where,
Then were not summers distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glasse,
Beauties effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it nor noe remembrance what it was.
   But flowers distil'd though they with winter meete,
   Leefe but their show, their substance still lives sweet.

Wow, right?  There's so much here.  I'd like to focus on time.  We've seen agricultural imagery before, but never with so much attention to its seasonality.  Every part of this poem feels aware that it is about to be abruptly cut off.  The words themselves end suddenly (if only to a modern eye): checkt, gon.  The meter is problematic too.  Booth points out that 'howers' interferes with the meter right away.  "Sap checkt" and "A liquid prisoner pent" also feel metrically choked off.  These technical features echo the thematic focus on summer's sudden, perhaps surprising, ending (the phrase "time leads Summer on" has a double meaning here).  And yet, we are told, the essence of the stuff can be preserved.  (Shall we continue our conversation about beauty?)

I'm powerfully reminded of Harold Bloom's account of Macbeth's proleptic imagination--the man literally sees his future in the present.  Perhaps the only thing to do in such a situation is to lament, beating out the time as you do so:  "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," or Othello's repeated cry of "O!"  Just so, the last line before the (strange) closing couplet offers syntax collapsing into syllables beating out the time:  "Nor it nor noe remembrance what it was."

Let's compare this to another poem about time and fruit, Seamus Heaney's "Blackberry Picking."  In particular, I'm interested in the relationship between past, present, and future.  From Heaney's poem, I feel a sense of foreseen regret which interferes with the appreciation of the moment.  This feels like a childhood poem, but there is no open space of innocence; he always already knows it's going to end.  Do these two poems feel similar to you?

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

One final note:  The word 'frame' in the first line reminds me of a delightful little book I found one afternoon in UT's stacks:  Shakespeare and Typography.  In a printshop, the frame holds the type, connecting the term with Shakespeare's frequent comparison of text/printing to reality.

Where There's a Will

Amber,

I'll pick up the challenge on the last two lines: "Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,/ Which used lives th' executor to be." I read them as Shakespeare setting up a simple reversal turning around the "unused/used" pair. If you fail to marry and have children, thus passing on your beauty, it dies with you. On the other hand, if you use your beauty appropriately -- propagation -- it continues ("lives") on.

You raise the question about "executor," which I think is exactly right. For me it really captures the merchant-class values of the sonnet and persistent imagery of money-lending and miserliness. In this sense, beauty here is capital, not to be wasted on the self, but invested in the future, and capital which if properly invested will distribute itself to one's descendants after death. I find this quantification of beauty a little distasteful. Having had Keats' "Beauty is truth, truth beauty -- that is all/ Ye know on earth and all ye need to know" drummed into me at a relatively early age, the idea that beauty ain't truth but a sort of stock portfolio to be distributed to one's children so they can be more likely to pass on the "investment" seems more than a bit boorish.

And having had such a blasphemous thought -- is Shakespeare a boor? -- like someone made aware of a cheating spouse, I start to find evidence everywhere. Go back to Sonnet 2 for a second, where our poet scolds his target: "If thou couldst answer, 'This fair child of mine/ Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,'/ Proving his beauty by succession thine." And there it is again: Beauty passed on to one's children settles all outstanding accounts. No doubt fading beauty creates a kind of debt; do we owe the world a replenishing of its coffers of comeliness? In Sonnet 1, Shakespeare speaks of "the world's due."

Or take Twelfth Night, where Viola (as Cesario) tweaks Olivia, echoing much of what we've discussed in these first few sonnets:

VIOLA
Lady, you are the cruel'st she alive
If you will lead these graces to the grave,
And leave the world no copy.
OLIVIA
O, sir, I will not be so hard-hearted. I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labeled to my will: as, item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two gray eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth" (1.5.239-249).

Again: Beauty as estate, to be divvied up amongst the progeny. When reading Twelfth Night, I have, to this point, felt that Olivia's arrogance is being mocked. In the context of the play, her regression from society to mourn her dead brother is over the top, and Viola's voice of sensibility reminds us that a woman should know "well what love women to men may owe," something Olivia seems to have forgotten. Viola also reflects here the role we see the poet of the sonnets take.

But in light of Sonnet 4, my appreciation of Olivia's response has shifted. It strikes me that our young man has had no voice in the sonnets, except that provided by his accuser (see quote from Sonnet 2 above). Olivia gives him a voice, and in doing so she seems to turn from mockee to mocker. What would she say if Viola's words were "Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,/ Which used, lives th' executor to be"? Maybe this:

"Send for a lawyer to draw up my will
My beauty will act as executor,
Distributing my fair in codicil:
Item, two lips, indifferent red..."

Now that's putting the "cute" in executor. I wonder what to make of the money images we've found so far. Spending and owing. Accounts and executors. Largess and niggardliness. Audit and bequest. Can Shakespeare really see beauty as so much filthy lucre?

-rrf

Use

Hi Chris,

Thanks for starting this conversation on the word "use." I kind of glossed over it when I read the sonnet before my first post, but your comments helped me make more sense of it. I'm still working on getting a good reading on the last two lines. Someone help me think through this.

Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,

Which used lives th' executor to be.

I originally read these lines roughly as: "if you perform your duties correctly you will live." In other words, do what nature wants and expects, and you will live on through your children. The more and more I read the lines this way, the more I stumbled over "executor." Originally I thought it was simply saying the person who executes nature's will will live on. But when I looked the word up in the OED, there is another definition that works in a different way: a person named in a decedent's will to carry out the provisions of that will. In a poem that is deeply rooted in money and law (unthrifty, lend, niggard, usurer), I'm wondering if this definition could provide a different meaning for these last two lines and the ultimately the entire sonnet. Any thoughts?

Amber

Words, words, words

Hi!

Amber, like you I was taken with the repeated pronouns.  At first, I didn't read them as mocking, but you've made a strong case for that reading.  My initial impression was that the repeated you, you, you was an erotic attachment, building toward the climactic "Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive."  Perhaps these two readings can remain in tension, explaining the halfhearted rhetorical commitment I hear in the speaker.

I was interested in the word "use"; my mind immediately jumped to a few other Shakespearean lines.  First was the senator's warning to Othello in 1.3 to "Use Desdemona well."  Here, the sense is something like, "Treat her properly," or "Understand her nature so as to gain your full advantage from her" (This second sense has a dark side which echoes Brabantio's warning that women are deceptive.)  Othello is such an elemental play; other uses of "use" in the play seem connected to the importance of properly understanding nature (And, by extension, humanity as well.  Consider Gail Paster's talks this summer about the early modern understanding of the body as governed by humors).

I also remembered Hamlet's lament in 1.2: "How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world."  Here, uses can be taken to mean ways of ordering or investing resources for my profit, allowing Hamlet's speech to be about renunciation.  Or it could mean ways of applying myself, hobbies, occupations.  Both of these speak to new understandings of the self encoded in the mercantile, professionalized urban life that was appearing at the time.

The two uses of use I cited illustrate the divergent worldviews that lend Elizabethan literature some of its energy--to some extent the world is still enchanted, and can be controlled through contemplation, but to some extent the world is now seen as resources, ready to be put to use and invested.  Consider how the negation of use changes with context:  For the Aristotelian Christian trying to understand the natural world, the opposite of use is abuse: misunderstanding, sin.  For the economist, the opposite of used is unused: missed opportunities, waste.  Both terms appear in Sonnet 4. 

In a second post, I plan to connect the difference between these approaches to Jacob's interest in the glass darkly, and the relationship between the present and the transcendent.  Maybe even going back to our former interest in the nature of beauty.  But it's late, and I can't access the OED from home. 

Trafficking alone

One of the first things I noticed when I read this sonnet was the frequency of thou, thy, and thee. In these fourteen lines, thou is used five times, thy six, and thee twice. The effect? As Jacob suggests, we get the beginning notes of a power struggle, a manipulative mocking of sorts.

I kept returning to the lines “For having traffic with thy self alone / Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive.” There is the obvious appeal to these lines in the alliteration, but then there is the curious “thy self” construction that appears three times. The first two times it appears the words are side by side. The third time it is separated by the word “sweet,” and it screams, “I am mocking you, fool!” So is this “trafficking alone” self-deception because the narrator thinks that the man is actually not all he thinks he is? He mocks his beauty, his power, and his importance. Perhaps the narrator hopes this is enough to turn him around and get him to have children.

In the spirit of primary week, I want to offer another reading of “trafficking alone” brought to you by Stephen Booth. He suggests that “having traffic with thyself alone” is not just staying single and childless, but it also suggests masturbation. Maybe Christine O'Donnell should have cited this poem in her crusade against masturbation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzHcqcXo_NA

Lastly, since this poem (and the previous poems) seem to be about persuasion, manipulation, and self-love, I couldn't resist adding this link. It's painful and only partially related to what we've been talking about (okay, even "partially" is a stretch), but you've got to see this if you haven't: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMgyi57s-A4

Sonnet 4

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thy self thy beauty's legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free:
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thy self alone,
Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive:
Then how when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Which, used, lives th' executor to be.

This poem seems to flow nicely after the last one. Last week Amber pointed out how the young man was projected into a world of other people. The figure of the wife was present as an absence for the young man. She existed as concrete concepts for him, and yet the concepts had no incarnated body it could point to. He existed in relationship with the concept “wife,” prior to having a wife to accompany the concept.

I think this notion of being-in-relationship-to prior to encountering is at play in this poem as well. But now that in-relationship-to is with nature itself. The narrator doesn’t merely verbally label the young man’s debt however; rather he activates the debt through the use of inquisition. Last sonnet we had one question, spurred by the present-absence of the embodied wife. Now we have four questions. Who, or what, is present here as a an abstraction but not as a material substance? What absence serves as the justification for the inquisition?

Why is it that “trafficking alone” is considered self-deception? The narrator doesn’t seem to think that self-love is wrong. Rather, the narrator rejects the very existence of self-love. Anyone living in a world in which the self serves as the final arbiter of meaning is living in an imaginary universe. The questions could be read as attempts to introduce weakness into the young man’s internal logic, subtly coaxing him towards the narrator’s interpretation. Do you get the sense that there is a power struggle taking place between the narrator and young man?

And who is this nature we keep hearing about? Seems like a pretty important figure.

That should get things started. Summer’s finally starting to pass here. Days aren’t as warm as they were a week ago, and the nights are getting chilly. I went out and helped slaughter two pigs on Sunday and when I got to the farmers market on Tuesday, it was already delicious sausage. I can’t believe the farmer could get it to market that quickly all by himself. If you’re looking for something to do Friday night, I suggest finding a place to listen to the Kol Nidre. It is by far the most beautiful and moving liturgy the Jews have to offer. It isn’t hard to feel the inquisitor during the opening song.

Sorry for the delay. Things have been a bit crazy here, but they should be calming down now that I have some of my applications in. Don't have time for anything too substantial, but just wanted to get out a few thoughts.

I think it's pretty cool how shakespeare begins by employing the word "glass" rather literally as something you can see your own face in, and then further in the poem he pushes the word further, transforming it into that which allows his mother to turn back time and continue to see her beauty in the world. I do think the command is a call towards self love, because I think Shakespeare views self love is the raw material that can be transformed into love of the material world. There continues to be a real affirmation of the image. I think Shakespeare affirms the image, but calls on us to deepen our engagement with it. He kinda seems like he's saying, "look in a mirror. wow, you thought i meant that literally? yikes. look how much more profoundly your mom understands reflection. maybe you should work on that..." i think the riff on mirrors and windows is calling attention on the claustrophobia that occurs when the image is cut off from some transcendent meaning-giver.

it's taking a huge amount of restraint to not mention something about "through a glass darkly," but i'll bite my tongue for now. it's a beautiful, cool night here in downtown carrboro and i'm being called away from engaging with a screen.

Blessing and unblessing

Amber,

Thanks for the questions--I'm interested in the arrival of the ladies as well.  Up until now, our stakeholders in the subject's beauty have been the subject himself, the world, and the speaker.  Now we get the subject's wife and his mother.  I'm inclined to read 'some' the way you implied--distancing her from the action, making her less present as a character.  We haven't met wife or mother before, and it feels to me like they are being pulled in as secondary considerations.  There's another possibility though: if he chooses not to marry, he will 'unbless some mother.'  This implies that marriage is so much the expected option that to choose otherwise would be to take away something already effectively bestowed, even if the recipient has not yet been determined.  I'm intrigued by the unblessing--blessing is just as irreversible as some other relevant actions:  marriage and conception.

I want to come back to a question Randall asked last week about the nature of beauty.  In this sonnet, there are several lines distinguishing inner self from outer self:  The first line makes a distinction between 'thou' and 'the face thou viewest' just as the last line refers to both 'thine image' and 'thee.'  In Sonnet 2, the idea that beauty is an inner, essential characteristic is mocked:  "To say within thine owne deepe sunken eyes, / Were an all-eating shame and thriftlesse praise."  But this week, I get the feeling that there is some validity to inner beauty, the kind you still have when you grow old.  At least, this sonnet promises, you will have enough left such that you can recognize it in somebody else's youth.  Is beauty part of a platonic idea, something eternal and unchanging, or is it a quality of the moment, a construct of time and circumstance? 

Finally, I'm interested in the two parallel questions in the second stanza:  "For where is she so fair whose uneared womb / Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry? / Or who is he so fond will be the tomb / Of his self-love to stop posterity?"  I think the dominant meaning here is that all women wish to become pregnant, just as all men wish to leave their mark on the world.  But by framing these as questions, it seems like the poem is allowing for other ways of living at the very moment it asserts orthodoxy.  Does this undermine the ostensible rhetorical purpose of convincing the youth to marry?  Amber suggested something similar may be going on with the repeated exhortions to look in the mirror.

Hope you're doing well.  We got pretty well swamped by Tropical Storm Hermine this week.

-Chris

Sonnet 3

Apologies for the double spacing of Sonnet 3; I can't figure out how to change it. Here it is from Stephen Booth's Shakespeare's Sonnets.

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest,

Now is the time that face should form another,

Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,

Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.

For where is she so fair whose uneared womb

Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?

Or who is he so fond will be the tomb

Of his self-love to stop posterity?

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime;

So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,

Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.

But if thou live rememb’red not to be,

Die single and thine image dies with thee.

While this sonnet is a continuation of the speaker’s plea for this man to have a child, we are introduced to another important factor of the equation: the mother of the hypothetical child. “Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother / For where is she so fair whose uneared womb / Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?” I’m curious about the choice of the word “some.” How did you all read this word? And how does this word choice relate to the obvious agriculture imagery in the rest of the sentence: “uneared,” “tillage,” and “husbandry.” This line also seems to connect with the last line in a peculiar way. Is the reference to dying “single” referring to dying without marrying and therefore without any children, or does it refer to dying without children? If it is the latter, I’m wondering if this is a common use of the word for the times.

I’m also wrestling with the connection between this mother (the hypothetical mother to the hypothetical child) and the young man’s mother mentioned in lines 9-10. What is the function of each mother in this poem? How do these references work with or against each other?

Finally, how does this poem connect with the other two we’ve read? The tone seems to be different, almost as though this one is telling the young man to indulge in his self-love (“Look in thy glass….). Does this demand reinforce or contradict the messages in the earlier sonnets?

There's lots more to explore in this poem, but I think this will get us started! Looking forward to reading your thoughts.

all about the benjamins

JL: Could someone say a little more about what these Sonnets were exactly? Were they ever preformed in some way? Or were they just published? And if so, who was buying them? Did people read them to one another in their parlor or something?

There is lots of speculation about what exactly these sonnets were, and it’s no surprise that the conversation about publication and purpose inevitably turns to audience. “Why did Shakespeare write these sonnets?” turns to “to whom did he write them and why?” The most popular argument is that Shakespeare wrote these sonnets beginning in the summer of 1592 for the earl of Southampton, a man who refused to marry and who stood to lose a lot (money, family, honor, etc.) if he remained single. The argument goes that Southampton’s family turned to Shakespeare to slyly convince the earl to take a wife. (The story of the earl, his life growing up, his status in the community, and his refusal to marry is pretty interesting, but perhaps it’s a story for another day…) There is also evidence that Shakespeare wrote these sonnets when the playhouses had been closed down because of the plague, and he probably would have welcomed the job and the money at a time when other playwrights were struggling to find work.

So what about publication? How did the private sonnets get to print?

Here is what Greenblatt says about the publication of the sonnets: “The first edition of the entire sequence – a quarto volume bearing the title Shake-speares Sonnets – did not appear until 1609. Shakespeare’s name, appearing in very large type, clearly was expected to sell copies…At the very center of the original title page, beneath Shake-speare’s Sonnets, there are the words “Never before Imprinted.” This prominent announcement…implies that the public has long heard of the existence of these poems but has not until now been able to purchase them. For the writing of sonnets, as contemporary readers well understood, was not normally about getting them into print, where they would simply fall into the hands of anyone who had the money and the interest to buy the book. What mattered was getting the poems at the right moment into the right hands – most obviously, of course, the object of the poet’s passion, but also the intimate (and, in the case of Shakespeare and the aristocratic young man, quite distinct) social circles surrounding both the poet and his beloved.” Greenblatt also mentions that as the individual poems started to move from private audience to public circles, printers were eager to print them. In 1599, William Jaggard printed an unauthorized collection of the sonnets called The Passionate Pilgrim. By W. Shakespeare, hoping to make money off Shakespeare’s popularity. Needless to say, only five of the twenty poems in the edition were actually written by Shakespeare…

Okay, speaking of money, it was hard to ignore the monetary overtones in this sonnet. “Small worth,” “treasure,” “thriftless,” “sum my count.” It certainly gives the feeling that if the reader wasn’t convinced by the argument of having children in Sonnet 1, then they would certainly recognize the monetary value of it here in Sonnet 2. Again, if these sonnets were directed at the earl of Southampton, this could make sense since he was about to lose his fortune unless he married.

particular beauty

How much more praise deserv’d thy beauties use,
If thou couldst answere this faire child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse
Prooving his beautie by succession thine.

Like you guys, I was also intrigued by the way beauty featured here. At first, I thought the notion of claiming ownership over an offspring's beauty was ridiculous (This is my beauty. There are many like it, but this one is mine...), because does your beauty really belong to you in the first place? But then I realized you could read this as a celebration of particularity and difference. It challenges some platonic notion of beauty where there's one basic form of beauty that everything is an imperfect manifestation of. So if beauty isn't some absent form, it's a material virtue that has real being.

Also, I think there's a nice meditation on how we relate to time hidden in these lines. It starts with the violent image of time digging trenches into a forehead. Time can be experienced as a dangerous adversary, forcing us into submission. And the sonnet ends with another violent act of time, the chilling of blood, but now the violent act is reversed through the relation to the child. The lone subject experiences time as an enemy, but the community experiences time as the animating force responsible for there being something rather than nothing. And if we think about the whole thing as being addressed to an aging youth, from an elder, it becomes a sort of invitation into this communal life the elder has found some sort of redemption in.

Could someone say a little more about what these Sonnets were exactly? Were they ever preformed in some way? Or were they just published? And if so, who was buying them? Did people read them to one another in their parlor or something?

Finally, do we think this kind of celebration of procreation would ever emerge from our contemporary culture? What was different about Shakespeare's time that lead him to celebrate birth as he did? Here's a snippit from a great essay by David Bentley Hart:

But really, anywhere throughout the autumnal world of old and dying Christendom, there are instants (however fleeting) when one cannot help but feel (however imprecisely) that something vital has perished, a cultural confidence or a spiritual aspiration, and it is obviously something inseparable from the faith that shaped and animated European civilization for nearly two millennia. Hence the almost prophetic "fittingness" of that rail station: once religious imagination and yearning have departed from a culture, the lowest, grimmest, most tedious level of material existence becomes not just one of reality's unpleasant aspects, but in some sense the limit that marks out the "truth" of things.

This is an inexcusably impressionistic way of thinking, I know, but it seems to me at least to suggest a larger cause for the remarkable willful infertility of the native European peoples: not simply general affluence, high taxes, sybaritism, working women, or historical exhaustion, but a vast metaphysical boredom. This is not to say that the American birthrate overall is particularly robust, hovering as it is just at or below "replacement level," but it has not sunk to the European continental average of only 1.4 children per woman (so reports the UN), let alone to that of such extreme individual cases as Spain (1.07), Germany (1.3), or Italy (1.2). Britain, at almost 1.7 children per woman, is positively philoprogenitive by European standards. And the most important reason for the greater--though not spectacular--fecundity of the United States appears to be the relatively high rate of birth among its most religious families (the godless being also usually the most likely to be childless).

It is fairly obvious that there is some direct, indissoluble bond between faith and the will to a future, or between the desire for a future and the imagination of eternity. And I think this is why post-Christian Europe seems to lack not only the moral and imaginative resources for sustaining its civilization, but even any good reason for continuing to reproduce. There are of course those few idealists who harbor some kind of unnatural attachment to that misbegotten abomination, the European Union--that grand project for forging an identity for post-Christian civilization out of the meager provisions of heroic humanism or liberal utopianism or ethical sincerity--but, apart from a bureaucratic superstate, providently and tenderly totalitarian, one cannot say what there is to expect from that quarter: certainly nothing on the order of some great cultural renewal that might inspire a new zeal for having children...

Amber, would you mind taking the reigns next week? I'm a bit overwhelmed at the moment (starting a new job and trying to do some fellowship applications). I could lead if I had to, but I'm afraid I'd be a bit rushed. After September 10 I should have more time to think and be a better participant in the discussion.

Who is fortie winters?

Randall,

My first thought on reading this sonnet was how closely related it is to the first sonnet.  One element I felt in the first sonnet, which seems more pronounced here, is the relationship between the speaker and the subject of the poem.  The "proud livery, so gaz'd on now" makes me wonder whether it's the world doing the gazing, or whether it's the speaker.  It is difficult not to read the youth's forecast--'trenches,' 'deepe sunken eyes'-- as a mirror of the speaker's own condition.  Similarly, the speaker seems to know intimately the feeling of being young, and his praise of the youth's beauty reads as a sorry memory of the speaker's own lost youth.  It is possible, too, that the youth is more than just the site of the speaker's meditation, but is the object of his affection.

Either way, the two beings each take on a duality in this reading--the soon-to-be-old youth is not very different from the once-young but aging speaker.  This makes the closing couplet especially interesting; yes, the speaker is urging the youth to procreate, but the speaker also seems to be working out a bit of private regenesis in his self-identification with the youth.  At some point, we're going to have to start looking into love, lust, and admiration, and ask what kind of ontological unity is possible through these relations.

I'm interested in this sonnet's questions about beauty too, but I'll save those thoughts until I can pull them together a bit more.  In closing, here's a little treasure from the back of Booth's edition of the sonnets--excerpts from the 1567 translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis, preceded by a note on how Shakespeare borrows Ovid's basic structure of presenting like thoughts next to each other, with gradual changes.  Everything changes, but it stays the same.

What?  seest thou not how that the yeere as representing playne
The age of man, departes itself in quarters fowre?  first bayne
And tender in the spring it is, even like a sucking babe.
Then greene, and voyd of strength, and lush, and foggye in the blade,
And cheeres the husbandman with hope.  Then all things florish gay.
The earth with flowers of sundry hew then seemeth for too play,
And vertue small or none too herbes there dooth as yit belong.
The yeere from springtyde passing foorth too sommer, wexeth strong,
Becommeth lyke a lusty youth.  For in our lyfe through out
There is no tyme more plentifull, more lusty whote and stout.
Then followeth Harvest when the heate of youth growes sumwhat cold,
Rype, meeld, disposed meane betwixt and yoongman and an old,
And sumwhat sprent with grayish heire.  Then ugly winter last
Like age steales on with trembling steppes, all bald, or overcast
With shirle thinne heare whyght as snowe. (Ovid XV 221-235)

You'll recognize some body-land imagery here, but also particular idiomatic words--lusty, sum.  Possibly another sense of weeds, too--the young man is the weed, "greene, and voyd of strength, and lush."  Fun stuff.

-Chris

Sonnet 2

Welcome back! First, allow me to attempt to sidestep the various editors’ attempts to make our poem intelligible and present Sonnet 2 in a form as close to what Shakespeare may have written. In modern editions I have, for example, line four yields both “tottered” and “tatter’d” (yes, in the end they mean the same thing). But let’s go with the kooky spellings and archaic punctuation.

When fortie Winters shall besiege thy brow,
And digge deep trenches in thy beauties field,
Thy youthes proud livery, so gaz’d on now,
Wil be a totter'd weed, of smal worth held:
Then being askt, where all thy beautie lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty daies;
To say within thine owne deepe sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftlesse praise.
How much more praise deserv’d thy beauties use,
If thou couldst answere this faire child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse
Prooving his beautie by succession thine.
This were to be new made when thou art ould,
And see thy blood warme when thou feel'st it could.

This may seem banal, but I’m fascinated how Shakespeare manages to get double-duty out of so many of his images. In the first quatrain, he has set up a pair of oppositions – youth and age, livery and weeds. The latter word means “clothes” (Orsino tells Viola “let me see thee in thy woman’s weeds” in Twelfth Night), but it also reconnects us to “beauties field” (flowers?) from line 2, bridging the two images. Very cool.

What do you think of the other oppositions that emerge – shame and praise, thriftlessness and profit (“the treasure of thy lusty daies”), warmth and cold – and what can we say about Shakespeare’s use of the technique as an argumentative mode?

One more image to consider: beauty. Shakespeare uses the word four times. Is that all that’s being preserved here?

Is it too early to consider the poem’s place in the (admittedly artificial) sequence? Chris mentioned “economic transactions” in Sonnet 1. I might shift that category to “middle-class-ness” and ask if all the “treasure” and “thriftlesse” talk and the summing of accounts don’t betray the roots of a man raised in merchant weeds. Amber? What would Greenblatt say? And where does the concept of “succession” fit in?

Finally, this poem clearly iterates the theme of Sonnet 1 – the perpetuation of self through offspring. How does Sonnet 2 differ from Sonnet 1? And if you were the object of both poems’ admonishments, which would convince you more?

Randall