From fairest creatures we desire increase,I'm interested in the strands of imagery running through this poem. We have the rose of course, but also images of heraldic coats of arms ('bear his memory,' 'only herald,' 'ornament'?) , economic transactions ('desire increase,' 'contracted,' 'the world's due), and eating ('famine,' 'abundance,' 'glutton'). Apparently, this sonnet is usually taken to be an older man encouraging a younger man to marry and have children--do these work together toward this interpretation? They seem oddly gendered.
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory:
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament,
And only herald to the gaudy spring,
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And tender churl mak'st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be--
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.
Some related issues came up when I looked into the meanings of 'churl' offered by the OED:
- A male human being, a man; esp. ‘man’ as correlative to ‘wife’, husband.
- A man simply, without rank; a member of the third or lowest rank of freemen
- A countryman, peasant, rustic, boor.
- One who is sordid, ‘hard’, or stingy in money-matters; a niggard; a miser.
Finally, I'm trying to work out the motion I feel in this sonnet. The first quatrain feels like an orderly progression, with each generation succeeding the last (almost like the line of kings in Macbeth). The second quatrain is circular and disrupts this order. The third quatrain seems to center on the image of a bud (closing in on itself?), a tightening, perhaps impotent crumbling.
Can you push my thinking further in any of these directions? What else occurred to you as you read?
-Chris
Chris, I liked your reading of the motion of this sonnet a lot. I promise I won't read Christianity into every Sonnet we look at, but I think it's useful to think about this one in relation to the operation of the Trinity.
ReplyDeleteIn the first quatrain, as you point out, we've got an orderly progression that ensures beauty's everlasting life. The father becomes the son becomes the holy spirit. Christ lives on through the lives of the Saints who bear the memory of the Cross. I think it's crucial that here we have beauty acting through vessels here. It's beauty's rose that never dies, even though the vessels themselves pass out of existence.
And then we get to the circular quatrain. The phrase that really popped out at me was "self-substantial fuel." There's a closing off to some sort of external source of fuel, causing a famine where there had previously been an abundance. This might be a bit of a stretch, but it's at least worth thinking about the religious transformation that was taking place in the period when this sonnet was authored. England was being purged of it's Catholic past. The eucharist, which had become the flesh of Christ through the operation of the sacraments for Catholics, now only symbolically pointed towards Christ. By denying the sacramental infusion, the symbol was becoming "self-sustaining."
And then the bud, that point of contact with the source of everlasting life, closes in on itself. In the end, the grave swallows up the world. The holy spirit of Beauty has disappeared. Something has happened and the grave, which ought to be empty due to the promise of everlasting life, is now full. The operation of the trinity has been constipated due to a closing off from the divine source.
Whether this really is a commentary on the changing nature of religion in Shakespeare's time (and I do think there's reason to believe he would have lamented these changes. A lot's been written about his Catholic sympathies), I think its helpful to think about the sonnet in terms of how it asks us to orient ourselves towards the transcendent. I think David Foster Wallace was channeling the spirit of Sonnet 1 when he told the graduating class at Kenyon:
"In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship - be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles - is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already - it's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power - you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart - you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out."
-Jacob
Hey team!
ReplyDeleteChris, I like where you’re going with this reading.
I was also interested in the imagery of the heraldic coat of arms in a poem that pushes procreation. I’m not sure if any of you have read Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, but I just finished the section where Greenblatt speculates (the entire book is a speculation, but it’s pretty damn convincing…) about how the Shakespeare family secured their own coat of arms. I’ll summarize it quickly: John Shakespeare (Will’s dad) applied for a coat of arms. The bailiff of Stratford rejects the application, perhaps because John couldn’t pay the high fees. Years later, some unknown person (Greenblatt is convinced it is Will Shakespeare because he is making lots of money in the theater at this point) resubmits the application and pays the fees. The family is granted the coat of arms, and they can legitimately claim status as gentlemen.
So what could this all mean for Sonnet #1? If Greenblatt is right, Shakespeare would have known intimately the process of securing the coat of arms and the importance it held for him and his direct descendants. So I suppose it’s no huge surprise that a poem that encourages a man to have children also drops hints of legitimacy and honor through the heraldic imagery. Furthermore, I think the question Chris raises about food imagery in the poem(famine, abundance, and glutton) could be connected to this preoccupation of honor and heraldry. Part of being a gentlemen and securing the coat of arms rests in the ability to prove that one not only has piles of money to pay the fees, but also that one lives a life of idleness and plenty. The speaker seems to celebrate the idea of extravagance in lines 7-8 when he scolds the man who “Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel, / Making a famine where abundance lies.” But this celebration of abundance is complicated in line 13 when the speaker seems to look down on the man’s selfishness (gluttony) for refusing to leave an heir. Who can help me with this contradiction?
Just as Jacob promises not to read Christianity into every poem, I promise not to bring Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World into our discussions! But it’s a good read if you guys haven’t picked it up!
Amber
Jacob, I actually spent some time thinking about similar issues this summer--I was interested specifically in how people understood images (and, by extension, how people thought about the stage and the world), and my reading consistently went back to religion. My most interesting find of the summer was The Stripping of the Altars (Eamon Duffy), which chronicles the dismantling of traditional religion in England. I was struck by how vividly images conveyed meaning in pre-Episcopal England, and how completely they were deprived of this status afterwards. Seems like this lines up with some of your comments.
ReplyDeleteAmber, I was frustrated by this contradiction too, though I wasn't able to articulate it as clearly as you were. Some of this imagery is dependent on whose perspective we see it from. When the subject of the poem makes a famine where abundance lies, for whom is he making a famine? The world? The speaker? (What kind of expectation of plenty existed in this relationship such that its lack of fulfillment could be considered a famine?) Excess is delightful when you are invited to partake; we feel contempt for gluttons who do not invite us to the party. Maybe this is one of the uses of the food imagery--it's best when it's shared.
ReplyDeleteChris, Jacob, and Amber - I'm intrigued by Jacob's response. I look forward to any exploration of the spiritual in these poems because such readings so frequently escape me. When I read Sonnet 1, for example, I was struck by how much it celebrates the physical world and the natural order of its perpetuation through sex. The poet does not say "women" in line 1; he says "creatures." And that image is followed by one that suggests aging makes us like fruit in that we ripen. So I cannot escape the poem's clear sensuality.
ReplyDeleteI get your argument, Jacob, about the purging of Catholicism (although it doesn't go easily or clearly even in the Elizabethan period), but the sonnet pulls my attention to the other philosophical evolution of the period -- the marriage of Christian values with classical ones. The second quatrain makes a subtle allusion to Narcissus. Compare "thou contracted to thine own bright eyes" to Golding's 1567 translation of Ovid:
"For as he dranke, he chaunst to spie the Image of his face
The which he did immediately with fervent love embrace.
...
Astraughted like an ymage made of Marble stone he lyes,
There gazing on his shadowe still with fixed staring eyes.
Stretcht all along the ground, it doth him good to see
His ardent eyes which like two starres full bright and shining bee" (75).
I think we find Shakespeare, here, reapplying Ovid. What is classically a cautionary tale about the fickleness of cosmic power becomes in the sonnet a much more secular early modern English caution: carpe diem.
And perhaps Shakespeare continues to mine classical thought with "thy light's flame." Fire, one of the four basic elements, is the element of passion, opposing the will or reason. Reason, Tillyard reminds us, comes from the head, that part of our body closest to God. Passion comes, if I remember correctly, from the gall bladder, closer to the earth than the heavens.
The third quatrain keeps us firmly in the physical world (spring, bud). And the poem wraps with worldly concerns and consequences. Even the gluttony image, which immediately evokes a Christian transgression seems to me very earthy. And its irony, I think, withholds it from a religious reading.
One final aside (this is getting too long). I haven't been able to read the third quatrain without being reminded of Blake's "The Sick Rose."
O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy;
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
How different the tone and attitude. That's something I hope to get out of reading these sonnets with you guys -- a richer understanding of Shakespeare, but also cool perspectives on other poems as well. - rrf