Hi folks,
Sorry this is coming two days late. One day is my fault, but I blame the other day on Faulkner's Sanctuary. I finished it on Tuesday and found life so bleak that I could do nothing for the rest of the evening.
Anyway, we have some new imagery, and some fun alliteration, this week:
Is it for fear to wet a widow's eye
That thou consum'st thyself in single life?
Ah, if thou issueless shalt hap to die,
The world will wail thee like a makeless wife;
The world will be thy widow and still weep,
That thou no form of thee hast left behind,
When every private widow well may keep,
By children's eyes, her husband's shape in mind.
Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend
Shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it;
But beauty's waste hath in the world an end,
And kept unused, the user so destroys it.
No love toward others in that bosom sits
That on himself such murd'rous shame commits.
I needed some help from glosses to make sense of this poem, and I'm still not sure I follow the logic of world-as-wife. If you die without a child, the world, like a wife, will mourn your passing. In fact, if you die unmarried, it will be worse than that--a "private wife" at least has her children to ease the pain. The world will have lost its spouse, and cheated of its comfort in children too.
I think the sonnet gets more interesting in the third quatrain. What's the logic at work here? A prodigal spender, who is married to the world, really doesn't lose anything, because he is just transferring wealth from himself to the world. Another kind of waster--the beautiful who won't reproduce--deprives everyone. The kind of waste that's preferred is heavy engagement with the world. This idea of being married to the world strikes me as particularly modern and urban, even anticipating Baudelaire's flaneur--the dandy who has the leisure to stroll and engage with the city. What's strange is that this line of argument does not favor marriage. In order to marry, the youth would have to give up one wife (the world) for another. The relationship with the world, which this poem seems to value, is incompatible with married life. Thoughts?
Finally, I'm interested in the moment of emotional intensity at the very end--the man unwilling to marry is called "murd'rous." It seems to me Shakespeare is quite interested in murder, and in suicide in particular. In my limited reading, I am drawn to Hamlet and to Macbeth. What can be done with these connections?
-Chris
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Saturday, October 23, 2010
Play on
Was anyone else reminded of Orsino's opening lines of Twelfth Night when they read this sonnet?
If music be the food of love, play on.
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
That strain again! It had a dying fall.
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor. Enough; no more.
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, naught enter there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price
Even in a minute. So full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.
I'd like to pick up on something Chris mentioned about the perception of music and see how it works in both Orsino's lines and in the sonnet. The sonnet seems to suggest that music IS the food of love, but we just hear it all wrong when we listen for the individual parts and ignore the harmony of many. In fact, the sonnet points out that we're really bad at hearing music since we find pleasure in the sadness it brings. Once we are trained to hear the "true concord of well-tuned sounds" and welcome the harmony of "many, seeming one" will the music truly live up to its full potential. The sonnet pushes the subject toward love.
Orsino would seem to be on board with all of this up until about line 7 of his speech when he declares "Enough; no more." What's changed? Why the sudden demand to stop the music? Well, because he realizes that it sounded different this time, not as sweet as before. It's after hearing the strain for the second time that Orsino declares that the spirit of love has "fallen into abatement and low price." So love is cheap? What exactly is this comparison that he (and the sonnet) seem to be drawing between love and music? Is music an easy way to reach love, as the sonnet seems to suggest? Or, as Orsino suggests, is it "high fantastical"?
Friday, October 22, 2010
Listening to music
Jacob,
Thanks for your interesting post. A couple of questions: Do you think of Christian time as teleological? If so, does this challenge the analogy to music? I don't tend to think of music as having a teleology, though I haven't thought much about it. Does the unity of a musical composition consist in its anticipation and living toward its conclusion? (Does anyone have more background here than I? I read some of Martin Esslin's dramatic theory this summer as I thought about how the perception of a performance was different for Elizabethans than for us today; I'd love to know who writes in the same vein for music.) I think Shakespeare's quite interested in time, and I'd love to continue this discussion about time across sonnets like our conversation about beauty.
Secondly, I'm interested in the relationship between music and listener, both in your thought and in your reading of the sonnet. The sonnet is interested in not just the music, but also the perception of music. The poem begins by pointing out how the subject is listening ("Why hear'st thou music sadly?"), suggesting that resonance between music and listener is possible because the listener's essence is "Music to hear." (Or, if the listener is not essentially composed of music, at least the speaker's perception of the listener is fundamentally musical. Here again is the question about beauty.) The poem progresses, suggesting a different mode of listening: "Mark how one string..." The poet is correcting the subject, telling him how to listen. I agree that this can be read as an analogy for correcting the mode of worship: Recognize that your essence is God too, that you can't stand alone, and perceive everything within this relation.
You write that today, most people don't hear an external order singing to them, telling them how to perceive it.* I'm still working my way through Taylor's A Secular Age, and find his description of the "enchanted world" relevant here. Even devout believers today have "buffered selves," set off from the creation surrounding them. We today probably think of music as something that cannot exist without an audience to perceive it. Music happens when sounds are processed by human being with ears. We're fascinated by art grounded in this paradigm: Musicians such as John Cage, interested in randomness and the human capacity, even tendency or need, to perceive music in our experience. Or computer-generated music, beautiful to listeners (even distinctly recognizable as Beethoven or Mozart), even though it was generated algorithmically. This is characteristically modern. I would guess that to most Elizabethans, and certainly to medieval Christians, music would seem as vital and alive, as grounded in its own self-sufficient essence, as human beings. For them, music would not have been something that required interpretation to come into being, just as the world around them was alive, aware, and potent, utterly undependent on human perception to sustain its reality. I'm not sure what Shakespeare would have made of computers that write sonatas.
I thought it was interesting that this sonnet praises the "speechless song" of music, suggesting a reality deeper than words, and perhaps undercutting the poet's own potential for meaning-making. Maybe words can only point the way.
* I'm interested in how frequently literature explicitly teaches you how to read it. Take Dante's Inferno: the poet is a stand-in for the reader, even explicitly challenging and cautioning the reader to understand the text correctly. Virgil is not just a teacher to the poet, but to the reader as well. If literature is a mirror of reality, this feature suggests that the world too can teach us how to read it, or, in the case of this sonnet, how to listen. When I taught Inferno last year, my students found this relationship to the text pleasant, recognizable, and natural.
Thanks for your interesting post. A couple of questions: Do you think of Christian time as teleological? If so, does this challenge the analogy to music? I don't tend to think of music as having a teleology, though I haven't thought much about it. Does the unity of a musical composition consist in its anticipation and living toward its conclusion? (Does anyone have more background here than I? I read some of Martin Esslin's dramatic theory this summer as I thought about how the perception of a performance was different for Elizabethans than for us today; I'd love to know who writes in the same vein for music.) I think Shakespeare's quite interested in time, and I'd love to continue this discussion about time across sonnets like our conversation about beauty.
Secondly, I'm interested in the relationship between music and listener, both in your thought and in your reading of the sonnet. The sonnet is interested in not just the music, but also the perception of music. The poem begins by pointing out how the subject is listening ("Why hear'st thou music sadly?"), suggesting that resonance between music and listener is possible because the listener's essence is "Music to hear." (Or, if the listener is not essentially composed of music, at least the speaker's perception of the listener is fundamentally musical. Here again is the question about beauty.) The poem progresses, suggesting a different mode of listening: "Mark how one string..." The poet is correcting the subject, telling him how to listen. I agree that this can be read as an analogy for correcting the mode of worship: Recognize that your essence is God too, that you can't stand alone, and perceive everything within this relation.
You write that today, most people don't hear an external order singing to them, telling them how to perceive it.* I'm still working my way through Taylor's A Secular Age, and find his description of the "enchanted world" relevant here. Even devout believers today have "buffered selves," set off from the creation surrounding them. We today probably think of music as something that cannot exist without an audience to perceive it. Music happens when sounds are processed by human being with ears. We're fascinated by art grounded in this paradigm: Musicians such as John Cage, interested in randomness and the human capacity, even tendency or need, to perceive music in our experience. Or computer-generated music, beautiful to listeners (even distinctly recognizable as Beethoven or Mozart), even though it was generated algorithmically. This is characteristically modern. I would guess that to most Elizabethans, and certainly to medieval Christians, music would seem as vital and alive, as grounded in its own self-sufficient essence, as human beings. For them, music would not have been something that required interpretation to come into being, just as the world around them was alive, aware, and potent, utterly undependent on human perception to sustain its reality. I'm not sure what Shakespeare would have made of computers that write sonatas.
I thought it was interesting that this sonnet praises the "speechless song" of music, suggesting a reality deeper than words, and perhaps undercutting the poet's own potential for meaning-making. Maybe words can only point the way.
* I'm interested in how frequently literature explicitly teaches you how to read it. Take Dante's Inferno: the poet is a stand-in for the reader, even explicitly challenging and cautioning the reader to understand the text correctly. Virgil is not just a teacher to the poet, but to the reader as well. If literature is a mirror of reality, this feature suggests that the world too can teach us how to read it, or, in the case of this sonnet, how to listen. When I taught Inferno last year, my students found this relationship to the text pleasant, recognizable, and natural.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Okay, so now we have had our religious poem, and moved on to our musical poem right? Wrong! Actually, I'm sure there is much a musically knowledgeable person could say about this poem, but I am not such a person, so I'll declare myself a one-trick pony and bring out some religious themes.
Before we read the Sonnets, let me just cite a short (alright, maybe a little bit longer than "short") passage from one of my favorite essays:
"When Christians speak of the eternally performing God, a God who not only creates but redeems, they are not referring to some univocal Being but to Rather, Son, and Spirit. Indeed, because the Christian God is Trinity and not Being, this makes all the difference to how the character of human actions are understood as participatory in, and thus deriving of, God's action. This is especially important if Jesus Christ is viewed as God's true and most defining act. Because Christ is regarded by his followers as God's most memorable and excellent performance (complete, holy, and finally efficacious because inclusive of all differences), the implication is that Christians lives, too, can become "holy performances." However, if human acts neither persist alongside or stand over against God's pure act nor are swallowed up or absorbed into God's complete performance, how can we register the difference they make? More specifically, how is the manifold diversity of human actions "accommodated" or preserved in God's pure, undivided act? No satisfactory response to these questions can be provided without reflecting further on Christian understandings of Trinity and Creation. For unless these matters are addressed, the ramifications for human performance under God will be distorted if not missed altogether...
How exactly does the preservation of difference manifest itself in practical, concrete terms within the life of the church, part of whose present reality includes the spatio-temporal world of God's good creation? The only answer that is forthcoming, it appears, is an agnostic one. Although the church cannot claim to know in advance the full details of the story, it nonetheless has some inkling of its general shape and eventual outcome. Perhaps a knowing which has the form of an "unknowing" is all that Christians can rightly expect if their lives are truly lived in hope. And though Christians live in expectation of the eschaton, the "fullness of time" when all things will be made one in God, that hope does not pretend to lift the church out of time. Explicating the character of Christian hope, therefore, means that considerably more can and must be said in regarding the "timing" - and indeed the time it takes- to abide in, to keep the faith. Performance analogies are especially apt in this respect.
Following Saint Augustine's lead, Milbank discovers in music an appropriate analogy for the life of faith, arging that while the church is "open to difference- to a series of infinitely new additions, insights, progressions towards God, it also strives to make of all these differential additions a harmony, 'in the body of christ.'" Indeed, insofar as music is "a consistently beautiful, continuously differential and open series," it serves as an appropriate model of the peaceable accommodations of interpretive difference within the church. Just as every musical note exists in a position fully defined by the unfoldings of the entire sequence, so too every interpretive difference emerges in relation to the overall historical development of the church's life and self-understanding. Music's endlessly peaceable progression mirrors the church's infinitely expansive interpretive practices. As the undivided musical sequence undergoes continuous alteration and revision in its accomodation of each additional note, so too the church displays an unending capacity to expand in a noncoervice, nonviolent way. In one sense, of course, the whole musical sequence is nothing other than the differentia of its parts. Although the church may confidently claim this works as its own, it must nonetheless not lose sight of the fact that "it is God himself who is differentiation, ensuring that this process is 'music,' not the ceaseless rupture and self-destruction of a differentiation poised 'univocally' between an 'indifferent' transcendence and an anarchic finitude.""
Alright, now on to the sonnet:
Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy:
Why lov'st thou that which thou receiv'st not gladly,
Or else receiv'st with pleasure thine annoy?
If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.
Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;
Resembling sire and child and happy mother,
Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing:
Whose speechless song being many, seeming one,
Sings this to thee: 'Thou single wilt prove none.'
In this poem, an external order seems to be acting on the man, attempting to bring him in line with some sort of cosmic harmony. The proper order SINGS to him. This is all sweet and good and nice and sugary and all, but it also seems like a load of shit. This isn't the order most people hear anyway. What calls do people hear most? TV's, demanding to be watched. Booze, demanding to be drunk. Pot, demanding to be smoked. Email, demanding to be checked. Does the proper order ever call to you?
"Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;"
What an amazing line. Strikes each in each. Next time I see a good group of friends, I'm going to think "Man, they really strike each in each." Each individual is partially defined by the part of others he brings out. A good husband/wife/child is like a good point guard, he/she makes everyone on the court play their own parts better.
When have you felt like you've been part of a harmony? When have harmonies sounded the saddest to you? Don't answer, just think about it. This poem kind of reminds me of the loneliness I sometimes feel when traveling.
And finally, in defense of solos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72e9Vc8iXg8&feature=related
Before we read the Sonnets, let me just cite a short (alright, maybe a little bit longer than "short") passage from one of my favorite essays:
"When Christians speak of the eternally performing God, a God who not only creates but redeems, they are not referring to some univocal Being but to Rather, Son, and Spirit. Indeed, because the Christian God is Trinity and not Being, this makes all the difference to how the character of human actions are understood as participatory in, and thus deriving of, God's action. This is especially important if Jesus Christ is viewed as God's true and most defining act. Because Christ is regarded by his followers as God's most memorable and excellent performance (complete, holy, and finally efficacious because inclusive of all differences), the implication is that Christians lives, too, can become "holy performances." However, if human acts neither persist alongside or stand over against God's pure act nor are swallowed up or absorbed into God's complete performance, how can we register the difference they make? More specifically, how is the manifold diversity of human actions "accommodated" or preserved in God's pure, undivided act? No satisfactory response to these questions can be provided without reflecting further on Christian understandings of Trinity and Creation. For unless these matters are addressed, the ramifications for human performance under God will be distorted if not missed altogether...
How exactly does the preservation of difference manifest itself in practical, concrete terms within the life of the church, part of whose present reality includes the spatio-temporal world of God's good creation? The only answer that is forthcoming, it appears, is an agnostic one. Although the church cannot claim to know in advance the full details of the story, it nonetheless has some inkling of its general shape and eventual outcome. Perhaps a knowing which has the form of an "unknowing" is all that Christians can rightly expect if their lives are truly lived in hope. And though Christians live in expectation of the eschaton, the "fullness of time" when all things will be made one in God, that hope does not pretend to lift the church out of time. Explicating the character of Christian hope, therefore, means that considerably more can and must be said in regarding the "timing" - and indeed the time it takes- to abide in, to keep the faith. Performance analogies are especially apt in this respect.
Following Saint Augustine's lead, Milbank discovers in music an appropriate analogy for the life of faith, arging that while the church is "open to difference- to a series of infinitely new additions, insights, progressions towards God, it also strives to make of all these differential additions a harmony, 'in the body of christ.'" Indeed, insofar as music is "a consistently beautiful, continuously differential and open series," it serves as an appropriate model of the peaceable accommodations of interpretive difference within the church. Just as every musical note exists in a position fully defined by the unfoldings of the entire sequence, so too every interpretive difference emerges in relation to the overall historical development of the church's life and self-understanding. Music's endlessly peaceable progression mirrors the church's infinitely expansive interpretive practices. As the undivided musical sequence undergoes continuous alteration and revision in its accomodation of each additional note, so too the church displays an unending capacity to expand in a noncoervice, nonviolent way. In one sense, of course, the whole musical sequence is nothing other than the differentia of its parts. Although the church may confidently claim this works as its own, it must nonetheless not lose sight of the fact that "it is God himself who is differentiation, ensuring that this process is 'music,' not the ceaseless rupture and self-destruction of a differentiation poised 'univocally' between an 'indifferent' transcendence and an anarchic finitude.""
Alright, now on to the sonnet:
Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy:
Why lov'st thou that which thou receiv'st not gladly,
Or else receiv'st with pleasure thine annoy?
If the true concord of well-tuned sounds,
By unions married, do offend thine ear,
They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.
Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;
Resembling sire and child and happy mother,
Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing:
Whose speechless song being many, seeming one,
Sings this to thee: 'Thou single wilt prove none.'
In this poem, an external order seems to be acting on the man, attempting to bring him in line with some sort of cosmic harmony. The proper order SINGS to him. This is all sweet and good and nice and sugary and all, but it also seems like a load of shit. This isn't the order most people hear anyway. What calls do people hear most? TV's, demanding to be watched. Booze, demanding to be drunk. Pot, demanding to be smoked. Email, demanding to be checked. Does the proper order ever call to you?
"Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,
Strikes each in each by mutual ordering;"
What an amazing line. Strikes each in each. Next time I see a good group of friends, I'm going to think "Man, they really strike each in each." Each individual is partially defined by the part of others he brings out. A good husband/wife/child is like a good point guard, he/she makes everyone on the court play their own parts better.
When have you felt like you've been part of a harmony? When have harmonies sounded the saddest to you? Don't answer, just think about it. This poem kind of reminds me of the loneliness I sometimes feel when traveling.
And finally, in defense of solos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72e9Vc8iXg8&feature=related
Monday, October 18, 2010
Critique of the Church
I admit that I think every single one of these Sonnets is grappling with Christian themes. Any time I read "son" or "inheritance" or anything about time, I take it to be in conversation with theologians. In this case, I think we could read this poem as satire of the Church establishment.
It begins by yanking us towards a vision of the Holy Land. The reference to the "new-appearing sight," is a pretty clear reference to John 9, the parable of Jesus healing the blind man. Significantly, the parable ends with Jesus telling the Pharisee, "If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains." Now the reference to the "('fore duteous) now converted" eyes starts to look like an attack. The man on the mountain had a responsibility to keep the eyes engaged, preserving the gift of newly-given site. Looking at beauty is something of a duty ("Serving with looks his sacred majesty"). So to claim that previously duteous people are now going astray (looking another way) is to indict those in charge of the mediation of revelation (the church).
I think Booth is right to say there is something melancholy about the portrayal of the cyclical day here (I have no idea what sacrilegiously complimentary analogy means by the way). The Messianic does not break in like the sunrise, at a set time each day, but as a radically original event without precedent. I think Shakespeare is subtly accusing the Church of letting revelation stagnate when it must be constantly refreshed. They think, well we've got Jesus and we're his Church so now we must be sanctified. In the words of Karl Barth, "Nein!" In order for the Church to be the Church, the Church must (re)produce the Son. In the tumultuous religious climate, with violent struggle for who gets to be the "established" church, something is missing: the figure of Jesus himself. If He is "unlooked" on, the Church diest.
It begins by yanking us towards a vision of the Holy Land. The reference to the "new-appearing sight," is a pretty clear reference to John 9, the parable of Jesus healing the blind man. Significantly, the parable ends with Jesus telling the Pharisee, "If you were blind, you would not be guilty of sin; but now that you claim you can see, your guilt remains." Now the reference to the "('fore duteous) now converted" eyes starts to look like an attack. The man on the mountain had a responsibility to keep the eyes engaged, preserving the gift of newly-given site. Looking at beauty is something of a duty ("Serving with looks his sacred majesty"). So to claim that previously duteous people are now going astray (looking another way) is to indict those in charge of the mediation of revelation (the church).
I think Booth is right to say there is something melancholy about the portrayal of the cyclical day here (I have no idea what sacrilegiously complimentary analogy means by the way). The Messianic does not break in like the sunrise, at a set time each day, but as a radically original event without precedent. I think Shakespeare is subtly accusing the Church of letting revelation stagnate when it must be constantly refreshed. They think, well we've got Jesus and we're his Church so now we must be sanctified. In the words of Karl Barth, "Nein!" In order for the Church to be the Church, the Church must (re)produce the Son. In the tumultuous religious climate, with violent struggle for who gets to be the "established" church, something is missing: the figure of Jesus himself. If He is "unlooked" on, the Church diest.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
still stuck on 6
I'll get to 7 sometime soon, but I feel like I have to grapple with 6 a bit more. So in 5, we had a distillation process. We distill flower's beauty away from the non-essential flower. Beauty has value. So now we have an abstraction, but this sign is still very much filled with meaning. But how does that distillation retain its value? By being refigured. So beauty actually has no value in itself. It is only through the act of USING the beauty that it takes on value. The process of exchange offers infinite life. Death is going to come, but if you were smart and spent your beauty, then the life of your beauty (which wasn't yours to begin with. the whole thing is only made possible through a loan) has a chance to live on.
This is not about having one kid. This is about exponential growth. It's not a sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset, situation we've got going here.
What does being self-willed do? It means that your beauty never is handed over. You're caught up in equal exchange. You spend 3 points, but you get 3 points back, so you haven't really increased the total number of points in the pot. And then when the debt collector comes, what do you have to show for yourself?
Don't be a self. Selves have to die, and dying is an ugly business. But what can you be instead of a self? You can empty yourself into the process of refiguration. This requires giving yourself, which is no easy business. But man oh man is it worth it. Dying sucks.
And then we go from worms in the ground to Jerusalem at sunrise.
This is not about having one kid. This is about exponential growth. It's not a sunrise, sunset, sunrise, sunset, situation we've got going here.
What does being self-willed do? It means that your beauty never is handed over. You're caught up in equal exchange. You spend 3 points, but you get 3 points back, so you haven't really increased the total number of points in the pot. And then when the debt collector comes, what do you have to show for yourself?
Don't be a self. Selves have to die, and dying is an ugly business. But what can you be instead of a self? You can empty yourself into the process of refiguration. This requires giving yourself, which is no easy business. But man oh man is it worth it. Dying sucks.
And then we go from worms in the ground to Jerusalem at sunrise.
What's not here
Amber,
Thanks for the introduction. Interesting questions indeed--I think I'll wait on most of them and see what Randall and Jacob have to say. For now, I'd like to throw in a few somewhat-related observations of a reader-response bent.
I was intrigued this summer when Stephen Booth mentioned a line in a sonnet which actively encouraged a misreading. I think the same thing happens here in line 2, when I do a double-take at "each under eye." At first, I read 'under' as a preposition, rendering something like 'everyone under the eye,' with the eye signifying the sun. Once I get past the enjambment, though, I need to reevaluate: "each under eye / Doth homage to his new appearing sight."* Now, 'under' is an adjective, making 'under eye' a noun phrase. Does this flickering misreading matter? Is it even a stable feature of the poem, or is it my idiosyncratic response?
And while we're in the mode of extremely tenuous arguments, I couldn't help being struck by the invisible presence of the moon at the end of the sonnet. The sun is going down, people's eyes are turning elsewhere, and 'noon' really wants something to rhyme with. I'm transported to the R&J balcony scene: "Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon / who is already sick and pale with grief" This might be productive in that it introduces something else that might lie hidden in the orderly generational succession: jealousy. Even if procreation takes the edge off of growing old, being succeeded by one's son must provoke some degree of envy. I'm drawn again to consider the older poet addressing himself to the younger man.
I think it would be interesting to consider the sun/son pun in this reader-response light--which sense hits you first, and at what point does the second sense approach? Does it do anything for you?
-Chris
*By being seldom seen, I could not stir
But like a comet I was wondered at
(Henry IV Part I 3.2.48-49)
Thanks for the introduction. Interesting questions indeed--I think I'll wait on most of them and see what Randall and Jacob have to say. For now, I'd like to throw in a few somewhat-related observations of a reader-response bent.
I was intrigued this summer when Stephen Booth mentioned a line in a sonnet which actively encouraged a misreading. I think the same thing happens here in line 2, when I do a double-take at "each under eye." At first, I read 'under' as a preposition, rendering something like 'everyone under the eye,' with the eye signifying the sun. Once I get past the enjambment, though, I need to reevaluate: "each under eye / Doth homage to his new appearing sight."* Now, 'under' is an adjective, making 'under eye' a noun phrase. Does this flickering misreading matter? Is it even a stable feature of the poem, or is it my idiosyncratic response?
And while we're in the mode of extremely tenuous arguments, I couldn't help being struck by the invisible presence of the moon at the end of the sonnet. The sun is going down, people's eyes are turning elsewhere, and 'noon' really wants something to rhyme with. I'm transported to the R&J balcony scene: "Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon / who is already sick and pale with grief" This might be productive in that it introduces something else that might lie hidden in the orderly generational succession: jealousy. Even if procreation takes the edge off of growing old, being succeeded by one's son must provoke some degree of envy. I'm drawn again to consider the older poet addressing himself to the younger man.
I think it would be interesting to consider the sun/son pun in this reader-response light--which sense hits you first, and at what point does the second sense approach? Does it do anything for you?
-Chris
*By being seldom seen, I could not stir
But like a comet I was wondered at
(Henry IV Part I 3.2.48-49)
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Sonnet 7
Wow, so Chris clearly gave us a lot to think about with his post on Sonnet 6. I'm still trying to make sense of his explanation of finance and interest, but perhaps we can return to that another day. For now, let's look at Sonnet 7. I'll admit up front that I love how this poem so vividly describes the rising sun without once using the word "sun." And after the incredibly loose and convoluted imagery of Sonnet 6, I appreciated the clarity of image the poem had to offer. Here it is:
Lifts up his burning head, each under eye
Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,
Serving with looks his sacred majesty;
And having climbed the steep-up heav'nly hill,
Resembling strong youth in his middle age,
Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,
Attending on his golden pilgrimage.
But when from highmost pitch, with weary car,
Like feeble age he reeleth from the day,
The eyes ('fore duteous) now converted are
From his low tract and look another way.
So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon,
Unlooked on diest unless thou get a son.
Clarity of the image aside, I think there's a lot here to investigate. First, it's hard to miss the religious language and sentiment: gracious light, sacred majesty, heav'nly hill, pilgrimage, converted. When it comes to religion, I look to the experts. (Jacob, now might be the time to read Christianity into this sonnet...please!) I was curious what our good man Booth had to say about this topic:
"The conjunction of the rising sun, religious language, and the climbing of a hill gives the whole poem vague, substantively unharnessed, but pervasive reference to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ; the pun on "sun" and son in line 14 is obviously also pertinent to Christ, but the Christian references never solidify, never add up to the sacrilegiously complimentary analogy they point toward." So my first question: what is the "sacrilegiously complimentary analogy" to which he refers? And what do you all think? Does this poem ever add up to anything solidly Christian?
Booth goes on to say that the poem does "give an air of solemnity and miraculousness to the equation the poem implies between the sun's cyclical birth, death, and rebirth and human victory over mortality by procreation." Yes, okay, but isn't this cycle that the poem suggests of birth, death, and rebirth pretty solidly rooted in Christian theology? Again, I'm no expert, so help me out here.
The word "converted" is kind of a bomb shell here in the poem. It seems to be where all of the Christian references lead, and I love how it works with the subject of the poem when extended to the last word "son." We are abruptly pulled out of the image of the rising and setting sun and reminded that the speaker is trying to convince his subject to have some babies!
That should get us started.
Amber
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Refiguring the numbers
Randall, Amber,
What a mess--I agree with both of you that the jumble of imagery here is hard to sort out. I'll start by tackling some of the economics, then play with syntax a bit.
Several glosses point out that ten percent was the legal cutoff for how much interest could be charged on a loan. This seems to be the basis of the tens-and-ones conceit in the middle of the poem. Indeed, if we read line 8 selectively, "be it ten for one," it's good business sense, and within the bounds of the law. I'll give you ten, and the cost to you will be one, or 10%. In the context of its sentence, though, this phrase makes less sense: "That’s for thyself to breed another thee, / Or ten times happier be it ten for one."* First we imagine a 100% return on investment, then a 1000% return. Buy now! (Although, it's not clear that we're recovering the capital. If not, there's no net profit in the first deal.)
Lines 5 and 6 constitute a counterfactual legal argument: "It's not usury if the borrower is willing to pay your price." Not so; the whole point of usury laws is to protect desperate people who would otherwise be willing to accept unfair rates.
Line 9 imagines another transaction: "If ten of thine ten times refigured thee." We can read this in two ways: First, ten units were lent out, and each was repaid in full. No profit. Unless (second reading) the thing lent out didn't cost anything to start with, leaving you with ten more than you started with. Is it too much to suggest this is a comparison between money, beauty, and love? How much does it cost to give each away? How much does it cost to hold each tight and not put it to use?
- - -
Enough. Let's look at syntax. I'm interested in agency in this poem--who's acting, and who's being acted upon. The first quatrain suggests forces act on us ("let not winter’s ragged hand deface /
In thee thy summer," "ere thou be distilled," "ere it be self-killed") as well as remedies we might take to counteract these forces ("Make sweet some vial"). The sonnet's opening "Then" already sets us on the reactionary foot; something has happened, the best we can do is respond.
The second quatrain, on finance (Jacob, man of business, tell us more...), again presents a mix of agency and passivity, acting and being acted upon. "Use" is proposed, even justified beyond the limit of the law. Even so, there are echoes of serving others, perhaps even being acted upon by others. The loan "happies those" who borrow, just as line 3, "treasure thou some place," shifts in meaning from being about "thou" to being about the place as we read it in conjunction with line 4. Even the loan acts upon the lender, refiguring him.
In the third quatrain, a line is missing, "Ten times thy self were happier than thou art," in which we see the subjunctive, (also in "what could death do") perhaps the most ambiguously active mood. For me, activity and passivity dominate this poem, and constantly point to sexual roles. The exhortation "Be not self-willed" with which the poem concludes points to the danger that comes from ambiguity in these roles. Shall we read this as masturbation, taking the active and passive role at the same time, sinking into subjunctive impotence? Or is the poet investing his own affection for the subject in the verb 'to will'? This would be another sort of transgression of active/passive male/female roles.
- - -
Perhaps, as Randall suggests, this poem refigures the subverter of the financial system--to Elizabethans, the Jew--as one who challenges and deconstructs social norms. In other words, the poet, the illicit lover, the hacker of winter and death. Can we thus recover some unity from the collapsing images of this poem?
-Chris
*Unless we take the sense of this line to mean you invest ten times, and get just one out. No businessman would take this deal. But this kind of investing--making sweet the vial--is different from the marketplace in that if you have to invest ten times to get the product, you will "ten times happier be."
What a mess--I agree with both of you that the jumble of imagery here is hard to sort out. I'll start by tackling some of the economics, then play with syntax a bit.
Several glosses point out that ten percent was the legal cutoff for how much interest could be charged on a loan. This seems to be the basis of the tens-and-ones conceit in the middle of the poem. Indeed, if we read line 8 selectively, "be it ten for one," it's good business sense, and within the bounds of the law. I'll give you ten, and the cost to you will be one, or 10%. In the context of its sentence, though, this phrase makes less sense: "That’s for thyself to breed another thee, / Or ten times happier be it ten for one."* First we imagine a 100% return on investment, then a 1000% return. Buy now! (Although, it's not clear that we're recovering the capital. If not, there's no net profit in the first deal.)
Lines 5 and 6 constitute a counterfactual legal argument: "It's not usury if the borrower is willing to pay your price." Not so; the whole point of usury laws is to protect desperate people who would otherwise be willing to accept unfair rates.
Line 9 imagines another transaction: "If ten of thine ten times refigured thee." We can read this in two ways: First, ten units were lent out, and each was repaid in full. No profit. Unless (second reading) the thing lent out didn't cost anything to start with, leaving you with ten more than you started with. Is it too much to suggest this is a comparison between money, beauty, and love? How much does it cost to give each away? How much does it cost to hold each tight and not put it to use?
- - -
Enough. Let's look at syntax. I'm interested in agency in this poem--who's acting, and who's being acted upon. The first quatrain suggests forces act on us ("let not winter’s ragged hand deface /
In thee thy summer," "ere thou be distilled," "ere it be self-killed") as well as remedies we might take to counteract these forces ("Make sweet some vial"). The sonnet's opening "Then" already sets us on the reactionary foot; something has happened, the best we can do is respond.
The second quatrain, on finance (Jacob, man of business, tell us more...), again presents a mix of agency and passivity, acting and being acted upon. "Use" is proposed, even justified beyond the limit of the law. Even so, there are echoes of serving others, perhaps even being acted upon by others. The loan "happies those" who borrow, just as line 3, "treasure thou some place," shifts in meaning from being about "thou" to being about the place as we read it in conjunction with line 4. Even the loan acts upon the lender, refiguring him.
In the third quatrain, a line is missing, "Ten times thy self were happier than thou art," in which we see the subjunctive, (also in "what could death do") perhaps the most ambiguously active mood. For me, activity and passivity dominate this poem, and constantly point to sexual roles. The exhortation "Be not self-willed" with which the poem concludes points to the danger that comes from ambiguity in these roles. Shall we read this as masturbation, taking the active and passive role at the same time, sinking into subjunctive impotence? Or is the poet investing his own affection for the subject in the verb 'to will'? This would be another sort of transgression of active/passive male/female roles.
- - -
Perhaps, as Randall suggests, this poem refigures the subverter of the financial system--to Elizabethans, the Jew--as one who challenges and deconstructs social norms. In other words, the poet, the illicit lover, the hacker of winter and death. Can we thus recover some unity from the collapsing images of this poem?
-Chris
*Unless we take the sense of this line to mean you invest ten times, and get just one out. No businessman would take this deal. But this kind of investing--making sweet the vial--is different from the marketplace in that if you have to invest ten times to get the product, you will "ten times happier be."
Flowers and worms
Despite the fact that this sonnet is often read as a continuation of Sonnet 5, the content in this poem is definitely not as rich. I found myself nodding at each point Randall made -- the "ten" overkill, the not-so-appealing image of "make sweet some vial," etc.
I am interested in how this poem works structurally, especially as a continuation of Sonnet 5. In the most basic sense, Sonnet 5 starts with summer, leads to winter, and shows how summer is sustained through the distilled flowers. The structure makes sense to me even though, as a few of you pointed out last week, Shakespeare completely skips fall. In Sonnet 6 it seems that Shakespeare wants to start where he left off and tie the two sonnets together through the words - various forms of fair, distilled, and the obvious repetition of winter and summer. We start with the distilled flowers -- I get it, that makes sense -- but after the first two lines it dissolves into a poem about money, interest, and death. It seems as though he tries to tie it back in at the end with "for thou art much too fair" which echoes the first lines of Sonnet 5 with "And that unfair which fairly doth excel." But this last attempt of rescuing this poem from the number 10 is negated by the last line: "To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir." So while Sonnet 5 ends with lovely distilled flowers that make summer live on, Sonnet 6 ends with words that just make me think of worms eating a dead body. Perhaps this ending would have been more satisfying for me if we had some sense of how the worms connect to this summer/winter relationship that Shakespeare so brilliantly captured in the distilled flowers of Sonnet 5. Instead, I feel like we're just left with an awkward image here at the end.
Any other thoughts about the structure and how Shakespeare tried to tie these two poems together? Further, is it fair for me to read these poems as a pair? Is there merit in this poem if we read it as a stand-alone poem rather than a continuation of the very successful Sonnet 5? Can anyone save Sonnet 6 for me and show me something exciting, interesting, successful that happens in the poem?
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Sonnet 6
Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface
In thee thy summer ere thou be distilled.
Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
With beauty’s treasure ere it be self-killed.
That use is not forbidden usury
Which happies those that pay the willing loan;
That’s for thyself to breed another thee,
Or ten times happier be it ten for one.
If ten of thine ten times refigured thee:
Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart,
Leaving thee living in posterity?
Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair,
To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.
I find Sonnet 6 to be something of a letdown after Sonnet 5. One wonders after reading it if the poet has played out his conceit a bit. The seasonal metaphor (for time, here) is marched out only to be distractedly dispensed with in favor an awkward comment about the distillation of one’s beauty into a waiting receptacle – “make sweet some vial”; I can’t get the image of a sperm donor out of my head – and a more substantial but equally out-of-tune economic image. We’ve said much about the monetary metaphors. Here, “treasure,” “usury,” and “loan” work a nice reversal from the negative connotations (see Merchant of Venice) one might connect to them, but we’ve wandered a long way, in only three lines, from winter and summer. So far, in fact, that I take what is probably a compelling complexity – that “winter” is a natural effect while “summer” is a human condition – and wonder if Shakespeare might have gotten a tad sloppy.
Then things get weird. We’ve had five poems that have argued that our young man should have issue. Fine. But all of a sudden Shakespeare is like that guy in the bar, deep into his fourth bottle of sack who doesn’t know when to stop, either his drinking or his argument: Ten kids, dude! You should have ten kids, then it matters not if you die, like, a thousand deaths, ‘cause there’ll be a whole army of you to live on!
Maybe I’m just a bit jaded by the word “ten” appearing four times in three lines; I get it. Really. In essence, the “ten times happier be ten for one” takes us back to our “willing loan,” specifically to the interest (children) it may pay. I wonder how modern women readers, carrying the image to its logical conclusion, feel being equated to a sperm bank.
Nor does the couplet feel like it offers me much closure, even epigrammatically, to what has gone before. Rather than returning to seasons, or distilled spirits, or sweetheart loans, or mass self-replication, Shakespeare closes with an admonition against narcissism and a back-handed compliment about the young man’s beauty (though I do see the allegiance between “heir” and “posterity”).
And, yes, that’s how I really feel. Perhaps you find greater merit in the poem? Bring it on. Or have I misread the poem’s organization and inter-relatedness? I’m all ears. Should we see this poem more as variation on and echo of the others than as an individual sonnet? I’m not sure. What do you think?
Randall
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