Sorry for the delay. Things have been a bit crazy here, but they should be calming down now that I have some of my applications in. Don't have time for anything too substantial, but just wanted to get out a few thoughts.

I think it's pretty cool how shakespeare begins by employing the word "glass" rather literally as something you can see your own face in, and then further in the poem he pushes the word further, transforming it into that which allows his mother to turn back time and continue to see her beauty in the world. I do think the command is a call towards self love, because I think Shakespeare views self love is the raw material that can be transformed into love of the material world. There continues to be a real affirmation of the image. I think Shakespeare affirms the image, but calls on us to deepen our engagement with it. He kinda seems like he's saying, "look in a mirror. wow, you thought i meant that literally? yikes. look how much more profoundly your mom understands reflection. maybe you should work on that..." i think the riff on mirrors and windows is calling attention on the claustrophobia that occurs when the image is cut off from some transcendent meaning-giver.

it's taking a huge amount of restraint to not mention something about "through a glass darkly," but i'll bite my tongue for now. it's a beautiful, cool night here in downtown carrboro and i'm being called away from engaging with a screen.

Blessing and unblessing

Amber,

Thanks for the questions--I'm interested in the arrival of the ladies as well.  Up until now, our stakeholders in the subject's beauty have been the subject himself, the world, and the speaker.  Now we get the subject's wife and his mother.  I'm inclined to read 'some' the way you implied--distancing her from the action, making her less present as a character.  We haven't met wife or mother before, and it feels to me like they are being pulled in as secondary considerations.  There's another possibility though: if he chooses not to marry, he will 'unbless some mother.'  This implies that marriage is so much the expected option that to choose otherwise would be to take away something already effectively bestowed, even if the recipient has not yet been determined.  I'm intrigued by the unblessing--blessing is just as irreversible as some other relevant actions:  marriage and conception.

I want to come back to a question Randall asked last week about the nature of beauty.  In this sonnet, there are several lines distinguishing inner self from outer self:  The first line makes a distinction between 'thou' and 'the face thou viewest' just as the last line refers to both 'thine image' and 'thee.'  In Sonnet 2, the idea that beauty is an inner, essential characteristic is mocked:  "To say within thine owne deepe sunken eyes, / Were an all-eating shame and thriftlesse praise."  But this week, I get the feeling that there is some validity to inner beauty, the kind you still have when you grow old.  At least, this sonnet promises, you will have enough left such that you can recognize it in somebody else's youth.  Is beauty part of a platonic idea, something eternal and unchanging, or is it a quality of the moment, a construct of time and circumstance? 

Finally, I'm interested in the two parallel questions in the second stanza:  "For where is she so fair whose uneared womb / Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry? / Or who is he so fond will be the tomb / Of his self-love to stop posterity?"  I think the dominant meaning here is that all women wish to become pregnant, just as all men wish to leave their mark on the world.  But by framing these as questions, it seems like the poem is allowing for other ways of living at the very moment it asserts orthodoxy.  Does this undermine the ostensible rhetorical purpose of convincing the youth to marry?  Amber suggested something similar may be going on with the repeated exhortions to look in the mirror.

Hope you're doing well.  We got pretty well swamped by Tropical Storm Hermine this week.

-Chris

Sonnet 3

Apologies for the double spacing of Sonnet 3; I can't figure out how to change it. Here it is from Stephen Booth's Shakespeare's Sonnets.

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest,

Now is the time that face should form another,

Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,

Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.

For where is she so fair whose uneared womb

Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?

Or who is he so fond will be the tomb

Of his self-love to stop posterity?

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime;

So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,

Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.

But if thou live rememb’red not to be,

Die single and thine image dies with thee.

While this sonnet is a continuation of the speaker’s plea for this man to have a child, we are introduced to another important factor of the equation: the mother of the hypothetical child. “Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother / For where is she so fair whose uneared womb / Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?” I’m curious about the choice of the word “some.” How did you all read this word? And how does this word choice relate to the obvious agriculture imagery in the rest of the sentence: “uneared,” “tillage,” and “husbandry.” This line also seems to connect with the last line in a peculiar way. Is the reference to dying “single” referring to dying without marrying and therefore without any children, or does it refer to dying without children? If it is the latter, I’m wondering if this is a common use of the word for the times.

I’m also wrestling with the connection between this mother (the hypothetical mother to the hypothetical child) and the young man’s mother mentioned in lines 9-10. What is the function of each mother in this poem? How do these references work with or against each other?

Finally, how does this poem connect with the other two we’ve read? The tone seems to be different, almost as though this one is telling the young man to indulge in his self-love (“Look in thy glass….). Does this demand reinforce or contradict the messages in the earlier sonnets?

There's lots more to explore in this poem, but I think this will get us started! Looking forward to reading your thoughts.

all about the benjamins

JL: Could someone say a little more about what these Sonnets were exactly? Were they ever preformed in some way? Or were they just published? And if so, who was buying them? Did people read them to one another in their parlor or something?

There is lots of speculation about what exactly these sonnets were, and it’s no surprise that the conversation about publication and purpose inevitably turns to audience. “Why did Shakespeare write these sonnets?” turns to “to whom did he write them and why?” The most popular argument is that Shakespeare wrote these sonnets beginning in the summer of 1592 for the earl of Southampton, a man who refused to marry and who stood to lose a lot (money, family, honor, etc.) if he remained single. The argument goes that Southampton’s family turned to Shakespeare to slyly convince the earl to take a wife. (The story of the earl, his life growing up, his status in the community, and his refusal to marry is pretty interesting, but perhaps it’s a story for another day…) There is also evidence that Shakespeare wrote these sonnets when the playhouses had been closed down because of the plague, and he probably would have welcomed the job and the money at a time when other playwrights were struggling to find work.

So what about publication? How did the private sonnets get to print?

Here is what Greenblatt says about the publication of the sonnets: “The first edition of the entire sequence – a quarto volume bearing the title Shake-speares Sonnets – did not appear until 1609. Shakespeare’s name, appearing in very large type, clearly was expected to sell copies…At the very center of the original title page, beneath Shake-speare’s Sonnets, there are the words “Never before Imprinted.” This prominent announcement…implies that the public has long heard of the existence of these poems but has not until now been able to purchase them. For the writing of sonnets, as contemporary readers well understood, was not normally about getting them into print, where they would simply fall into the hands of anyone who had the money and the interest to buy the book. What mattered was getting the poems at the right moment into the right hands – most obviously, of course, the object of the poet’s passion, but also the intimate (and, in the case of Shakespeare and the aristocratic young man, quite distinct) social circles surrounding both the poet and his beloved.” Greenblatt also mentions that as the individual poems started to move from private audience to public circles, printers were eager to print them. In 1599, William Jaggard printed an unauthorized collection of the sonnets called The Passionate Pilgrim. By W. Shakespeare, hoping to make money off Shakespeare’s popularity. Needless to say, only five of the twenty poems in the edition were actually written by Shakespeare…

Okay, speaking of money, it was hard to ignore the monetary overtones in this sonnet. “Small worth,” “treasure,” “thriftless,” “sum my count.” It certainly gives the feeling that if the reader wasn’t convinced by the argument of having children in Sonnet 1, then they would certainly recognize the monetary value of it here in Sonnet 2. Again, if these sonnets were directed at the earl of Southampton, this could make sense since he was about to lose his fortune unless he married.

particular beauty

How much more praise deserv’d thy beauties use,
If thou couldst answere this faire child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse
Prooving his beautie by succession thine.

Like you guys, I was also intrigued by the way beauty featured here. At first, I thought the notion of claiming ownership over an offspring's beauty was ridiculous (This is my beauty. There are many like it, but this one is mine...), because does your beauty really belong to you in the first place? But then I realized you could read this as a celebration of particularity and difference. It challenges some platonic notion of beauty where there's one basic form of beauty that everything is an imperfect manifestation of. So if beauty isn't some absent form, it's a material virtue that has real being.

Also, I think there's a nice meditation on how we relate to time hidden in these lines. It starts with the violent image of time digging trenches into a forehead. Time can be experienced as a dangerous adversary, forcing us into submission. And the sonnet ends with another violent act of time, the chilling of blood, but now the violent act is reversed through the relation to the child. The lone subject experiences time as an enemy, but the community experiences time as the animating force responsible for there being something rather than nothing. And if we think about the whole thing as being addressed to an aging youth, from an elder, it becomes a sort of invitation into this communal life the elder has found some sort of redemption in.

Could someone say a little more about what these Sonnets were exactly? Were they ever preformed in some way? Or were they just published? And if so, who was buying them? Did people read them to one another in their parlor or something?

Finally, do we think this kind of celebration of procreation would ever emerge from our contemporary culture? What was different about Shakespeare's time that lead him to celebrate birth as he did? Here's a snippit from a great essay by David Bentley Hart:

But really, anywhere throughout the autumnal world of old and dying Christendom, there are instants (however fleeting) when one cannot help but feel (however imprecisely) that something vital has perished, a cultural confidence or a spiritual aspiration, and it is obviously something inseparable from the faith that shaped and animated European civilization for nearly two millennia. Hence the almost prophetic "fittingness" of that rail station: once religious imagination and yearning have departed from a culture, the lowest, grimmest, most tedious level of material existence becomes not just one of reality's unpleasant aspects, but in some sense the limit that marks out the "truth" of things.

This is an inexcusably impressionistic way of thinking, I know, but it seems to me at least to suggest a larger cause for the remarkable willful infertility of the native European peoples: not simply general affluence, high taxes, sybaritism, working women, or historical exhaustion, but a vast metaphysical boredom. This is not to say that the American birthrate overall is particularly robust, hovering as it is just at or below "replacement level," but it has not sunk to the European continental average of only 1.4 children per woman (so reports the UN), let alone to that of such extreme individual cases as Spain (1.07), Germany (1.3), or Italy (1.2). Britain, at almost 1.7 children per woman, is positively philoprogenitive by European standards. And the most important reason for the greater--though not spectacular--fecundity of the United States appears to be the relatively high rate of birth among its most religious families (the godless being also usually the most likely to be childless).

It is fairly obvious that there is some direct, indissoluble bond between faith and the will to a future, or between the desire for a future and the imagination of eternity. And I think this is why post-Christian Europe seems to lack not only the moral and imaginative resources for sustaining its civilization, but even any good reason for continuing to reproduce. There are of course those few idealists who harbor some kind of unnatural attachment to that misbegotten abomination, the European Union--that grand project for forging an identity for post-Christian civilization out of the meager provisions of heroic humanism or liberal utopianism or ethical sincerity--but, apart from a bureaucratic superstate, providently and tenderly totalitarian, one cannot say what there is to expect from that quarter: certainly nothing on the order of some great cultural renewal that might inspire a new zeal for having children...

Amber, would you mind taking the reigns next week? I'm a bit overwhelmed at the moment (starting a new job and trying to do some fellowship applications). I could lead if I had to, but I'm afraid I'd be a bit rushed. After September 10 I should have more time to think and be a better participant in the discussion.

Who is fortie winters?

Randall,

My first thought on reading this sonnet was how closely related it is to the first sonnet.  One element I felt in the first sonnet, which seems more pronounced here, is the relationship between the speaker and the subject of the poem.  The "proud livery, so gaz'd on now" makes me wonder whether it's the world doing the gazing, or whether it's the speaker.  It is difficult not to read the youth's forecast--'trenches,' 'deepe sunken eyes'-- as a mirror of the speaker's own condition.  Similarly, the speaker seems to know intimately the feeling of being young, and his praise of the youth's beauty reads as a sorry memory of the speaker's own lost youth.  It is possible, too, that the youth is more than just the site of the speaker's meditation, but is the object of his affection.

Either way, the two beings each take on a duality in this reading--the soon-to-be-old youth is not very different from the once-young but aging speaker.  This makes the closing couplet especially interesting; yes, the speaker is urging the youth to procreate, but the speaker also seems to be working out a bit of private regenesis in his self-identification with the youth.  At some point, we're going to have to start looking into love, lust, and admiration, and ask what kind of ontological unity is possible through these relations.

I'm interested in this sonnet's questions about beauty too, but I'll save those thoughts until I can pull them together a bit more.  In closing, here's a little treasure from the back of Booth's edition of the sonnets--excerpts from the 1567 translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis, preceded by a note on how Shakespeare borrows Ovid's basic structure of presenting like thoughts next to each other, with gradual changes.  Everything changes, but it stays the same.

What?  seest thou not how that the yeere as representing playne
The age of man, departes itself in quarters fowre?  first bayne
And tender in the spring it is, even like a sucking babe.
Then greene, and voyd of strength, and lush, and foggye in the blade,
And cheeres the husbandman with hope.  Then all things florish gay.
The earth with flowers of sundry hew then seemeth for too play,
And vertue small or none too herbes there dooth as yit belong.
The yeere from springtyde passing foorth too sommer, wexeth strong,
Becommeth lyke a lusty youth.  For in our lyfe through out
There is no tyme more plentifull, more lusty whote and stout.
Then followeth Harvest when the heate of youth growes sumwhat cold,
Rype, meeld, disposed meane betwixt and yoongman and an old,
And sumwhat sprent with grayish heire.  Then ugly winter last
Like age steales on with trembling steppes, all bald, or overcast
With shirle thinne heare whyght as snowe. (Ovid XV 221-235)

You'll recognize some body-land imagery here, but also particular idiomatic words--lusty, sum.  Possibly another sense of weeds, too--the young man is the weed, "greene, and voyd of strength, and lush."  Fun stuff.

-Chris

Sonnet 2

Welcome back! First, allow me to attempt to sidestep the various editors’ attempts to make our poem intelligible and present Sonnet 2 in a form as close to what Shakespeare may have written. In modern editions I have, for example, line four yields both “tottered” and “tatter’d” (yes, in the end they mean the same thing). But let’s go with the kooky spellings and archaic punctuation.

When fortie Winters shall besiege thy brow,
And digge deep trenches in thy beauties field,
Thy youthes proud livery, so gaz’d on now,
Wil be a totter'd weed, of smal worth held:
Then being askt, where all thy beautie lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty daies;
To say within thine owne deepe sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftlesse praise.
How much more praise deserv’d thy beauties use,
If thou couldst answere this faire child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse
Prooving his beautie by succession thine.
This were to be new made when thou art ould,
And see thy blood warme when thou feel'st it could.

This may seem banal, but I’m fascinated how Shakespeare manages to get double-duty out of so many of his images. In the first quatrain, he has set up a pair of oppositions – youth and age, livery and weeds. The latter word means “clothes” (Orsino tells Viola “let me see thee in thy woman’s weeds” in Twelfth Night), but it also reconnects us to “beauties field” (flowers?) from line 2, bridging the two images. Very cool.

What do you think of the other oppositions that emerge – shame and praise, thriftlessness and profit (“the treasure of thy lusty daies”), warmth and cold – and what can we say about Shakespeare’s use of the technique as an argumentative mode?

One more image to consider: beauty. Shakespeare uses the word four times. Is that all that’s being preserved here?

Is it too early to consider the poem’s place in the (admittedly artificial) sequence? Chris mentioned “economic transactions” in Sonnet 1. I might shift that category to “middle-class-ness” and ask if all the “treasure” and “thriftlesse” talk and the summing of accounts don’t betray the roots of a man raised in merchant weeds. Amber? What would Greenblatt say? And where does the concept of “succession” fit in?

Finally, this poem clearly iterates the theme of Sonnet 1 – the perpetuation of self through offspring. How does Sonnet 2 differ from Sonnet 1? And if you were the object of both poems’ admonishments, which would convince you more?

Randall