FALLPOCOLYPSE!!!

(for best effect read aloud in a forest at dusk)

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls, all silvered o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves,
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

Are any of you at precisely this point in fall where you are? This sonnet could not have come at a better time for me. The leaves are just on the brink of nudity. Personally, I'm excited to see what comes next, but the narrator is a bit more conservative. He takes trees showing full frontal as a sign of the apocalypse.

Fall doesn't have to be apocalyptic. If everything went as it should in summer, the shift to fall is largely unconscious. But here, something that was supposed to happen failed to happen. Beauty failed to replant itself. Now all the signs of fall become signs of the immanent end.

I love this poem for exactly the reason I hate LA. I like experiencing the passage of time. In LA, leaves don't fall, diets don't change, people don't age. In such a place, it's extremely easy to worship the present. But the narrator does experience the passage of time, and this leads him to question the reality of the temporal. Once you start doubting the temporal, you are forced to start questioning the nature of the eternal.

I've been thinking a lot about our culture's refusal to face death recently. Here's a great essay on the subject I just read:
http://www.davidtinapple.com/illich/1995_death_undefeated.pdf

Has anyone else ever used a scythe? If you haven't, I HIGHLY recommend it. It feels so unbelievably good.

How much better would this sonnet be if we just chopped out the "save breed" part? I've come to really hate the way he makes everything about having kids.

Did this poem remind anyone else of Amos 8:
"This is what the Sovereign LORD showed me: a basket of ripe fruit. “What do you see, Amos?” he asked. “A basket of ripe fruit,” I answered. Then the LORD said to me, “The time is ripe for my people Israel; I will spare them no longer. “In that day,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “the songs in the temple will turn to wailing. Many, many bodies—flung everywhere! Silence!”

Sonnet 11

I'll start by admitting that it's been difficult for me to approach these poems with the same enthusiasm since Randall's post about Sonnet 6: "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!" And while it was particularly creepy to ask (no, insist) that this guy have ten kids, I'm starting to see that the entire project, the constant persistence, and especially the hints at violence in the last two poems (murd'rous shame, murd'rous hate, etc.) and the awkward plea that the man "do it for me," drive these sonnets into a creepy realm. Don't worry, Randall, you didn't ruin the poems for me. But you've all have certainly complicated my understanding of Shakespeare's project with the sonnets. Which brings me to my first set of questions: is it fair for me to see these sonnets as a "project"? Is anyone else seeing these sonnets (as a whole, if not necessarily a "project") in a different light (than me? than where you started?).

And now on to Sonnet 11:

As fast as thou shalt wane so fast thou grow'st --

In one of thine, from that which thou departest,

And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow'st

Thou mayst call thine, when thou from youth convertest.

Herein lives wisdom, beauty, and increase;

Without this, folly, age, and cold decay.

If all were minded so, the times should cease

And threescore year would make the world away.

Let those whom nature hath not made for store,

Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish.

Look whom she best endowed, she gave the more;

Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish.

She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby

Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.

(If any of you have Stephen Booth's Shakespeare's Sonnets, take a look at the first line of the original printed version. With all the s's and f's in this line, it's pretty to see on the page.)

In general, Shakespeare gives the guy two choices: wisdom, beauty, increase OR folly, old age, decay (reminiscent of Sonnet 6 "make worms thine heir"). It's a common sentiment that's already been established in the previous sonnets, so what is new in this poem? Well, I'd argue that the answer is "not much." The nature character shows up again, this time as the distributor of beauty, power, and life. I'd say that her appearance restores the calm after two emotionally changed sonnets, and returns the poet to an earlier argument: it's only natural for you to procreate because clearly you have been given an excess of beauty and intelligence, which only naturally means you were "meant" to pass it on. As Randall noted in his last post, we obviously don't know the order in which these sonnets were written, but this return to nature and the echo of nature's loan of life and beauty from Sonnet 4 makes me wonder about the order in which these two poems were written.

What am I missing here? Can anyone see anything new that this poem is doing that hasn't been done in previous sonnets?

Mis/Reading

Randall,

Thanks for your analysis--you aptly crystallized the emotional flow I felt in this poem, and pointed toward some kind of parallel spiritual process.  I feel myself going through the senses of meaning Dante intended for the Divine Comedy:  the literal, the allegorical, the moral, the anagogical. 

I'd like to explore a bit further the way meaning unfolds in this poem.  Booth's commentary argues for leaving the first line unpunctuated to preserve three separate senses:  "(1) shame on you!  you should deny; (2) to avoid shame you should deny; (3) from a sense of shame you should deny."  Booth claims each of the three hits at a slightly different moment.  I think the same thing happens more generally with the first lines of the sonnet.  We first take the initial line in isloation:  Admit that you don't love anybody.  Then, surmounting the enjambment, I take the first two lines together:  Admit that you don't love anybody who doesn't care about you.  Admittedly, this may be a distinctly modern reading, as it relies on not realizing that 'art' is a second-person conjugation, and cannot be a third-person conjugation.  After failing by regarding lines in isolation, and then falling via the other extreme, of regarding the lines as a single unit, I reach a third, balanced sense:  Admit that you don't love anybody, you who don't even love yourself.  As I have argued before, I believe these misreadings are intentional.  To write such misreadings into a poem requires an extraordinary capacity for understanding language not just the way you understand it, but also the way others will understand it in idiosyncratically different ways.  One must at once be oneself and not oneself.

These questions of interpretation lead to questions of identity, which I'll explore a bit more if I find some time tomorrow.  In short, I see four ways this poem questions identity:  First, by insisting on integrity, stability, and consistency in who we are and who we claim to be.  Second, in asking about our relationship to our future selves.  Third, by asking how much we are individuals, and how much we are part of larger selves.  Fourth, by exploring extensions of self, into offspring and into other minds.  

Sorry about my premature post a couple of weeks ago.  I hope I didn't disturb anyone's enjoyment of your week off.  Finally, Randall, F. Scott Fitzgerald once got kicked out of your school.  He's buried across the street from the high school I attended.  CRAZY!!!

-Chris

Sonnet 10 - Anger Spent

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

Sonnet 9

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

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"?

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.

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

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.

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.

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)

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:

Lo, in the orient when the gracious light

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

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."

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?

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

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.