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.