Sonnet 10 picks up where Sonnet 9 left off, with, as Chris noted, an “emotional intensity.” The poet returns to both “shame” and murder, curt admonition and accusation hurled in argumentative escalation as if he’s begun to realize his pleas fall on deaf ears.
For shame, deny that thou bear'st love to any
Who for thyself art so unprovident.
Grant if thou wilt, thou art beloved of many,
But that thou none lov’st is most evident;
For thou art so possessed with murd’rous hate,
That 'gainst thyself thou stick'st not to conspire,
Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate,
Which to repair should be thy chief desire.
O, change thy thought, that I may change my mind.
Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love?
Be as thy presence is, gracious and kind,
Or to thyself at least kind-hearted prove.
Make thee another self for love of me,
That beauty still may live in thine or thee.
I know we don’t know the order in which Shakespeare actually wrote these sonnets. But it’s hard to ignore the current arrangement’s natural logic. We find that the poet’s gentle admonishment shifted to more ornate persuasion and then arrived here with strident condemnation. ‘For shame! You are guilty of murder. You breed hate, a deadly sin, within you.’
And worse, the poet accuses his target of conspiring against himself. Conspiracy, to Elizabethans, is serious and dreadful business, not the stuff of crackpot politicos and hyperimaginative novelists that we have. Here, the crimes stack up, and they become more terrifyingly real, even as images, than the more tenuous crime of failing to have issue and leaving a copy of oneself.
I’ll leave the second quatrain to Jacob’s capable mind, for certainly the body/roof analogy calls to mind Corinthians: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?” I’ll ask merely this: have we moved from crimes against mankind (murder, hate, conspiracy) to crimes against God? Talk about escalation!
Our third quatrain and final couplet, though, take us someplace very interesting. All of a sudden, the argument shifts. The yelling stops. And our poet pleads: “do it for me.” His angry statements turn to a question: “Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love?” Is this rhetorical? Does the verb reconnect us to God’s temple? Reading line 10, I feel like the poet’s anger is spent. The demands turn to pleas. In fact it kind of feels like it spent itself in line 14 of Sonnet 9. The we get, in Sonnet 10, its echoes, followed by the gentle weeping of the “why won’t you do this for me” argument.
We can take “Make thee another self for love of me” a number of ways. What is, after all, the relationship between the poet and this selfish bachelor? Is this a plea for love as well as a plea for the poem’s object to get busy?
And if the emotional intensity of the argument is breaking down here, so too is the consistency of his refrained argument. Notice that Shakespeare seems to slip up (you may certainly argue that he does no such thing) when, after nine sonnets of saying that the only way to perpetuate one’s beauty is by having children, he suggests that children will allow beauty to live on “in thee.” What?
Thoughts?
Randall
Make thee another self for love of me,
ReplyDeleteThat beauty still may live in thine or thee.
I think this is absolutely a call to get busy, but busy doing what? My guess? It's a call for the emergence of the messianic subject:
"For Paul, the redemption of what has been is the place of an exigency for the messianic. This place does not involve a point of view which we could see a world in which redemption had taken place. The coming of the Messiah means that all things, even the subjects who contemplate it, are caught up in the "as not," called and revoked at one and the same time. No subject could watch it or act "as if" at a given point. The messianic vocation dislocates and, above all, nullifies the entire subject. This is the meaning of Galatians 2:20, "It is no longer I that live, but the Messiah living in me." He lives in him precisely as the "no longer I," that dead body of sin we bear within ourselves which is given life through the spirit in the Messiah (Rom. 8:11) The whole of creation was subjected to caducity, the futility of what is lost and decays, but this is why it groans as it awaits redemption (Rom. 8:20-22). The thing in the spirit to correspond with this creature's continuously lost lament is not a well formed discourse able to calculate and register loss, but "unspeakable groanings" (Rom. 8:26). This is why the one who upholds faith in what is lost cannot believe in any identity or worldly klesis. The "as not" is by no means a fiction in the sense intended by Vaihinger or Forberg. It has nothing to do with an ideal. The assimilation to what has been lost and forgotten is absolute: "We are made as the filth of the world, the offscouring of all things" (1 Cor. 4:13). Pauline klesis is a theory of the interrelation between the messianic and the subject, a theory that settles its differences once and for all with presumed identities and ensuring properties. In this sense, that which is not is stronger than that which is...
...He who upholds himself in the messianic vocation no longer knows the "as if," he no longer has similitude at his disposal. He knows that in messianic time the saved world coincides witht he world that is irretrievably lost, and that, to use Bonhoeffer's words, he must now really live in a world without God. This means that he may not disguise this world's being-without-God in any way. The saving God is the God who abandons him, and the fact of representations (the fact of the "as if") cannot pretend to save the appearance of salvation. The messianic subject does not contemplate the world as though it were saved. In Benjamin's words, he contemplates salvation only to the extent that he loses himself in what cannot be saved; this is how difficult it is to dwell in the calling." (Agamben's "The Time that Remains")