Thanks for your posts this week--if you have any last thoughts on the first sonnet, by all means throw them up. It certainly looks like we have some diversity in our approaches! I enjoyed Jacob's interest in the religious context of the poem and Amber's connections to Shakespeare's life. If we're staking out ground, I'm probably going to be most concerned with language, and particularly the possibilities and resonances of individual words. But I also look forward to developing what Randall calls 'prismatic thinking,' or the capacity to question one's own conceptual commitments and to try out different critical approaches.
This week's conversation was centered around the relationship between worldly things and their transcendent significance. Jacob did some interesting work with the rose and the bud, suggesting that instead of allowing one's beauty to signify the eternal, the subject of the poem becomes self-referential, selfishly meaning nothing more than himself. (What does this look like in real life? Falstaff?) Amber echoed the theme, comparing individual procreation with the larger structure of the family and family honor, symbolized in a coat of arms. In a sense, this is a mapping of the linear segment of a human life onto the ongoing spiral of the transcendent. It will be interesting to follow this theme in sonnets to come.
One procedural note: I think it will work better if we try to put our thoughts into posts instead of comments. That way we can more easily refer back to these conversations in the archive. It will also be easier to respond to specific posts instead of just jumping into the comments fray. Randall's hosting the second sonnet; talk to you on Tuesday!
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