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?

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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.

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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."