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
But wait--the schedule says this is our week off! Instead of two days late, I'm actually five days early! Saved!
ReplyDeleteThis expansion from the single crying woman (the "private wife") to that of the weeping-world-as-wife seems to me to be an attempt to move the consequences of this man's selfishness from the micro to the macro. Up until this point we've seen how his actions wreak havoc on individuals: the man himself, the poet, the mysterious "nature" (which I suppose you could argue is something larger than an individual?). So the question is: can it work? Can this strategy finally make this guy have some babies? Unlikely.
ReplyDeleteIf the first ten lines are meant to make the subject reflect on the broad implications of his actions, then the last four are meant to shame him (to borrow a term from the poem) into reconsideration. It's as though the poet knew the first approach in this poem wouldn't work. There is something incredibly disturbing about this "murd'rous shame" here at the end. It followed a sentiment that we've seen before in the sonnets: if you waste your beauty, it will disappear. But the disappearance is different this time -- it's violently destroyed, it's intentional, it's avoidable. And what a way to lead into the next sonnet, one that is even more aggressive.