Sonnet 8

8

Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?

Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy;

Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,

Or else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?

If the true concord of well-tuned sounds

By unions married, do offend thy ear,

They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds

In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear:

Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,

Strikes each in each by mutual ordering,

Resembling sire, and child, and happy mother,

Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing:

Whose speechless song being many, seeming one,

Sings to thee: ‘Thou single wilt prove none.’

General
This is the first sonnet about music and its structure reflects its subject matter. As HV says, it divides music into its three parts: 5-8, its sounds or aural effect; 9-12, its strings or medium; 13-14, its song or content.

WS also varies the rhetorical form: a single question, 2 proverbs, a double question, a hypothesis – well-known strategies in persuasive oratory.

I am also taken by the movement between words. By this I mean how one word metamorphoses into another with a corresponding shift in sense. Examples are lov'st to receiv'st not gladly(3); concord to confound (5 & 7); one to none (13 & 14)

Sense
First quatrain
You, who have a voice like music/ when there is music to hear, why do you listen to music without pleasure? Things that delight should not war with each other, joy/pleasure should delight in pleasure. Why do you appear to love music since you listen to it without pleasure?

1. Music to hear: You, whose voice is music. GBE thinks that this implies 'the youth is music itself, subsuming all the perfectly integrated qualities attributed to music in the following lines’. Note the use of the rhetorical figure of chiasmus here: music-hear-hear-music.
Sadly: without pleasure, mournfully.

2. Sweets…joy: i.e. things affording pleasure

3. cf Jessica in MV 5.1.69: ‘I am never merry when I hear sweet music’; and Spenser The Ruins of Time (1591), 613-14: ‘Of the strings…/ That wrought both joy and sorrow in my mind.’

4. receiv'st: to attend, listen, or give heed to
annoy: pain, irksomeness. IR (& JK) also link annoy with French ennui. CB: the paradox of enjoying the sadness of music is a commonplace of the period, from Jacques’ ‘I can suck the melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs’ (AYLI, 2.5.11-12) to John Dowland’s motto: Semper Dowland semper dolens (‘always Dowland always doleful’).

Second quatrain
If the perfect harmony of well-tuned sounds joined together by chords, offends your ear, they so but sweetly/affectionately chide you, - you who wastes / creates discord by being single / failing to take your part in part-singing.

6: Unions: chords cf Sidney’s New Arcadia - Cecropia's speech on marriage: 'And is a solitary life as good as this? Then can one string make as good music as a consort.'

7: sweetly chide: (a) rebuke affectionately / graciously (b) rebuke with sweet (well-tuned sounds). Cf Sidney, AS, first song, 18: ‘Whose grace is such, that when it chides doth cherish’ JK draws a comparison with MND (4.1.111-17), where Hippolyta describes the ‘music’ of the hounds in the field: ‘Such gallant chiding…So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.’
confound: destroys by mixing together, ruins by blending (cf 5.6) from the latin: confundere: ‘to pour together, topple in confusion, bewilder, disastrously mingle’

8: IR: ‘who, by remaining single, suppress those roles (of husband and father) which you should play.’

5-8: SB: ‘Sometimes Shakespeare’s own sentences can be demonstrated to mean nothing at all – even where readers understand them perfectly.' (!) He then goes to some lengths about these lines, looking at how the reader has to negotiate for himself a meaning that is not literally out – he concludes: ‘The quatrain is an emblem of the paradoxical conditions it recommends, harmony and marriage – unities made by literally ‘confounding,’ ‘pouring together,’ individual elements and potentially disabled by a confusion that results from failure to mix.’

Third quatrain
Note how each string, dear husband to the other, hits/strikes a deal in unison, resembling father, child and fortunate mother, who all combined as one, sing one pleasing note.

9-12: cf: Samuel Brandon, The Virtuous Octavia (1598), ll.2024-27: ‘When any one doth strike a tuned string: / The rest, which with the same in concord be, / Will shew a motion to that senseless thing; / When all the other neither stirre nor play.’ Also, St Paul’s ‘mystery’ of marriage, namely that two ‘shall be one flesh’ (Eph. 5.32-3).

The metaphor is of lute strings, which are tuned in pairs; when one is plucked, the other of the same pitch produces a sympathetic vibration.

Couplet
Whose wordless song although containing many parts, yet sounding as one, sings this to you: ‘You, single, will prove to be nothing’

13: speechless: wordless, i.e. instrumental rather than vocal.

14. Plays on proverbial idea that one is nothing – i.e. the young man will be a zero cf: 3.14: ‘Die single, and thy image dies with thee’ and 136.8-10 ‘Among a number one is reckoned none, / Then in the number let me pass untold / Though in thy store’s account I one must be.’ as well as Marlowe, Hero and Leander, 255-6: ‘One is no number; maids are nothing then, / Without the sweet society of men’.This idea is evidently revisited by WS on more than one occasion – this from MM 2.4.134-8: Angelo to Isabella – ‘Be that you are, / That is a woman; if you be more, you’re none; /If you be one as you are well-express’d / By all external warrants, show it now / By putting on the destin’d livery.’

Links with other sonnets
14. 3.14; 136.8-10

Links with other works by WS
3. MV, 5.1.69: See also ref to AYLI above.

7. MND, 4.1.111-17

14.MM, 2.4.134-8

Links with works by other authors
3. Spenser The Ruins of Time, 613-14

6. Sidney New Arcadia, 333

7. Sidney, AS, first song, 18

9-12: Samuel Brandon, The Virtuous Octavia, 2024-27

14. Marlowe, Hero and Leander, 255-6

Sonnet 7

7

Lo, in the Orient when the gracious light

Lifts up his burning head, each under eye

Doth homage to this new appearing sight,

Serving with looks his sacred majesty;

And having climbed the steep-up heavenly hill,

Resembling strong youth in his middle age,

Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,

Attending on his golden pilgrimage:

But when from high-most pitch with weary car

Like feeble age he reeleth from the day,

The eyes, fore-duteous, now converted are

From his low tract, and look another way:

So thou, thyself out-going in thy noon,

Unlooked on diest, unless thou get a son.

General
Imagery linking sun and man is not unusual in WS - the obvious parallel is with R&J when Romeo sees Juliet at the balcony: 'It is the east and Juliet is the sun! /Arise fair sun and kill the envious moon' (2.2.2ff) and there are other examples as set out below. There has been some speculation on the links between Sonnet 7 and R&J, ‘but the direction of influence cannot be established.’(GBE)

Structure
The sonnet is structured around the key word 'look', which appears in all the elements - i.e each of the the three quatrains and then the couplet. Not only that, but it is in the latter half of each element, creating a setting/situation followed by how it is/is not perceived.

Sense
First quatrain
Behold, just as in the east the sun lifts its regal head and every inferior eye beneath it pays allegiance (kneels) to this new appearing sight, paying compliment with looks to its sacred majesty. i.e.: man stares downwards to avoid being dazzled by the rising sun.

1. Lo: behold (with play on low in line 12)
gracious light: regal, beneficent sun. The sun was considered king among the planets in the Ptolemaic system, in which the Earth was of course central. This from R&J: 'the worshipp'd sun / Peer'd forth the golden window of the east' (1.1.118-9)
2. under eye: (a) below (on the ground); (b) socially inferior (c) mortal eye (i.e. every creature which lives beneath the sun.) cf WT : Polixenes says: ‘I have eyes under my service’(4.2.35)

Second quatrain
And having climbed steeply across the sky, in its middle age (i.e. midday) resembling the vigour of youth, still those on earth adore its beauty, attending on its golden pilgrimage.
5. having: refers to the sun
steep-up: precipitous
heavenly hill: the hill of the heavens ( i.e. the sky).SB: 'The conjunction of the rising sun, religious language, and the climbing of a hill gives the whole poem vague, substantively unharnessed, but pervasive reference to the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ; the pun of ‘sun’ and son in line 14 is also obviously pertinent to Christ, but the Christian references never solidify, never add up to the sacrilegiously complimentary analogy they points towards; they do, however, give an air of solemnity and miraculousness to the equation the poem implies between the sun’s cyclical birth, death, and rebirth and human victory over mortality by procreation.’

Aristotle in his Rhetoric divided life into 3 ages, giving supremacy to the middle one – so middle age more to do with being in one’s prime as WS saw it: 'all the valuable qualities that youth and age divide between them are united in the prime of life, while all their excesses or defects are replaced by moderation and fitness. The body is in its prime from thirty to five-and-thirty; the mind about forty-nine.' Link to the full text is http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/rhetoric.html (for the study of ages go to Book 2, Parts 12-14). Horace takes this up in Ars Poetica and WS develops into the seven ages in Jacques' speech in AYLI.

6-10: Most relevant to this quatrain is Ovid Metamorphoses 15.247-9 (Golding): 'From that tyme growing strong and swift, he passeth foorth the space / Of youth: and also wearing out his middle age apace, / Through drooping ages steepye path he ronneth out his race.'
6. Resembling…age: At noon the sun retains its youthful vigour (SB)
7. still: (a) nevertheless; (b) continually
mortal looks adore: (a) mortal looks continue to adore (b) nevertheless mortal gazes adore. KDJ: adore conceals a play on ‘ore’, the source of gold.
8. attending: (a) watching (b) attending like servants

Third quatrain
But when from the apex, with tired chariot, it staggers from the day like someone old, those eyes, previously cast down because duteous, are now turned away from the sun’s low path and look elsewhere.
9. weary car: metonym for ‘weary sun’, car meaning chariot, the two coming together in R3: ‘The weary sun hath made a golden set, / And by the bright tract of his fiery car / Gives token of a goodly day tomorrow.’ (5.3.19-21)
10. reeleth: staggers
11. fore: before
converted: turned away – Booth: ‘however – an moreover – it simultaneously suggest a conversion from superstitious heathen fear to higher religion.’

Couplet
In the same way, the speaker says, the young man burning himself out in his prime, dies ignored, unless you sire a son.

13. JK finds line 13 very dense - ‘this is hardly glossable’ while SB: (a) so you, outlasting you prime (b) so you, at the moment when you surpass yourself (c) so you, yourself already at the point of departing (i.e. dying) at the moment of your prime (d) so you, yourself already in the process of going out (as a light goes out, extinguished) at the moment of your prime.
14. GBE: playing with idea of ‘sun’, which will arise anew as you set.

Links with other works by WS
1. R&J, 1.1.118-19
2. WT, 4.2.35
9. R3, 5.3.19-21