Wow, that Heaney poem has got some juicy language! So much fun to read out loud. I think the Heaney poem could be read as a critique of the platonism/gnosticism of the sonnet.

I loved your analysis of all the things that cut off in the poem. I'd just add that it's pretty rare to come across a poem where you transition from summer to winter. If fall was in there, we'd have this smooth passage of time, but instead we just go from trees with leaves to bare bark (that reminds me of dc).

"But flowers distil'd though they with winter meete/ Leefe but their show, their substance still lives sweet."

There's a major devaluation of materiality here. The petals and the stem are just for show; they're just a casing for essential flowerness. And through a distillation process, it's possible to free the wheat from the chafe and preserve the eternal form of flowerhood without the flower.

In Heaney's poem, the narrator reacts to abundance with this "hunger" that sets him out into the briar with pales. But "once off the bush the fruit fermented." In the sonnet, it was only when the essence of the flower was removed from the material plant that the value could be preserved for eternity, but in Heaney, value imbues the physical IN TIME, and the attempt at abstraction (distilling a blackberry bush into a consumer product) causes decomposition and devaluation.

Let me add my own passage into the conversation. It's my favorite passage from an essay by Marilynne Robinson:
"One might as well say that the earth invades the seed, seizes it as occasion to compose itself in some brief shape. Groundwater in a sleeve of tissue, flaunting improbable fragrances and iridescence as the things of this strange world are so inclined to do. So a thriving place is full of intention, a sufficiency awaiting expectation, teasing hope beyond itself."

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.

Where There's a Will

Amber,

I'll pick up the challenge on the last two lines: "Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,/ Which used lives th' executor to be." I read them as Shakespeare setting up a simple reversal turning around the "unused/used" pair. If you fail to marry and have children, thus passing on your beauty, it dies with you. On the other hand, if you use your beauty appropriately -- propagation -- it continues ("lives") on.

You raise the question about "executor," which I think is exactly right. For me it really captures the merchant-class values of the sonnet and persistent imagery of money-lending and miserliness. In this sense, beauty here is capital, not to be wasted on the self, but invested in the future, and capital which if properly invested will distribute itself to one's descendants after death. I find this quantification of beauty a little distasteful. Having had Keats' "Beauty is truth, truth beauty -- that is all/ Ye know on earth and all ye need to know" drummed into me at a relatively early age, the idea that beauty ain't truth but a sort of stock portfolio to be distributed to one's children so they can be more likely to pass on the "investment" seems more than a bit boorish.

And having had such a blasphemous thought -- is Shakespeare a boor? -- like someone made aware of a cheating spouse, I start to find evidence everywhere. Go back to Sonnet 2 for a second, where our poet scolds his target: "If thou couldst answer, 'This fair child of mine/ Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse,'/ Proving his beauty by succession thine." And there it is again: Beauty passed on to one's children settles all outstanding accounts. No doubt fading beauty creates a kind of debt; do we owe the world a replenishing of its coffers of comeliness? In Sonnet 1, Shakespeare speaks of "the world's due."

Or take Twelfth Night, where Viola (as Cesario) tweaks Olivia, echoing much of what we've discussed in these first few sonnets:

VIOLA
Lady, you are the cruel'st she alive
If you will lead these graces to the grave,
And leave the world no copy.
OLIVIA
O, sir, I will not be so hard-hearted. I will give out divers schedules of my beauty. It shall be inventoried, and every particle and utensil labeled to my will: as, item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two gray eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth" (1.5.239-249).

Again: Beauty as estate, to be divvied up amongst the progeny. When reading Twelfth Night, I have, to this point, felt that Olivia's arrogance is being mocked. In the context of the play, her regression from society to mourn her dead brother is over the top, and Viola's voice of sensibility reminds us that a woman should know "well what love women to men may owe," something Olivia seems to have forgotten. Viola also reflects here the role we see the poet of the sonnets take.

But in light of Sonnet 4, my appreciation of Olivia's response has shifted. It strikes me that our young man has had no voice in the sonnets, except that provided by his accuser (see quote from Sonnet 2 above). Olivia gives him a voice, and in doing so she seems to turn from mockee to mocker. What would she say if Viola's words were "Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,/ Which used, lives th' executor to be"? Maybe this:

"Send for a lawyer to draw up my will
My beauty will act as executor,
Distributing my fair in codicil:
Item, two lips, indifferent red..."

Now that's putting the "cute" in executor. I wonder what to make of the money images we've found so far. Spending and owing. Accounts and executors. Largess and niggardliness. Audit and bequest. Can Shakespeare really see beauty as so much filthy lucre?

-rrf

Use

Hi Chris,

Thanks for starting this conversation on the word "use." I kind of glossed over it when I read the sonnet before my first post, but your comments helped me make more sense of it. I'm still working on getting a good reading on the last two lines. Someone help me think through this.

Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,

Which used lives th' executor to be.

I originally read these lines roughly as: "if you perform your duties correctly you will live." In other words, do what nature wants and expects, and you will live on through your children. The more and more I read the lines this way, the more I stumbled over "executor." Originally I thought it was simply saying the person who executes nature's will will live on. But when I looked the word up in the OED, there is another definition that works in a different way: a person named in a decedent's will to carry out the provisions of that will. In a poem that is deeply rooted in money and law (unthrifty, lend, niggard, usurer), I'm wondering if this definition could provide a different meaning for these last two lines and the ultimately the entire sonnet. Any thoughts?

Amber

Words, words, words

Hi!

Amber, like you I was taken with the repeated pronouns.  At first, I didn't read them as mocking, but you've made a strong case for that reading.  My initial impression was that the repeated you, you, you was an erotic attachment, building toward the climactic "Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive."  Perhaps these two readings can remain in tension, explaining the halfhearted rhetorical commitment I hear in the speaker.

I was interested in the word "use"; my mind immediately jumped to a few other Shakespearean lines.  First was the senator's warning to Othello in 1.3 to "Use Desdemona well."  Here, the sense is something like, "Treat her properly," or "Understand her nature so as to gain your full advantage from her" (This second sense has a dark side which echoes Brabantio's warning that women are deceptive.)  Othello is such an elemental play; other uses of "use" in the play seem connected to the importance of properly understanding nature (And, by extension, humanity as well.  Consider Gail Paster's talks this summer about the early modern understanding of the body as governed by humors).

I also remembered Hamlet's lament in 1.2: "How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world."  Here, uses can be taken to mean ways of ordering or investing resources for my profit, allowing Hamlet's speech to be about renunciation.  Or it could mean ways of applying myself, hobbies, occupations.  Both of these speak to new understandings of the self encoded in the mercantile, professionalized urban life that was appearing at the time.

The two uses of use I cited illustrate the divergent worldviews that lend Elizabethan literature some of its energy--to some extent the world is still enchanted, and can be controlled through contemplation, but to some extent the world is now seen as resources, ready to be put to use and invested.  Consider how the negation of use changes with context:  For the Aristotelian Christian trying to understand the natural world, the opposite of use is abuse: misunderstanding, sin.  For the economist, the opposite of used is unused: missed opportunities, waste.  Both terms appear in Sonnet 4. 

In a second post, I plan to connect the difference between these approaches to Jacob's interest in the glass darkly, and the relationship between the present and the transcendent.  Maybe even going back to our former interest in the nature of beauty.  But it's late, and I can't access the OED from home. 

Trafficking alone

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

Sonnet 4

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thy self thy beauty's legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free:
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thy self alone,
Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive:
Then how when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Which, used, lives th' executor to be.

This poem seems to flow nicely after the last one. Last week Amber pointed out how the young man was projected into a world of other people. The figure of the wife was present as an absence for the young man. She existed as concrete concepts for him, and yet the concepts had no incarnated body it could point to. He existed in relationship with the concept “wife,” prior to having a wife to accompany the concept.

I think this notion of being-in-relationship-to prior to encountering is at play in this poem as well. But now that in-relationship-to is with nature itself. The narrator doesn’t merely verbally label the young man’s debt however; rather he activates the debt through the use of inquisition. Last sonnet we had one question, spurred by the present-absence of the embodied wife. Now we have four questions. Who, or what, is present here as a an abstraction but not as a material substance? What absence serves as the justification for the inquisition?

Why is it that “trafficking alone” is considered self-deception? The narrator doesn’t seem to think that self-love is wrong. Rather, the narrator rejects the very existence of self-love. Anyone living in a world in which the self serves as the final arbiter of meaning is living in an imaginary universe. The questions could be read as attempts to introduce weakness into the young man’s internal logic, subtly coaxing him towards the narrator’s interpretation. Do you get the sense that there is a power struggle taking place between the narrator and young man?

And who is this nature we keep hearing about? Seems like a pretty important figure.

That should get things started. Summer’s finally starting to pass here. Days aren’t as warm as they were a week ago, and the nights are getting chilly. I went out and helped slaughter two pigs on Sunday and when I got to the farmers market on Tuesday, it was already delicious sausage. I can’t believe the farmer could get it to market that quickly all by himself. If you’re looking for something to do Friday night, I suggest finding a place to listen to the Kol Nidre. It is by far the most beautiful and moving liturgy the Jews have to offer. It isn’t hard to feel the inquisitor during the opening song.