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
Amber,
ReplyDeleteI’ve been wanting to follow up on your Boothian reflection about “having traffic with thyself alone” and masturbation in Sonnet 4. Shakespeare begins the sonnet, “Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend/ Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?” I remember a teacher explaining that the verb “to spend” means, among other things, “to ejaculate.”
Eric Partridge confirms this in Shakespeare’s Bawdy, a glossary of all the dirty ways to read Shakespearean language, and cites All’s Well That Ends Well: “He wears his honour in a box unseen,/ That hugs his kicky-wicky here at home,/ Spending his manly marrow in her arms” (2.3.282-284). (If you’re not up on your early modern English slang, “kicky-wicky” refers to one’s wife.)
So, the opening of Sonnet 4 give us a particularly messy image of onanism, a reading supported by the poem’s consistent implication that one’s beauty can only be perpetuated through procreation. I read the first two lines, and their image of seminal discharge upon oneself rather than the fertile womb of one’s mate, and I think: Dude! Take a shower! Does that put me in agreement with Christine O’Donnell?