Shakespeare in Penzance: The Sonnets

Sonnet 14

2010-12-06T14:37:00.000Z

Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck;

And yet, methinks, I have astronomy,

But not to tell of good or evil luck,

Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons’quality;

Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,

Pointing to each his thunder, rain and wind;

Or say with princes if it shall go well

By aught predict that I in heaven find;

But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,

And, constant stars, in them I read such art

As truth and beauty shall together thrive

If from thyself, to store thou would convert:

Or else of thee this I prognosticate,

Thy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date.

Sense
First quatrain
The speaker says that he doesn’t draw his conclusions from the stars, but even so he understands astrology, although not to foretell good or bad luck, of plagues, shortages, or the nature of the forthcoming seasons.
2. I have astronomy: i.e I have knowledge of astronomy

Second quatrain
Nor is he able to predict the future down to the last minute, stating exactly when there will be thunder, rain and wind; or say whether certain rulers will be fortunate by means of frequent predictions which he reads in the stars.
8. oft predict: KDJ has amended to aught, on the grounds that oft is almost never used as an adjective, and this is the only recorded use of predict as a noun. But others have stayed with oft, admitting its rarity. SB: ‘The perversity of the diction and the awkwardly elliptical style suggest the pompous obfuscation of a smug hack.’ Not sure I agree with him, but what a wonderful comment!

Third quatrain
Instead, the speaker says, he derives his knowledge from the beloved’s eyes. They are like constant/unmoving stars, and in them he can read/discover such learning to the effect that truth (constancy) and beauty (external) will thrive together if the beloved were to turn away from self-adoration/gratification and convert to providing for the future (store).
9-10: this idea is typically Elizabethan but most particularly from Sidney in Arcadia: ‘O sweet Philoclea…thy heavenly face is my Astronomie’ and here, in Astrophel and Stella no.26:

Though dusty wits dare scorn astrology,

And fools can think those lamps of purest light

Whose numbers, ways, greatness, eternity,

Promising wonders, wonder to invite,

To have for no cause birthright in the sky,

But for to spangle the black weeds of night;

Or for some brawl, which in that chamber high

They should dance, to please a gazer's sight:

For me, I do Nature unidle know,

And know great causes great effects procure,

And know those bodies high reign on the low.

And if these rules did fail, proof makes me sure,

Who oft fore-judge my after-following race

By only those two eyes in Stella's face.

12: convert: (a) turn your attention (b) change. Note pronunciation: 'convart'.

Couplet
If not the speaker says that he predicts for the beloved that his death will also be truth and beauty’s final fate and stipulated limit (in time).
14. cf The Pheonix and Turtle, ll.62-64: 'Truth may seem, but cannot be, / Beauty brag, but 'tis not she, / Truth and Beauty buried be.’
HV comments that this is the first instance of the linked words truth and beauty in the sonnets.

Links to other works by WS:
14: The Phoenix and Turtle, ll.62-64

Links to works by other authors:
Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, 26

Sonnet 13

2010-11-22T14:16:00.001Z

O that you were yourself! But, love, you are

No longer yours, than you yourself here live;

Against this coming end you should prepare,

And your sweet semblance to some other give:

So should that beauty which you hold in lease

Find no determination; then you were

Yourself again after yourself’s decease,

When your sweet issue your sweet form should bear.

Who lets so fair a house fall to decay,

Which husbandry in honour might uphold

Against the stormy gusts of winter’s day

And barren rage of death’s eternal cold?

O none but unthrifts, dear my love you know:

You had a father, let your son say so.

General
There is a debate about the use of you over thou here – it is the first sonnet in the sequence to do so. SB argues that this is a move towards intimacy, but there is much confusion about this and WS appears to use the terms interchangeably in the sonnets, except for the Dark Lady sequence where (except 145 which is unique for other reasons) he only uses thou. GBE concludes: ‘it seems to me very doubtful that, in general, such variations should be taken as signalling significant changes in attitude or tone’. My view is that the more of WS' sonnets I read the more I understand that this is not a sequence in the way that other sonnet sequences are organised, but more as a collection of poems, possibly in different voices, to different subjects. Such issues only become significant if the reader is intent on imposing a narrative on the group as a whole.

HV concentrates more on the tone of the poem, noting that this is the first ‘momentous instant in which the speaker first uses evocatives of love: he addresses the young man as love and dear my love. The sonnet is Italianate: the octave argues for the preservation of the individual self, the sestet for preservation of family lineage.

It is also the first of the many ‘reply-sonnets', in which it appears that the speaker (s) is answering a point put to him by the beloved(s).

Sense

First quatrain
Oh, that you were in good health/ that your identity was fixed. But, my love, you are only in possession of yourself for as long as you remain alive. You should prepare yourself in anticipation of death, and replicate a likeness of yourself in someone else.
1-4: GBE provides a useful paraphrase: ‘O if only the whole you were composed of soul (‘self’) and hence immortal (there would be no cause for concern), but ‘you’ are a combination of soul and body and, as such, your bodily part is mortal and subject to death (‘this coming end’)’.
1. JK: ‘The first yourself is an imagined absolute, beyond chance and Time, the latter quotidian, subject to the decay described by Sonnet 12’.
2. here: in the world, with poss play on ‘heir’.
4. semblance: image, copy (with implication that this image would perpetuate both parts, spiritual and physical, of ‘you’)

Second quatrain
In that case that beauty which you hold by lease, i.e. only temporarily, would find no end/conclusion/termination. Then yourself would survive beyond your death, when your sweet offspring should bear your sweet – essential – form.
5. beauty: both inner and outer (GBE)
6. determination: in legal language, an estate held in lease determines at the end of a fixed term; one held for life determines at the death of the holder (SB).
7. again: SB sees a possible pun on 'a gain' – and that WS ‘is pressing the idea of investment for every dram of wit it will yield…this sonnet is cast in terms of profitable property management.’
8. sweet form: precious image – GBE: ‘with perhaps some reference to the Scholastic concept of something which contains the ‘essential determinant principle’. GBE comments on ‘the frequent and rather tiresome repetition’ in the sonnets of sweet - may be a legacy of Petrarch’s ‘dolce’, ‘dolcemente’, ‘dolcezza’ and other related forms. However, I feel that the word itself has suffered from recent bad press and is about purity and essence instead of cuteness; as such the repetition is to be marked but not resisted.

Third quatrain
Who lets such a beautiful body/family line go to waste, which good management might support in an honourable state/perpetuate through ‘an honourable estate’ of matrimony, in anticipation of the bad effects of old age (‘winter’) and the barrenness of death.
9. lets: allows, with quibble on lease
10. house: cf. roof in 10 – both his body and his lineage
12. barren rage: WS often uses rage where he means lust/desire/passion
cf. Lucrece ll. 464-69:
His hand that yet remains upon her breast,
Rude ram, to batter such an ivory wall! -
May feel her heart, poor citizen! Distress'd,
Wounding itself to death, rise up and fall, -
Beating her bulk, that his hand shakes withal:
This moves in him more rage and lesser pity,
To make the breach and enter this sweet city.

SB considers that in this sonnet barren is used as an adjective signifying effect and cause – so it is a barren-making passion.

Couplet
O none but prodigals/spendthrifts do that – you had a father, create a son that will say the same.
13-14: Q’s punctuation is ambiguous here. The intimacy of 'dear my love you know', confirms the intimate use of you is intended in the sonnet (JK).

Links with other works by WS
12. Lucrece, ll.463 - 469

Sonnet 12

2010-11-15T14:21:00.000Z

When I do count the clock that tells the time,

And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;

When I behold the violet past prime,

And sable curls all silvered o’er with white:

When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,

Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,

And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves

Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard:

Then of thy beauty do I question make,

That thou among the wastes of time must go,

Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,

And die as fast as they see others grow,

And nothing ‘gainst time’s scythe can make defence

Save breed to brave him, when he takes thee hence.

General
There are several works that WS kept for constant reference on his desk; one of them was Ovid's Metamorphoses, which it he knew both in the Latin and in Arthur Golding's 1567 translation – and, depending on the vocabulary/phraseology he uses we can sometimes tell which version he is thinking of at the time. Here, Book 15 ll. 221-237 applies, with its comparison of the passing of time in Nature and human life:

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, is the blade,
And cheeres the husbandman with hope. Then all things florish gay.
The earth with flowres of sundry hew then seemeth for to play,
And vertue small or none to herbes there dooth as yit belong.
The yeere from springtyde passing foorth to sommer, wexeth strong,
Becommeth lyke a lusty youth. For in our lyfe through out
There is no tyme more plentifull, more lusty, hote and stout. ...
Then followeth Harvest when the heate of youth growes sumwhat cold,
Rype, meeld, disposed meane betwixt a yoongman and an old,
And sumwhat sprent with grayish heare. Then ugly winter last
Like age steales on with trembling steppes, all bald, or overcast
With shirle thinne heare as whyght as snowe. Our bodies also ay
Doo alter still from tyme to tyme, and never stand at stay.
Wee shall not bee the same wee were today or yisterday.

(The full text of Golding's translation can be found at: http://www.elizabethanauthors.com/ovid15.htm) But you can also buy one – so much better for annotating – see Additional Reading blog (Jan 2010).

Time with its unstoppable tyranny, as we have already seen in Sonnets 2 & 5, is one of WS' major preoccupations. It is probably no accident that when the sequence was assembled, this sonnet was numbered 12, just as 30 and 60 are also concerned with the passing of time. This does, though, also have wider implications for the publication of the sonnets – who did it, who ordered them, and in particular whether Shakespeare knew about it. While I believe it is more appropriate to consider these sonnets not so much as a sequence as a collection, there are undeniable patterns and groups, some of which are centred on numbering.

Sense
First quatrain
The speaker says that when he counts the clock chimes telling the time and sees the splendid day sunk into obscure/fearful night; when he sees the violet past its best, and black hair turned to white....
1. tells: utters; counts/measures out. Both hearing and sight remind the speaker of the inexorable march of Time the Destroyer against ‘beauty’.
2. brave: resplendent
hideous: KDJ compares with Sonnets 5&6 and argues that there may be an association with hidden = causing dread or horror
3. violet: sometimes associated with faithfulness, WS uses the flower elsewhere, as KDJ points out, to do with the vulnerability of youth as in Hamlet 1.3.7ff (Laertes warning Ophelia about Hamlet's interest in her): 'A violet in the youth of primy nature, / Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting, / The perfume and suppliance of a minute.' More widely, it is also linked with the Virgin Mary as a symbol of her chastity.
past prime: past its best; when the spring is over; also originally associated with the first hour of the day and then by extension, spring or youth (KDJ). This from V&A, 131-2: 'Fair flowers that are not gathered in their prime / Rot and consume themselves in little time.'

The first quatrain is interesting for 1) its metre – the first line is all monosyllables, reflecting the ticking of a clock 2) the repetition of when, the time related word that will carry on into the second quatrain and 'convert' to then in the third.

Second quatrain
When the speaker sees tall trees bare of leaves, which formerly sheltered the herd from the heat, and summer’s greenery all bound up in sheaves, borne on the barrow, now turned white and bristly...
5. barren: unusual in the sense of barren leaves – more usually about fruit – recalls the chill landscape of bareness everywhere in 5.8 (CB); cf.11.10: barrenly perish. I wonder also if there is a reference to writing here, found in the pairing of barren and leaves - perhaps a sense of inspiration drying up.....writers, WS included (e.g Sonn 77) often use the metaphor of childbirth about their writing output.
6. canopy: this is its first cited use as a verb in the OED.
6-8. The combination of senses (of bier) turns harvest into a funeral, as the friend turns opportunities for reproduction into self-love (CB). There is also the Elizabethan idea of the harvest-home in which the last sheaf of grain was brought to the barn with great ceremony and celebration (SB).
Keats wrote in the margin of his copy of the sonnets, next to the account of summer’s bier: ‘Is this to be borne: Hark ye!’ [source: HV]
8. bier: a) handbarrow for carrying harvested grain; b) stand for a corpse cf. Hamlet 4.5.164: 'They bore him bare-faced upon the bier'.
beard: 'hair' (of such grains as wheat). It should perhaps be pronounced more like 'bird' – WS rhymes heard and beard in LLL 2.1.201/2.

Third quatrain
Then do I ask about the survival of your beauty, when you have to go ‘among the wastes of time’ – become one of the things destroyed by time, since virtue and beauty change/depart from themselves/give themselves up (to death)/lose their essential qualities, and decay/die just as quickly/steadily as they see others grow.

In her essay on this sonnet HV is most interested in the idea of sweets and beauties – esp sweets – she sees them as standing for inward virtue and outward show – ‘when we look back to see what proof we have for that interest in the poem, we behold, as if for the first time, the kindly trees sheltering the grateful herd’ – they stand for something sweet as well as participating in the list of ‘fading beauties’. She goes on: ‘The major aesthetic inventions of sonnet 12 are thus the decision to add sweets to beauties, and its corollary, the model of freely chosen acquiescence in one’s own death in favour of one’s children. ...If the young man is to be a creature of human worth, he must be virtuous, must not rail against but acquiesce morally in his own extermination, and must defy, by biologically reinforcing Nature’s increase, the power of Time to decrease value. Against the euphemistic view of Time by which things are said merely to sink or fade past their prime, the poem bravely faces up to the aggressive destructive power manifesting itself through Time the reaper; and against an aestheticism that would deplore only aging and the loss of beauty, the poem sets a moral elegy that deplores the eventual disappearance of sweet virtue, as well.’

I have found this interpretation of 'sweet' most useful when reading the sonnets (and elsewhere in WS). It gives more weight to a word that in the 21st century conjures images connected with pink and little girls. Here HV recognises that it has a completely different weight instead to do with measures of inner worth as well as outward beauty.
Couplet
Nothing can then take a stand against Time’s scythe, except to produce offspring to defy him when he takes you from this place.
13. breed: breed is a noun here = offspring, although there is the ‘hint of a desperate imperative’ (Burr).
14. brave: challenge/defy

Sonnet 11

2010-06-02T08:27:00.000+01:00

As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow’st

In one of thine, from that which thou departest;

And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow’st

Thou mayst call thine, when thou from youth convertest;

Herein loves wisdom, beauty and increase:

Without this, folly, age and cold decay.

If all were minded so, the times should cease,

And threescore year would make the world away:

Let those whom nature hath not made for store,

Harsh, featureless and rude, barrenly perish;

Look whom she best endowed, she gave the more,

Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish:

She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby

Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.

General
One of the most striking features of this sonnet is the shift in metaphor from organic, recalling the early horticultural sonnets, to inorganic – as the speaker now raises the subject of 'print' and 'copy'. HV talks about this extensively,looking at the pattern of waning-and-growing in the sonnet which ends with ‘a “better” metaphor which will not require the disagreeable waning of the beloved – the inorganic metaphor of the seal that prints successive copies.’ In the last 4 lines the sonnet starts to print copies of its own words: gave, gift; bounteous, beauty; more, more; shouldst, shouldst; carved, copy; meant, print – the process of ‘copying is enacted before the reader’s eyes.

Note also the use of feminine rhyme, as in Sonnet 8: this is where the the final syllable of a line is unstressed – and so these lines ‘convey something of a dying fall', and are often used by WS to illustrate vulnerability and/or heightened emotions.

Sense
First quatrain
The speaker tells the youth that just as fast as he decays he will also grow in his child, born from that which has left him (blood/seed). And that fresh/youthful blood, which he gave when young, he may call his own, when he is no longer young.
1. fast: quickly and steadily; speedily

2.in one of thine: in the person of your child; in the womb of your wife (SB)
departest: give up/surrender, in the sense of semen. (Each orgasm was believed to shorten a man's life!)

3. blood: life

4. convertest: turn aside; left behind. This is pronounced 'convartest', to rhyme with 'departest'. The best recording I have of that is by David Tennant whose Scottish accent perfectly fits the delivery (see Audio List)

Second quatrain
The speaker tells the youth that in this course lies wisdom, beauty and increase, but if he deviates then instead folly, age and cold decay will accrue. If everyone thought the way he does then generations would stop and the sixty years would see the end of the world.
5. Herein: in my advice; in marriage and procreation; in the child itself

7.times: generations

Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric (1553): 'Let it [marriage] be forbidden...and within few years, all mankind must needs decay forever...Take away marriage, and how many shall remain after a hundred years.'

Third quatrain
Let those whom nature has made worthy of preserving – those that are harsh, featureless and ugly, die without issue. Whomever she well endowed with qualities, she gives more to, which generous gift you should nourish/foster by putting it to use.
9. for store: as a source of increase; as breeding stock (livestock kept for breeding were called ‘store beasts’ [SB]). Store may also be a reference to 'hoarded wealth', looking back to e.g. Sonnet 2.

10. featureless: without marks of distinction, shapeless, ugly
rude: crude, rough, bare

11.Like God in the parable of the talents, Nature gave more to those who already had most –see Matt 25.29:‘For unto everyone that hath shall be given and he shall have abundance; But he hath not, from him shall be taken away, even that which he hath.’ (JK)

12.in bounty cherish: foster (take care of) by being bountiful (i.e. prolific); cherish also meant 'guard carefully'; thus this phrase embodies the paradox of several previous sonnets, that of keeping by giving, increasing by diminishing'. (SB)

Couplet
The speaker tells the youth that Nature designed him as her example of what nature can do – her stamp of authority – and in so doing meant that he should reproduce himself, and so not let the original pattern die.
13. carved: incised, in the context of seal
seal: not the wax, but the stamp which marks it. GBE: ‘The youth is pictured as Nature’s great seal by which she validated (gave authority to) her highest creations, as a monarch did in appending a seal to documents of state.'

KDJ also finds a possible echo of Song of Solomon 8.6.: ‘Set me as a seal upon thine heart, as a seal upon thine arm: for love is strong as death.’

Links to works by other authors

11. Matt 25.29:

13: Song of Solomon 8.6

Sonnet 10

2010-06-01T08:50:00.000+01:00

For shame deny that thou bear’st love to any,

Who for thyself art so unprovident;

Grant, if thou wilt, thou art beloved of many,

But that thou none lov’st is most evident:

For thou art so possessed with murd’rous hate

That ‘gainst thyself thou stick’st not to conspire,

Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate

Which to repair should be thy chief desire:

O change thy thought, that I may change my mind;

Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love?

Be as thy presence is, gracious and kind;

Or to thyself at least kind-hearted prove,

Make thee another self for love of me,

That beauty still may live in thine or thee.

General
Nearly all the editors that I have access to naturally pick up on the important shift in Sonnet 10 to the use of 'I' and 'me' – depending on their own standpoint, then, is the argument as to whether the first person is WS or his 'persona'. I have probably been boring enough on this subject but will say nonetheless that, in the absence of any textual or other evidence, we cannot assume that WS is present here, any more than he is when Hamlet is contemplating suicide or having a dig at the groundlings.

This is of course different to constructing a narrative in the text itself, and there is speculation, for example by JK, that 'On the surface [it is] politely critical, banteringly censorious (as befits a sonnet rebuking a social superior), it conveys a concern commensurate with the growing devotion registered in line 13’s for love of me (with its first use of a first-person pronoun in the sequence, even if oblique).’ While I am resistant to the idea of placing too much weight on the idea of a narrative thread in the sequence there are moments like these, where a group of sonnets seem to fit together (e.g. 1-18; 36ff; 127-154) where there is a perceptible movement in the relationship between the speaker and the beloved. As HV says, WS ‘is especially concerned…to punctuate his sequence with moments of visible drama.’

Sense
First quatrain
The speaker chastises the beloved, saying he should be ashamed in denying that he loves anyone, failing to look to the future for himself. While it may be true that he is beloved by many, it is most evident that he himself loves no one.
1.for shame: out of shame; shame on you!; to avoid shame you should deny; from a sense of shame you should deny – SB: ‘all three readings occur one after the other in the sequence of reading.’ It is also worth noting that the word shame also occurs at 9.14, making if not a narrative then at least a cerebral/thematic link between the two sonnets.
bear'st: feel. KDJ makes the point that WS often associates the 'bearing' of love with shame or sin, as in Othello 5.2.240: 'Think on thy sins. They are loves I bear you.' However, she does not carry on that thought to the 'bearing' of children, or the pun that women have to bear the weight of men (e.g as the Nurse does in R&J)

2. unprovident: careless; improvident, failing to look to the future

3. cf 31.1: 'Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts.'

Second quatrain
Because the beloved is so possessed by murderous hate he does not hesitate to conspire against himself, seeking to ruin that beautiful roof which his chief desire should rather be to repair.

5. possessed with: as though invaded by a demon, self-hate

murd’rous hate: cf 9.14

6. stick’st not: does not hesitate or scruple

7.that beauteous roof: JK: ‘The young man seeks to destroy his lovely body (conventionally the house of the soul) by refusing to increase; he therefore threatens destruction of his family, the house to which he belongs, and possibly (by implication) puts a real roof in jeopardy by leaving his property to chance and decay by neglecting to provide an heir.'

These ideas of the ruined house are found elsewhere, e.g.Marlowe's Hero and Leander: 1st Sestiad, 239ff: ‘Who builds a palace, and rams up the gate, / Shall see it ruinous and desolate: / Ah! Simple Hero, learn thyself to cherish, / Lone women like to empty houses perish.’ There is also this, from Spenser's Ruines of Rome, Sonn 7:

Ye sacred ruines, and ye tragick sights,
Which onely doo the name of Rome retaine,
Olde moniments, which of so famous sprights
The honour yet in ashes doo maintaine:
Triumphant Arcks, spyres neighbours to the skie,
That you to see doth th' heauen it selfe appall,
Alas, by little ye to nothing flie,
The peoples fable, and the spoyle of all:
And though your frames do for a time make warre
Gainst time, yet time in time shall ruinate
Your workes and names, and your last reliques marre.
My sad desires, rest therefore moderate:
For if that time make ende of things so sure,
It also will end the paine, which I endure.

Third quatrain
The speaker appeals directly to the beloved to change his way of thinking so that he can alter his opinion of him. Should hate be lodged in a more beautiful dwelling than gentle love? He asks that the youth lives up his appearance/demeanour – gracious and kind/generous, or at least prove benevolent to himself.

11.kind: JK: for Elizabethan readers this meant generosity to others of human kind and particularly towards kindred – ‘so the word incites the youth to create kin to be kind to.’

Here, then, is the all important first-person reference, which now means that the speaker is being drawn into emotional entanglement with the youth, counting his own opinion worthy of being a motive for the young man to change his ways.

Couplet
The speaker pleads/demands that the beloved create another one of him, for love of the speaker, so that beauty might always live on in both the youth and his offspring.

13. The reference to the speaker intensifies from that of his opinion counting to his love holding sway over the youth, as he tries to find a way for the the beloved to endure for his sake, rather than just for the world in general. This the first suggestion of a personal relationship between them.

Links to works by other authors
Marlowe: Hero and Leander
Spenser: Ruines of Rome (trans of Du Bellay’s Antiquitez de Rome, 1591)

Sonnet 9

2010-05-31T08:49:00.001+01:00

Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye

That thou consum’st thyself in single life?

Ah, if thou issueless shalt hap to die,

The world will wail thee like a makeless wife;

The world will be thy widow, and still weep

That thou no form of thee hast left behind,

When every private widow well may keep,

By children’s eyes, her husband’s shape in mind:

Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend,

Shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it;

But beauty’s waste hath in the world an end,

And kept unused the user so destroys it:

No love toward others in that bosom sits

That on himself such murd’rous shame commits.

General

This sonnet uses the argument of Sonnets 1 & 4 that it is a public duty for the beloved to go forth and multiply legitimately. HV points us to the internal workings of the poem as a fantasy on the letter W – if widow = widdow as in Q. ‘The initial and final w’s of widow are mirror images of each other, and its middle letter is repeated – dd – in self-identity….The poem needs to be read in Q spelling, since in modern spelling some of the symmetries disappear.’ She concentrates on the instances of the symmetrical letters: w; u; and v.

It is certainly always a worthwhile exercise to examine the Q text, as later editorial decisions and modernization of spellings can mean we miss out on many of these subtleties.

Sense
First quatrain
The speaker asks the young man if it is because he is afraid that he will bring grief to one woman (i.e. make one a widow), that he wastes himself in a single life. In fact if he should happen to die without issue, the whole world will mourn him like a mateless wife (a widow).

2. consum’st: (a) waste (b) destroy – with overtones of eating, burning (as in a candle) and economic consumption. cf. 1.6: 'feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel'; also R&J, 1.1.210-11: ' For beauty starv'd with her severuty / Cuts beauty off from all posterity.'
Makeless: mateless; widowed (OED)
3.issueless: childless
hap: happen/chance

GBE thinks that the use of hyperbole in this quatrain implies the youth's noble position and importance to the future of the commonwealth ('world'). As you know I have always resisted the idea of putting a narrative on the sonnets, but there are other instances where there seems to be reference by the speaker to a difference in their social positions e.g. 37 where the speaker says that he takes 'all my comfort of thy worth and truth' (37.4). This is not that same as saying, though, that WS himself is referring to e.g. Southampton or Herbert, as tempting as it may be to make that leap!

Second quatrain
The world will be his widow, and continually/always weep that he left no image/likeness (in the shape of children) behind him; when at the same every ordinary, individual widow may well be able to keep in mind an image of her husband in his children’s eyes.

6. form: image, with the suggestion also of something essential.
7. private: particular, individual / living quietly out of the public eye / deprived, suffering (through a macaronic pun on privare (Latin for to deprive)).

Third quatrain
GBE gives the most useful gloss of this difficult quatrain: Whatever a prodigal wastes (‘doth spend’) here on earth merely, as it were, changes hands (‘Shifts but his [i.e. its] place’), because the world continues to benefit from it (‘still…enjoys’). But a waste of beauty yields no return to others unless put to proper use in procreation. If the young man does not put beauty to use/hoards it like a miser, it will be destroyed.

9.unthrift: wastrel, prodigal
doth spend: wastes
11. cf. the Parable of the Talents Matt – cf. Sonnet 2 - also, Marlowe Hero and Leander, 1, 328: ‘Beauty alone is lost, too warily kept’
12.user: waster, user, invester, spendthrift
so: thus

Couplet
He that commits such ‘murd’rous shame’ – keeping beauty to himself by not procreating – holds no love for anyone else.

14. cf : ‘you shalbe coumpted a parricide, or a murtherer of your stocke: that whereas you may by honest marriage encrease your posterite; you suffer it to decaie for ever, through your willful single lyfe.’ Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric (1553) ed T J Derrrick 1982, p137
shame: note as link word between this and Sonnet 10.

Sonnet 8

2010-04-28T14:50:00.000+01:00

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

2010-04-02T10:35:00.000+01:00

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

Sonnet 6

2010-03-25T21:30:00.001Z

Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface

In thee thy summer, ere thou be distilled:

Make sweet some vial, treasure thou some place

With beauty’s treasure, ere it be self-killed.

That use is not forbidden usury

Which happies those that pay the willing loan;

That’s for thyself to breed another thee,

Or ten times happier, be it ten for one:

Ten times thyself were happier than thou art,

If ten of thine ten times refigured thee;

Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart,

Leaving thee living in posterity?

Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair

To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.

General
Sonnet 6 should not be read in isolation, but as following on from Sonnet 5 with which it forms a pair. Without this context, the first quatrain loses some of its impact. As well as the ‘Then’ which starts the sonnet, indicating that the speaker is continuing his argument, there are important link words that bind the two, moving from the general tone of Sonnet 5 to the more personal here:

1. winter: 5.6; 5.13
2. summer: 5.5; 5.9
distilled: 5.9; 5.13
3. sweet: 5.14
4. beauty: 5.8; 5.11
13. fair: 5.4

HV seems unimpressed by this sonnet with what she sees as ‘this rather labored conceit of interest-bearing funds’, but for me it is so typical of WS to get caught up in such a financial/legal metaphor that jars with the organic imagery of Sonnet 5 as well as this sonnet’s first part.

Sense
First quatrain
The speaker now talks directly to the young man to say that in the same way (as the flowers in Sonnet 5), he should not let old age’s rough hand mar/ravage his face, before his ‘essence’ is captured – i.e. he procreates. He should render some womb precious (GBE), cherish/fill it with beauty’s treasure (i.e. his offspring) before that beauty is ‘self-killed’ – destroys itself.

1. ragged: rough (cf tatter’d weed in Sonnet 2) In Q spelling wragged and winter alliterate (HV).
deface: JK suggests that this verb is given an ‘aggressive physicality’ by the attention paid to the young man’s face in Sonnets 1, 2, 3 and 5 – so it is most likely in the sense of ‘unface, ravage the features’. It is, considered in this context, a violent word that sits well with ‘self-killed’ in line 4.
3. Make sweet some vial: SB: ‘the specific meaning ‘impregnate the womb of some woman’ is suggested by the metaphor and the context of the preceding sonnets and is confirmed by line 7.’ This view is supported by GBE with the additional comment making the link to ‘obvious play on the bottle (‘vial’) of ‘sweet’ perfume as an image of marriage in 5.9-10.’
treasure: endow with treasure, enrich (GBE). Treasure is a loaded word in The Sonnets, implying seed/semen as in Sonnet 20.14: ‘Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.’ Elsewhere, in Othello: ‘Say that they slack in their duties / And pour our treasures into foreign laps.’ (4.3.86); and in 1H4 where Lady Hotspur says to her husband ‘my treasures and my rights of thee’ (2.3.4)
4. self-killed: this refers to the idea of the little death that is the result of self-pleasuring (as in 4.7-8 and elsewhere in this first group)

Second quatrain
The mercantile metaphor is picked up, with the speaker saying that it would not be illegal usury to get that sort of return ie children, if it makes the debtor happy – ie the mother who returns the loan (semen) happily with interest (children). That sort of usury is an opportunity for him to produce another self, the mother being 10 times happier if 10 children were to be produced from the one man.

5-6: JK: ‘…usurers are not forbidden to lend money for interest when their debtors are willing to be in debt on usurious terms and pleased to repay what they owe.’ So – the woman will return the loan of his seed with interest ie his progeny.
5. use: (a) kind of use (b) interest, return (GBE) (c) practice of lending money out for interest (usury)(KDJ) (d) sexual intercourse
usury: JK – Elizabeth legalized usury in 1571, but it was frowned on for a long time afterwards. That same statute declared that ‘all usury, being forbidden by the law of God, is sin and detestable’ – it legalized an interest rate of ten in the hundred (cf emphasis on ‘ten’ in lines 8-10). WS is therefore playing with old Aristotlean idea that usury was considered ‘unnatural’, the kind of incest (metal breeding from metal) and at the same time glancing at the legal ten percent return on an investment (GBE). In his Discourse upon Usury (1572), Thomas Wilson comments: ‘God ordeyned for maintenaunce of amitye, and declaration of love, between man and man: whereas now lending is vused for pryate benfit and oppression, & so no charitie is vsed at all…’ Also cf. Sonnet 4.7-8: ‘Profitless usurer’ etc
6. happies: makes happy/fortunate
willing: voluntary, with sexual overtones
7. That’s: which is
breed: usurers were similarly thought of as making their ‘treasure’ (4) breed and multiply (GBE). It reminds me of Shylock’s comment in MV 1.3.128: ‘for when did friendship take / A breed for barren metal of his friend?’
8. ten for one: ie if he had 10 children the happy mother would be ten times happier if it were to produce ten of him. Relates to the legal interest rate – childbirth is talked about in terms of a good investment.

Third quatrain
It would be more fortunate if there were ten replicas of you, and if ten of your offspring replicated you again. Then what would death do if you should die and yet leave you living in perpetuity?
9. than: changed by all editors from 'then' in Q to make sense.
Ten times…art: (a) you would be happier if you lived in 10 likenesses rather than just as you do (b) it would indeed be a fortunate state of affairs if you lived in 10 likenesses of yourself. (JK) Or: 10 of your offspring would offer posterity a much more promising future than you do now in your state of oneness (GBE).
10. If ten…refigured thee: if you had ten children all duplicating you. On a secondary level, the line runs away with itself, suggesting 100 grandchildren (JK).
refigured: re-embodied; perhaps ‘remultiplied’. Note: ‘the multiplication of ten by ten occurs, inevitably, in the tenth line’ (CB); duplicated (SB)
11. depart: die, echoing Elizabethan marriage service
12. Leaving thee living: Booth makes much of the phonetic play between these words, and the link between leaving and depart, and the link between leaving and the botanical metaphor of Sonnet 5. He also notes that leaving modifies both death and depart: ‘what could death do if he had to leave you behind, if he could not take you’. JK also picks up on sense of ‘bequeathing yourself.’
posterity: (a) offspring and offspring of your offspring (b) perpetuity

Couplet
The speaker implores the young man not to be licentiously self-destructive or obstinate, since he is too beautiful to be defeated by death and to make only worms his heirs.
13. self-willed: note link to self-killed in line 4. Sexual innuendo; ‘licentiously self-destructive’ (GBE); obstinate
fair: (a) unblemished (b) beautiful (c) of good judgement.
14. conquest: (a) something overcome by death (b) property acquired other than by inheritance (e.g force)

Links with other sonnets
4. treasure: 20.14
5. usury: 4.7-8

Links with other works by WS
4. treasure: Othello, 4.3.86; 1H4, 2.3.4
7. breed: MV, 1.3.128

Links with works by other authors
5-14: Genesis 1.22: ‘go forth and multiply’
5. usury: cf. Aristotle Politics, 1.3.23 ; Thomas Wilson, Discourse upon Usury (1572)

Sonnet 5

2010-02-04T21:33:00.000Z

Those hours that with gentle work did frame

The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell

Will play the tyrants to the very same,

And that unfair which fairly doth excel.

For never-resting time leads summer on

To hideous winter, and confounds him there,

Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,

Beauty o’er-snowed and bareness everywhere;

Then were not summer’s distillation left,

A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,

Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor it, not no remembrance what it was.

But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,

Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

General
The first thing to note about Sonnet 5 is that it should be read with Sonnet 6 with which it forms a pair - the 'Then' of Sonnet 6 informs us that the speaker is carrying on his argument. Considered as a pair it is easier to see the grander design of the movement, from impersonal to personal. As HV says it is as though the logic of Sonnet 5 generates Sonnet 6: ‘The splendidly achieved aesthetic shape of sonnet 5 is conferred by the speaker’s stereoptical comprehension (with ‘divining eyes’) of past , present, and future time in one gaze.’ Secondly, this is one of the few impersonal sonnets in the sequence.

Sense
First quatrain
Just as the hours – possibly seasons – have tenderly framed/constructed that beautiful object to look where every eye turns/lingers, they will also be tyrannical to that beauty, and unfairly treat/make ugly/make illegitimate that which excels all beauty.
1.hours: disyllabic – Q= howers. Cf Sonnet 60.8-12:
And time, that gave, doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow

gentle: mild, seemingly tender, - to be contrasted with the harsh ‘working’ of time in age (lines 3-8)
2. gaze: object raptly looked on (JK)
4.unfair: (a) treat unfairly (b) make unfair/deprive of beauty (like a tyrant) CB: ‘the verbal innovation makes shocking the suddenness with which the gentle hours turn into destructive tyrants.’ – only example of this transitive verb in OED.

This first quatrain sets up the idea of time as deceiver and then importantly as tyrant. WS, like other writers of his time is very concerned with ideas around the inability to stop time and its effects.

Second quatrain
For never-resting time leads summer on, as it were in a dance of the hours but then the more sinister implications of to lead on emerge, as in to entice or beguile (CB). Summer is led into dreadful winter where it is utterly destroyed, where growth/reproduction is stopped by the frost, leaves fall and beauty is hidden beneath snow, everything bare.

5-8: Cf: Sonnet 97.1-4:
How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen,
What old December's bareness everywhere

This is relevant for its reference to the passing of time in seasonal terms and how the seasons translate to the body – although WS does not make this as explicit in Sonnet 5, in the context of the first 17 sonnets, the implication is that the young man must reproduce before he is consumed by 'December's bareness'.

As ever, though, the original reference is to Ovid Meta XV (Golding) 212-13:
Then ugly winter last
Like age steals on with trembling steps, all bald, or overcast
With shirle thin hair as white as show. Our bodies also ay
Do alter still from time to time, and never stand at stay.

6. hideous: in its original sense – to cause dread or horror (KDJ)
confounds: utterly destroys (word also used in Sonn 19 as in ref below)
7. sap: humours associated with nature – sap drying out in winter. Cf 15.5-7 'as plants increase...Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease'
leaves: note how this will become left in line 9 – WS plays with this word elsewhere in the sonnets (see SB for numerous refs)
8.o-er-snowed: cf Sonnet 1 – beauty’s rose is now covered in snow, with intimations of barrenness.

As seen in the extract from Sonnet 97 above, WS sometimes likes expressing this concern with the relentless passing of time here and elsewhere in terms of the body as nature, especially the tree. There is another pertinent example in Sonnet 73:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bared ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

Third quatrain
If it wasn’t that the summer survives in the form of bottled perfume – imprisoned in a glass bottle, then the chief effect of beauty – i.e. its beautiful scent, would die at the same time as beauty - the rose – itself, leaving us with neither beauty nor any means of recalling it (CB). Vend comments that: ‘by the insistence on instrumental distillation as the only possible preserving of beauty, he explicitly forbids any recourse to the idea of a recurring organic spring. Though nature is in fact cyclical, not all metaphorical uses of nature in poetry invoke its cyclicity, not by any means.’
9.distillation: the idea of perfume cf MWW 3.5.104 as below. KDJ glosses as rose-water, much used in Elizabethan cookery and medicine. Cf. Sidney New Arcadia 333
‘Have you ever seen a pure Rosewater kept in a crystal glass; how fine it lookes, how sweet it smells, while that beautiful glass imprisons it? Break the prison, and let the water take his own course, doth it not embrace dust, and lose all his former sweetness, and fairness? Truly so are we, if we have not the stay, rather then the restraint of Cristalline marriage.’

10. JK though says that WS ‘makes the vial an emblem not of married chastity but of what Sonnet 1 calls increase: it is the child who will preserve his father’s beauty (5.9-14), or the procreative womb of that child’s mother (6.3-4)’
left: remaining
11. bereft: lost/ snatched away (SB)
12.Note absence of main verb in this sentence – reflecting the distillation process. JK calls this line ‘elliptical and ambiguous’.

The idea of preserving through distillation/perfume is also use in Sonnet 54:
But for their virtue only is their show
They live unwooed, and unrespected fade,
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not do so;
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made;
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth;
When that shall vade, by verse distils your truth.

Couplet
14. Leese: lose (archaic) –‘doubtless employed for a pun of ‘lease’(JK)
substance: essence – also:
(a)CB makes point leese probably also infers ideas of preservation of an estate – possessions, goods etc .
(b) ‘More show than substance’ = proverbial.
(c) Could also relate to Platonic theory of ideas/forms. SB: ‘what we ordinarily take for reality is not reality; the particulars we perceive are only shadows (images, reflections) of the substance (ideas,forms) manifested in, and distorted by, the dross of physicality….The most celebrated of the Platonic forms is the idea of the good, of beauty, the disembodied substance of which each particular beautiful thing is only a partial and flawed reflection.’ (SB, 53 headnote) In this it relates to Sonnet 53:
What is your substance, whereof are you made,
That millions of strange shadows on you tend?

still: (a) nevertheless (b) always/forever; echoes distilled, and gains additional permanence for the echo (CB)
sweet: (a) beautifully scented (b) uncorrupted, wholesome

Links with other sonnets
Gen: Sonnets 6, 12, 18, 19, 60 for ideas of time as tyrant and 73 for idea of seasons
1.4.hours: cf 60.8
5-8. Sonnet 97.1-4:
7. Sap checked: cf 15.6
9-14. cf Sonnet 54.9-14
14. substance: cf Sonnet 53

Links with other works by WS
9. distillation: MWW 3.5.104: ‘And then to be stopped in, like a strong distillation’ – the word more often refers to the process than its outcome (CB)

Links with works by other authors
5.8.Ovid Meta 15.233ff (Golding trans)
10. P Sidney New Arcadia, 333

Sonnet 4

2010-02-03T18:36:00.000Z

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend

Upon thyself 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 largesse given thee to give?

Profitless usurer, why dost thou use

So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?

For having traffic with thyself alone,

Thou of thyself 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.

General
There may be a debt (Sonnets 4-13) to Marlowe’s Hero and Leander – but, such is the uncertainty over dates, that the debt could be the other way around– Marlowe died in May 1593 and the dates of the sonnets are of course uncertain (see Blog Post: Introduction). Two passages are particularly relevant:

What difference betwixt the richest mine
And basest mould but use? For both, not us'd,
Are of like worth. Then treasure is abus'd
When misers keep it; being put to loan,
In time it will return us two for one.
Rich robes themselves and others do adorn;
Neither themselves nor others, if not worn.
Who builds a palace, and rams up the gate,
Shall see it ruinous and desolate. (ll. 232-240)

The richest corn dies, if it be not reap'd;
Beauty alone is lost, too warily kept.' (ll.328-29)

The sonnet extends the metaphor of beauty and sex as money, adding to it the idea of wills and inheritance. The young man is wasting this inheritance on himself and will have nothing to leave to future generations (KDJ). It plays on the proverbial idea of ‘paying one’s debt to nature’ (SB) and also refers back to the parable of the talents as in Sonnet 2.

Sense

First quatrain
The speaker asks the young man why he wastes on himself the beauty that he could leave to his children and /or has been left to him by Nature. Nature does not give, but only lends and being generous, she lends to those that are also generous – ie will pass on the beauty through other generations.
1. thriftless: (a)unprofitable (b) improvident/prodigal
spend: can be sexual - the main image of failure to turn to women, but there is a subsidiary allusion to masturbation.
2. beauty’s legacy: both the beauty that has been bequeathed to him by nature, and that he could leave to his children
3. KDJ picks up on a semblance in this thought to Wyatt: My lute awake (pub. 1557)

And then may chance thee to repent
The time that thou hast lost and spent
To cause thy lovers sigh and swoon;
Then shalt thou know beauty but lent,
And wish and want as I have done.

Here he contemplates just as WS does, the way that beauty is lent for a short time and is tied up inextricably with mortality.
Also relevant again is Matthew parable of the talents as per sonnet 2.
4. frank: generous
free: open-handed, with connotations of noble; but can also mean licentious

Second quatrain
The speaker then asks the young man, who he calls a beautiful miser, why he misuses the abundant beauty that was given to him so that he might give it to others. A moneylender who makes no profit, the friend uses up nature’s loan rather than using it to generate interest (or children) (CB).
5. niggard: miser
6. bounteous largesse: Since largesse means ‘a liberal gift freely bestowed’, the phrase, which rhetorically balances ‘beauteous niggard’ is tautological and seems to contradict the kind of giving ascribed to Nature in line 3. (GBE)
7. profitless usurer: the youth lends money but does not make any interest – i.e produces no children
8. sum of sums: grand total, deriving from Latin: summa summarum – pointing back to the debt to nature of 2.11 (CB). WS also uses this idea in MV 3.2.157-8 where Portia says: 'but the full sum of me / Is sum of something.'
canst not live: i.e in perpetuity.

Third quatrain
The speaker tells the young man that in being sexually obsessed with himself alone he tricks himself out of the survival of his essence – his own ‘sweet self’. Then, in a fourth question, the speaker asks when he dies what he will leave – an empty balance in his ‘audit’.
9. traffic: (a) trade/bargaining (b) sexual commerce/intercourse – revives idea of masturbation from line 1.
12. audit: an impt image in the Sonnets and developed towards 126: ‘final account/reckoning’ (JK)

Couplet
The speaker says that the young man’s wasted – ‘not put to profitable use’- beauty must die with him. If it were to be used profitably, then his heir will be the agent (executor) to administer his estate (beauty).

Structure
The sonnet is constructed as a series of questions, forcing the young man to face up to his responsibility to reproduce. Within these questions, repetition is also important e.g. 'beauty', 'nature', 'use', together with 'lend' and 'give'.

HV sees the sonnet as a type of homily - behind the vocatives and questionings ‘lies the religious genre of the reproach of the cleric to the sinner.’ But this is tempered by the use of the oxymorons –so, ‘in this poem, homily has been secularized. Not God…but rather organic Nature here provides the motive for reproduction.’ Further the speaker’s bias is revealed in e.g. ‘thy sweet self’ in a way a priest would never say.

Links with other works by WS
8 MV 3.2.157-8

Links with works by other authors
Gen: Marlowe Hero and Leander 1, 234-68; 317-28
3. Matthew 25: 14-30
Wyatt My lute awake

Sonnet 3

2010-01-30T09:15:00.000Z

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 remembered not to be,

Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

General
Interesting its form and structure, Sonnet 3 has no couplet tie and is also notable since the sonnet does not ‘turn’ until the couplet: ‘the body of the poem would seem devoted to life, the couplet to death.’ (HV) In addition the second quatrain is in the form of two questions.

Sense
First quatrain
The speaker implores the young man to look in his mirror and tell the face that he sees there that it is time to create another, identical face i.e. have a child. If he doesn’t then he will cheat the world and deny some mother future happiness/bliss.

1. glass: mirror – often used as a form of admonition (CB) eg as in Whetstone’s Mirror for Magistrates (1559) or as an emblem of vanity (cf Luc ll.1758-64)
3. whose: i.e the new face that should be formed
fresh repair: (a) appearance of newness (b) recently renovated state (CB) - untarnished by time (GBE)
4. beguile: trick; cheat (charmingly); disappoint
unbless: deprive of happiness. 1st cited usage in OED

The first quatrain links back to Sonnet 1.9: 'Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament' with its insistence on the present – time permeates this sequence and the speaker wishes to stress the urgency of preserving the young man's beauty through the next generation. Thus 'Now is the time' in line 2. Note the use also of synecdoche [where the naming of a part represents the whole] in the word 'face' (1,2) – in Sonnet 2 'brow' (2.1) acts in the same way.

Second quatrain
For where is the virgin so beautiful that she would deny the young man’s advances? Or who is he that is so foolish as to be the grave of his own beauty through his narcissism – to cut off the family line?

5. uneared: untilled, unploughed - cf. A&C 2.2.233-34 and Wilson p. 122 (1926 ed)
6. husbandry: agricultural management – cf. MM 1.4.43-4
7. fond: foolish
8.stop posterity: cut off the family line/ the emergence of future generations – cf V&A ll.757-60

Note use of agricultural metaphor, picking up on refs to 'field' and 'weed' in Sonnet 2. These two questions are central to the speaker's argument in the first 17 sonnets – that the young man is failing in his duty to procreate and that he is too tied up in his own self-love – both will mean an end to his beauty as it will die with him and so cheat the world.

'Womb' and 'tomb' are interestingly juxtaposed here, I think quite arrestingly. This is similar to the surprise of the 'increase/decease' rhyme in Sonnet 1, as noted by HV. WS makes the womb/tomb rhyme again in R&J 2.3.5-6.

Third quatrain
The speaker tells the young man that he is the reflection of his mother, and that she can look at his youthfulness and see/recall her own springtime. In the same way the youth will grow old and look back at this time as his ‘golden time.’

9. Again ref to Luc as per l.1. Also cf Erasmus as quoted in CB – see below.
April: proverbially fresh
prime: height of perfection, springtime of life
11. windows of thine age: metaphorically aged eyes cf. 1Cor, 13:12 It is a chance to get perspective – cf Sonnet 24: 'Mine eye hath played the painter...'
12. cf Aristotle below for the unexpected physical explanation!

Couplet
But if he does not want to be remembered then he should die unmarried so that his image dies with him.
13. remember’d not to be: (a) in such a way that you will not be remembered (b) with the intent of being forgotten (SB)
14.image: (a) physical appearance (as reflected in a mirror) (b) embodiment (such as a child) (CB) (c) idea – cf: Donne below

There is a definite tone of frustration and admonition in the speaker's voice, emphasized by the use of 'die' twice, stressing the urgency and finality of the young man's position. At this stage there is no talk of poetry saving the subject's beauty for posterity – it is all up to the young man to take the action.

Links with other works by WS
1.Luc ll.1758-64: time ref
5-8. R&J 2.3.5-6: 'The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb: / What is her burying grave, that is her womb.'
5. A&C 2.2.233-34: ‘She made great Caesar lay his sword to bed. / He ploughed her, and she cropped.’
MM 1.4.43-4: ‘even so her plenteous womb / Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry’
8. V&A: ll.757-60: ‘What is thy body but a swallowing grave, / Seeming to bury that posterity / Which by rights of time thou needs must have.’ This is repeating the x-ref and idea inherent in Sonnet 1 ll.13-14

Links with works by other authors
5.Thomas Wilson p. 122 (1926 ed): ‘what punishment is he worthy to suffer, that refuseth to Plough that land, which being tilled, yieldeth children.’
9. Erasmus: 'Old age cometh upon us all, will we or nill we, and this way nature provided for us, that we should wax young again in our children...For what man can be grieved that he is old when he seeth his won countenance, which he had being a child, to appear lively in his son?' (CB, taken from Wilson)
11. 1Cor, 13:12 : ‘For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face’
12. Aristotle De generatione 780a, 31-3: the reason why old people do not have keen vision is that the skin in the eyes, like that elsewhere, gets wrinkled and thicker with age.’ (Burr)
14. Donne: Image and Dream 1: ‘Image of her whom I love, more then she.’

Sonnet 2

2010-01-28T21:29:00.000Z

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,

Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,

Will be a tattered weed of small worth held:

Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies,

Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,

To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,

Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise,

How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use

If thou couldst answer, ‘This fair child of mine

Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse’,

Proving his beauty by succession thine:

This were to be new made when thou art old,

And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

General
This is the first sonnet to deal directly with a theme that preoccupies the speaker (and WS in other works): the role of time as tyrant and in particular its effects on beauty. It is also noteworthy (with Sonnet 4) for its ‘distinction between investment for profit and miserly self-defeating financial conservatism.’ (SB) The financial imagery of Sonnet 1 is re-asserted and intensified.

First quatrain
When the young man is forty years old, the beauty of his youth will be in tatters and of little value. Note the use of battle imagery: trenches/ field/ livery - this is not just an attack by age but also a personal attack by the speaker on the wastefulness of youth.

1. forty – really used to be many, as in biblical forty days and forty nights (Gen 7:4)
winters – rather than summers – accentuates the process of withering and loss of vitality.
2. Although field could be an agricultural one being furrowed by time, the use of besieged in line 1 & livery in line 3 rather suggests the language of battle. See other authors, but there is definitely a link then into the parable of the talents imagery used in the second quatrain.
3.proud: splendid, gorgeous
4.totter’d weed (Q): (a)tattered garment (b) a ragged weed, picking up on the botanical ref.

From the beginning, the sonnet takes on the personal 'I' and does not, as Sonnet 1, move from the general to specific- instead there is a strong sense that the speaker is moving in on his subject. The imagery is a mix of agricultural and war – the trenches have a resonance for us that would not have existed for WS, nonetheless the use of 'besiege', 'trenches' and 'field' suggest time as aggressor. There is a third image, linked to the agricultural and carried over from Sonnet 1 – that of the young man burying/hoarding his beauty out of sight – this prepares us for the second quatrain.

Second quatrain
Then when he is asked where all his beauty lies, if he is only able to point at his own ‘deep-sunken’ eyes it would be a great shame and unprofitable praise. He is being accused of selfishness – denying the world the perpetuity of his beauty.

5. lusty: (a)vigorous (b) sexually active
6. deep-sunken eyes: cf bright eyes in 1.5
treasure: note financial ref cf worth in line 4
7. all-eating: all-devouring/universally destructive cf.1.13-14. See also Arden note that time traditionally devours all: tempus edax rerum. And sonnet 19 (x)
thriftless praise: note another financial ref (see line 7) = unprofitable commendation, as the youth has hoarded all his ‘treasure’ instead of putting it to good use. (Camb)

5-8: This quatrain alludes to the parable of the talents in Matthew 25: 14-30 : this is the passage from the Geneva Bible (1560)

14 "For it will be as when a man going on a journey called his servants and entrusted to them his property; 15 to one he gave five talents, to another two, to another one, to each according to his ability. Then he went away. 16 He who had received the five talents went at once and traded with them; and he made five talents more. 17 So also, he who had the two talents made two talents more. 18 But he who had received the one talent went and dug in the ground and hid his master's money. 19 Now after a long time the master of those servants came and settled accounts with them. 20 And he who had received the five talents came forward, bringing five talents more, saying, 'Master, you delivered to me five talents; here I have made five talents more.' 21 His master said to him, 'Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master.' 22 And he also who had the two talents came forward, saying, 'Master, you delivered to me two talents; here I have made two talents more.' 23 His master said to him, 'Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master.' 24 He also who had received the one talent came forward, saying, 'Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not winnow; 25 so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.' 26 But his master answered him, 'You wicked and slothful servant! You knew that I reap where I have not sowed, and gather where I have not winnowed? 27 Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers, and at my coming I should have received what was my own with interest. 28 So take the talent from him, and give it to him who has the ten talents. 29 For to every one who has will more be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away. 30 And cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth.'

Third quatrain
How much better use of his beauty it would be it he could then answer that this fair child shall square my account and make reparation for my old age, proving his son to be legally his.

8. use: active deployment, with return (Burr); monetary interest;
9. proper use of beauty for treasure in procreation – see V&A (x)
deserved: would merit
11. sum my count: render a true audit of my ‘due’ to nature cf 4.12
my old excuse: (a) the excuse I make when I am old (b) the excuse I habitually make (CB)
12 proving: demonstrating or discovering (KDJ)
by succession: by inherited right

So – here speaker is putting forward the case for social good if young man procreates within marriage.

Sir Thomas Wilson: 'You have them that shal comfort you, in your latter daies, that shall close up your iyes, when God shall call you, that shall bury you...by whom you shall seme, to be new borne. For so long as thei shall live, you shall nede never bee thought ded your self...For, what man can be grieved, that he is old, when he seeth his awne countenance whiche he had beying a childe, to appere lively in his sonne?'
The Art of Rhetoric (1553) ed T J Derrick, (1982), pp.127-8

Couplet
This would mean that in old age he would be made anew, and see his own cold blood (with age) live vigorously in his son..

13. were: would be
14. Old people believed to become cold and dry – young believed to be hot and moist (Burr)

This picks up on narcissistic vision of Sonnet 1 and thereby plays to the young man’s vanity.

Links with other sonnets
8. 19.1/2: ‘Devouring time, blunt thou the lion’s paws, / And make the earth devour her own sweet brood.’
11. 4.12: ‘What acceptable audit canst thou leave?’

Links with other works by WS
10.V&A, 767-78: ‘Foul cank’ring rust the hidden treasure frets, / But gold that’s put to use more gold begets.’ This also echoes the parable of the talents.

Links with other authors
2. Michael Drayton The Shepherd’s Garland (1593), 2nd Eclogue, 46: ‘The time-plow’d furrows in thy fairest field.’
Samuel Daniel Delia (1592), 4.8: ‘Best in my face, how cares have tilled deep furrows’

Sonnet 1

2010-01-21T14:27:00.000Z

From fairest creatures we desire increase,

That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

But as the riper should by time decease

His tender heir might bear his memory:

But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,

Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,

Making a famine where abundance lies,

Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament,

And only herald to the gaudy spring,

Within thine own bud buriest thy content,

And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.

Pity the world, or else this glutton be,

To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

General
As a first sonnet this is an extraordinary start compared to other sonnet sequences of the time – this is no introduction to a love sequence, where is the unrequited love? Where is the unreasonable but beautiful mistress?

Coleridge: ‘Shakespeare goes on creating, and evolving B out of A, C out of B, and so on, just as a serpent moves, which makes a fulcrum of its own body, and seems forever twisting and untwisting its own strength’ (quoted in JK, p.167). Vendler elaborates further: ‘In short, we may say this sonnet makes an aesthetic investment in profusion.’

Sense
First quatrain
From the most beautiful living things we desire procreation, so that beauty’s ‘rose’ – i.e. the prime of beauty will never die. Much play has been made of its italicisation in Q, possibly indicating a wider reference being made and links have been made between the rose and Wriothesley, whose name may have been pronounced ‘Rose-ly’. Similarly, KDJ has linked the reference to the Tudor rose – an indication that QE1 should marry, but this seems to me unlikely in the context of this particular sonnet. More importantly it is part of the courtly love tradition – so an extraordinary word to use in a sonnet and indeed a sequence that takes that tradition and turns it on its head. As CB suggests: ‘The metaphor ‘beauty’s rose’ [the fragile vehicle of beauty] was probably enough to make compositor A reach for his italics.’ So – starts with a generalizing reflection (HV).

Instead, while the older roses mature and die, their gentle offspring will (a) carry their memory (b) bear their resemblance. HV makes the point that ‘decease’ is unexpected after ‘increase’ when ‘decrease’ might have been expected. There is a possible play on words: ‘mulier’ woman from ‘mollis aer’ meaning ‘soft air’. The pun makes the generations mingle: a wife bears a son at the some time as heir reproduces his father’s manner (CB). There is also a heraldic metaphor here – bear as in heraldic arms.

SB: ‘This quatrain, designed to recommend and advertise the potency of the idea that mortals are immortal in the generation, is strengthened by including and overwhelming the fact it attempts to combat the beauty of each beautiful creature is mortal, each must by time decease’.

Second quatrain
But you, betrothed/ but also ‘shrunken’ to your own bright eyes, burn up the substance of your life – cf Ovid’s Narcissus. i.e. the youth loses the chance to increase and instead has contracted or shrunk into himself – making loss where abundance lies. Cf. Ovid – Narcissus’ cry ‘inopen me copia fecit’ [‘my very abundance of contact with what I love makes me poor’] see Golding’s translation 3.463ff. It is in all an image of impotence – a desire that can go nowhere. Also cf. V&A ll.19-20.

Third quatrain
The speaker opens a third argument – this then is not a volta but a different structure – but is it as simple as 3 quatrains, each with a variation on the same argument with a couplet at the end?
You who are the world’s vigorous and youthful ornament, and chief forerunner of the spring in all its joyful show – you bury your bud/seed in your happiness/ that which you contain/ the children who are hidden within you (CB). Note use of ‘buriest’ – links to ‘grave’ in last line and marks a definite shift in the tone of the sonnet. The importance of now – this is a stress in the poem – as WS tries to capture the fleeting moment of the present. And, gentle miser, you are wasteful in acting in such a mean/selfish way. The young man is a wastrel because he hoards himself up.

Couplet
The speaker implores the youth to take pity on the world, or else he will be this sort of glutton: he will consume what he owes to the world i.e. his children – these are destroyed once by his self-absorption and once by his death. So, the sonnet ends with a gloomy prophecy.

Structure
This is not as straightforward as one might have thought – HV argues instead that the ‘reproachful narrative of the actuality (5-12) straddles the octave and sestet’ showing WS’ ‘inventiveness with respect to the continental sonnet structure……I think it is no accident that the first sonnet in his sequence avoids the two structures a reader might expect – the binary structure of the Italian sonnet, and the quatrains-in parallel of the English sonnet.’ She sees the first quatrain as organic, the second as inorganic, the third as reproach and the couplet as prophecy. This is a useful analysis of the structure of this seemingly straightforward but actually incredibly complex sonnet!

The Speaker
This is our first encounter with the speaker – what can we learn about him from this sonnet? The first point of note is that he is prepared to use all sorts of rhetorical devices to persuade the young man to produce an heir. He is then showing off his prowess in sonneteering – a glance at the ideas contained in Fletcher's preface to Licia (see Blog Post : Introduction.)

Links with other sonnets
HV thinks as there are so may concepts here that link to other sonnets that this may have been composed later as a ‘preface’. It is, she says, an index to the others covering: beauty, increase, inheritance, memory, light, abundance, sweetness, freshness, ornament, springtime, tenderness, and the world’s rights. This is an interesting thought, yet the relationship between all the sonnets is a complex one and I am constantly constructing an imaginary 3D matrix in which to link them all to each other - like a giant prism!

Links with other WS works
2. A&C 3.13.19-20: ‘Tell him that he wears the rose / Of youth upon him.’
4. Cymb. 5.6.448-54 & Luc l.1240 – Cymb also published 1609 – some say this could be a sign that this group of sonnets is later than has been supposed.
6. cf. V&A l.19-20.
12. cf. Rosaline in R&J who according to Romeo, has sworn to live unmarried and ‘in that sparing makes huge waste. / For beauty starved with her severity, / Cuts beauty off from all posterity.’ (1.1.218-20)
14. V&A ll.757-60

Links with other authors/sources
Erasmus’ ‘Epistle to persuade a young gentleman to marriage’ which appeared in Thomas Wilson’s The Arte of Rhetorique (1553) – Wilson was hugely influential book that WS is likely to have known. (Source: Katherine M Wilson in SB)
6. Ovid – Narcissus’ cry ‘inopen me copia fecit’ [‘my very abundance of contact with what I love makes me poor’] see Golding 3.463ff. It is in all an image of impotence – a desire that can go nowhere.
12. Isaiah 32:5:’Then shall the niggard be no more called gentle, nor the churl liberal’ (Coverdale’s trans.)

Additional reading and abbreviations

2010-01-21T13:55:00.003Z

Here is a list of other reading that you might find useful with abbrevations that I have used in the blog. This list will inevitably grow!

Other authors:
Ovid                    Metamorphoses
                            (trans D. Raeburn, Penguin, 2004)

Golding, A           Ovid's Metamorphoses: the Arthur Golding translation of 1567
                           (Simon and Schuster, 2000)

Abbreviations of Shakespeare's works (all Arden editions, 2nd series unless otherwise specified)
A&C                  Antony and Cleopatra
Cymb                         Cymbeline
Luc                             Lucrece
R&J                    Romeo and Juliet
V&A                   Venus and Adonis in Narrative Poems
MV                             The Mercant of Venice

Other books of intrest
Clark, S                      Amorous Rites: Elizabethan Erotic Verse
                                   (Everyman, 1994)
                                   This is my preferred edition of use for Marlowe's Hero and Leander.
                                   As well as a useful intro and chronology of the poets, it also has:
                                   Thomas Lodge: Scylla's Metamorphosis
                                   WS: Venus and Adonis
                                   Francis Beaumont: Salmacis and Hermaphroditus
                                   John Marston: The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image

Introduction

2010-01-19T09:41:00.002Z

General introduction: What is so special about the sonnet?

For Wordsworth it was a way into the inner most workings of the poet:

SCORN not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frown'd,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlock'd his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch's wound;
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound;
With it Camöens sooth'd an exile's grief;
The Sonnet glitter'd a gay myrtle leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crown'd
His visionary brow: a glow-worm lamp,
It cheer'd mild Spenser, call'd from Faery-land
To struggle through dark ways; and when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew
Soul-animating strains—alas, too few!

William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, 1827

Browning though felt that this view undermined the way that WS always managed so well to efface his own personality from his work:

'With this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart, once more! Did Shakespeare? If so, the less Shakespeare he!' - Robert Browning

For others, the key is in the form ‘…is it not delightful, to see much excellently ordred in a small roome, or little gallantly disposed and made to fill up a space of like capacitie, in such sort, that the one would not appear so beautiful in a larger circuit, nor the other do well in a less.’ Samuel Daniel: Poems and a Defence of Rhyme ed A C Sprague, 1950)

As Bate points out, WS is not the only elusive voice - Giles Fletcher in his preface to Licia also plays with the idea: 'I did it only to try my humour: and for the matter of love, it may be I am so devoted to some one, into whose hands these may light by chance, that she may say which thou sayest (that surely he is in love), which if she so, then have I the full recompense of my labour, and the poems have dealt sufficiently with the discharge of their own duty.' In other words, it is all about the special structure and form of the sonnet – the 'conceit' – he deliberately stays vague on the possible personal nature of the content.

How should a sonnet be studied?
There have been various approaches to studying sonnets – as many probably as there have been for other kinds of literature, but the question needs to be asked as it affects our understanding. My approach is a sort of historical-formalist one, meaning that while some historical and literary context is obviously useful it should be both relevant and wholly reliable (i.e. not constructing a convenient narrative/suggesting evidence for biography with factual support outside the sonnet). What matters most is the poem – close reading is everything, and understanding the thematic preoccupations of the sonneteers in general and WS in particular, as well as at least having a grasp of the extent of rhetorical devices used is essential.

Part One: a brief history and summary of the sonnet form

Giacomo da Lentini (1188-1240) is also known as il Notaio, as he was a notary in the court of the Sicilian king and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (1194-1250) - he was an integral part of the Sicilian School and is said to have invented the sonnet in the C12.

He was influenced by both the Provencal troubadour tradition and Sicilian peasant songs. From the former came the inverse relationships of courtly love, from the latter came the form - the strambotto –8 lines with the rhyming form (abababab), to which da Lentini added the sestet (cdcdcd or cdecde) to produce a new poetic form. There are many theories as to why he added six lines in particular, and it may be related to the ideas of harmonic proportion (Plato) and the Golden Section/Mean (Pythagoras). However, Levin points out that ratio of 8:5 would be a true approximation of the Golden Section and so considers it more likely that da Lentini, in creating this top heavy, asymmetrical form with this principle in mind, needed a sixth line in order to balance out the rhyme. It is probably relevant, then, that Frederick took a particular interest in the work of Fibonacci and anyone interested in this should look at Levin.

Guittone d’Arezzo (1230-1294) was at the heart of the Tuscan school of poetry and, despite criticism from Dante, has also now been credited with developing the form. He wrote 246 sonnets on all sorts of subjects, not just love.

Dante d’Alghieri (1265-1321) The term ‘sonnetto’ (‘little sound’) and its equivalent ‘sonito’ was first used by Dante when he distinguished between poetry to be sung and that to be read, and he wrote what is thought to be the first sonnet sequence in his work La Vita Nuova (1295) which contained 25 sonnets to his beloved Beatrice. It was a work of prose and poetry in which Dante provided commentaries to the sonnets.

To every captive soul and gentle heart

Unto whose sight may come the present word,
That they thereof to me their thoughts impart,
Be greeting in Love’s name, who is their Lord.
Now of those hours wellnigh one third had gone

What time doth every star appear most bright,

When on a sudden Love before me shone,

Remembrance of whose nature gives me fright.

Joyful to me seemed Love, and he was keeping

My heart within his hands, while on his arm

He held my lady, covered o’er, and sleeping.

Then waking her, he with this flaming heart

Did humble feed her fearful of some harm.

Thereon I saw him thence in tears depart.

This sonnet is divided into two parts. In the first part I offer greeting, and ask for a reply; in the second I signify to what the reply is to be made. The second part begins here: “Now of.”

To this sonnet reply was made by many, and of diverse opinions. Among those who replied to it was he whom I call first of my friends, and he then wrote a sonnet which begins, “All worth, in my opinion, thou hast seen.” And this was, as it were, the beginning of the friendship between him and me, when he knew that I was he who had sent it to him.

The true meaning of this dream was not then seen by any one, but now it is plain to the simplest.

Dante: La Vita Nuova (1295)

From The New Life of Dante Alighieri, translated by Charles Eliot Norton; Houghton, Mifflin and Company; Boston and New York; 1896; pp. 1-22.

This sonnet is of particular interest to scholars in being the earliest extant example of Dante's work written probably when he was only 19 or 20 years old. It tells of a dream that he meeting Beatrice – she was married now and so the unobtainable object of his desire. Look at the rhyming scheme – it may be that this has suffered in the English translation but it is clearly set in the octave and then possibly not as formed in the second part – also note how Dante asks his question in the first four lines and answers in the remaining ten – this is very different to Petrarch's style.

Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) (1304-74) though, was to have the biggest influence with his tortured account of his love for Laura. Laura was not, as Beatrice had been for Dante, a way to God and salvation as portrayed in The Divine Comedy, but rather a correlative of God. This was the start of a movement from the sacred to secular, from symbol to image and an increasing focus on the individual – the Petrarchan sonnet: a man loves and desires a beautiful woman who is dedicated to chastity – either virginity or married chastity. Thus Petrarch is cited as one of the main figures of the humanist movement. There are 317 sonnets in his Canzoniere.

If love it be not, what is this thing I feel?
If love it be, it what kind of thing?
If good, then why so deadly is its sting?
If ill, why sweet to suffer on its wheel?

If willingly I burn, is my pain real?
If not, what use is all my murmuring?
O living death, O pains that pleasure bring!
How, unconsenting, am I brought to heel?

If I consent, I have no right to curse.
Amid such adverse winds in barque so slight,
Without a helm I sail on stormy seas,

Burdened with error, but of wisdom light,
So that I know not what desire I nurse,
I burn in winter and in summer freeze.

Petrarch: Canzoniere, trans G R Nicholson
(Autolycus, 1987)
‘The Petrarchan sonnet characteristically treats its theme in two parts. The first eight lines, the octave, state a problem, ask a question, or express an emotional tension. The last six lines, the sestet, resolve the problem, answer the question, or relieve the tension.’ (Enc Brit) If only it was always that straightforward…..!

The structure:
Clearly divided into the octave and the sestet; then sub-divided into quatrains (octave) and tercets (sestet).

The volta – this is the ‘turn’ or ‘shift’ in the sonnet where the sense changes with the structure, perhaps towards resolution or even transformation.

Rhyming scheme:
Octave: rima bacciata or kissing rhyme abba abba
Sestet: rima incatenata or interlacing rhyme. Here it is cde cde, but it can vary:
cde dce or cde ced.

This structure has the interesting result of creating three rhyming couplets in the octave with two rhyming sounds – easier to achieve in Italian than English – does this have an impact on the way that the sense is carried along between one part of the sonnet and another? This is important in telling us why it changed in the hands of the English sonneteers.

Subject matter:
The subject is love! The form of the sonnet lends itself to this theme in that it produces so many contrasting emotions and sensations. As Levin says ‘When a sonnet is true to its nature, it encompasses contradiction and arrives at resolution or revelation’. Whether or not it arrives at revelation it certainly encompasses contradiction and exploits the inherent tension that the form dictates. It is also focussed on the experience of the individual – allowing for a particularly intensity of experience, in terms of the emotion/situation described, the act of writing the sonnet and the act of reading it.

The asymmetrical but tightly constructed configuration creates a poem that turns around and speaks to itself. In the first half – the octave- the speaker is trying to define love – he does this through a series of questions. In the sestet he attempts to reach some sort of definition of his condition which is that he does not know how to define it! The poem then becomes something of a circular argument, and there are times when you think that a resolution has been reached only to find that you are drawn back to something in the octave to make you reconsider.

This is also achieved by the use of rhetorical devices and extensive repetition – there are:

Key words: These are words that are repeated in the octave and sestet. Here, consento is a good example of a word that appears twice but a shift in emotion takes place between the two occurrences – first he does not consent and then he admits that he might consent and if he does then he has no right to moan about his lot. Key words are particularly important in our understanding of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Shakespeare is fond of using repetition where the sense shifts in the same word – antanaclasis.

Opposites: the use of antithesis Good/deadly; sweet/suffer; living/death; burn/freeze – all of these create tension in the poem and to illustrate the intensity of the speaker's emotional condition.

The Elizabethan Sonnet

Wyatt and Surrey
Thomas Wyatt, travelling as a diplomat and courtier, brought Petrarch’s sonnets back to England in 1520s and 30s. It was these that inspired Surrey. Both poets were published in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) - after both poets had been dead for some time - which while hardly heard of today had a huge influence on the development of English poetry – almost 100% that WS would have seen a copy if not owned one himself. In the preface Tottel talks about getting the poems out to a wider public, the implication being that they had been the property of a select few until that time.

I find no peace, and all my war is done,

I fear, and hope, I burn, and freeze like ice.

I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise.

And naught I have, and all the world I season.

That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison,
And holdeth me not, yet can I ’scape nowise;
Nor letteth me live nor die at my devise,
And yet of death it giveth me occasion.
Withouten eyen I see and without tongue I ’plain;
I desire to perish, and yet I ask health;
I love another, and thus I hate myself;
I feed me in sorrow, and laugh at all my pain.
Likewise displeaseth me both death and life,
And my delight is causer of this strife.

Thomas Wyatt (after Petrarch)

Sir Philip Sidney
It was Sidney though who really kick-started the Elizabethan craze for sonneteering when his poems to Lady P Devereux published posthumously by his sister Mary Countess of Pembroke in 1591 – Astrophil and Stella [Astro=star; phil=lover – Gk]. He was highly experimental and did not hesitate to push the boundaries of the form.

Astrophil and Stella no.1
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she (dear she) might take some pleasure of my pain;
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine her wits to entertain;
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention’s stay;
Invention, Nature’s child, fled step-dame Studie’s blowes,
And others’ feet still seem’d but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speake, and helpless in my throws,
Biting my truant pen, beating my self for spite,
‘Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write.’

Sidney was instrumental in the evolution of the sonnet – in essence this is a sonnet with Petrarchan characteristics – the speaker is hopelessly in love with an unattainable woman, and raises expectations that the remainder of the sequence will expand on this situation. ‘In fact, Sidney’s sequence is a highly self-conscious exercise in Petrarchan writing, which interlinks the frustration of Astrophel/Sidney’s political and amatory desires.’ (Brown and Johnson, OU, p.58). This view is supported by way in which Sidney interweaves songs with the sonnets – only Elizabethan sonneteer to do so, but with a direct line to Dante and Petrarch – with result that sequence takes on a new dimension.

Sidney was a great theorist and was seeking to bring the Petrarchan sonnet up to date: ‘Invention is the first part of classic rhetoric, the process of finding out whatever materials are appropriate for a given task…Astrophel approaches his composition in entirely the wrong order: he seeks fit words before he has chosen his basic materials or considered their presentation; he jumps straight to Elocution, leaving out Invention and Disposition, and this is why he finds it so hard to write.’ (Evans, xvii).

Other major sonneteers:

Samuel Daniel Delia (1592)
Barnabe Barnes Parthenophil and Parthenope (1593)
Thomas Lodge Phillis (1593)
Giles Fletcher Licia (1593)
Thomas Watson The Tears of Fancy, or Love Disdained (1593)
Henry Constable Diana (1594)
Michael Drayton Idea’s Mirror; Idea in 63 Sonnets (1594)
William Percy Sonnets to Celia (1594)
Edmund Spenser Amoretti (1595)
Bartholomew Griffin Fidessa (1596)
Richard Linche Diella (1596)
William Smith Chloris (1596)
Richard Barnfield Cynthia (which includes a sequence on loving a man (see CB p18) (1597)
Robert Tofte Laura (1597)

Part Two: Shakespeare’s Sonnets
My argument is that WS’s sequence is different to all those mentioned so far, and we will develop this through close reading. First something about his sequence – what do we know?

Date
On 20 May 1609 WS’ sonnets were entered into the Stationers’ Register – Thomas Thorpe published 154 sonnets together with the poem The Lover’s Complaint with which they are usually printed. WS’ sonnet sequence was the longest by far and was printed when the fashion for love sonnets was well passed, and it is the subject of some speculation as to why they were printed at that time, and whether the author had indeed anything to do with their publication.

This has ranged from reasons relating to the subject matter to theories that they never intended as a sequence, and were put together by the publisher/author to raise funds.

When and in what order were the Sonnets written?
1598 – Francis Meres (1565-1647) publishes his Palladis Tamia (Wit’s Treasury) including a ‘Comparative Discourse of our English Poets with Greek, Latin and Italian Poets’ – ‘the sweet witty soul of Ovid lies in mellifluous and honey-tongued Shakespeare, witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends, etc’ This is evidence, then, that WS had at least written some sonnets at this time if only for private circulation.

1599 – The Passionate Pilgrim published by William Jaggard – it is almost a certainty that WS had nothing to do with the publication – the unauthorised volume has poems by a variety of authors including WS, and includes three extracts from Love's Labours Lost (LLL) and versions of what are now known as Sonnets 138 and 144. Otherwise, there are poems by Griffin, Barnfield and Marlowe, and other works that may or may not be by WS, although it is starting to look increasingly doubtful.

The sonnets only appear together in a group then in 1609, but the question of the order in which they were published has vexed critics, who cannot agree whether WS even authorised the publication of the Sonnets let alone had a hand in deciding the order in which the sequence was finally laid out. Recently, studies have been carried out that look at the occurrence of rare words in the Sonnets and the most likely order is as follows:

1591-95 127-54
1594-95 61-103
1595-96 1-60
1598-1604 104-26

This is based on the work of McDonald P. Jackson who has related the occurrence of rarer words in the plays and the sonnets. See CB p.104/105 if interested further. Our increased knowledge of the dating process throws the way the whole sequence has been put together into question, and without a narrative, there is plenty of room for speculation. Sonnets 1-17, for instance, have become known as a distinct group in which the poet attempts to persuade a youth to marry and procreate.

The Dedication: who is Mr WH?
It is possible that WS was commissioned by the Countess of Pembroke to write this group for her son William Herbert, and he is a contender for the elusive WH of the dedication – ‘the onlie begetter’ of the ‘ensuing sonnets’. However theories surrounding this dedication have abounded to include others, another hot favourite being Henry Wriothesley the Earl of Southampton, and the dedicatee of Venus & Adonis and Lucrece, but this is also unlikely since in both these poems the dedication is clearly by WS himself, as they come with a short paragraph and are signed by the author and Southampton was in his late twenties when most of sonnets probably written - too old!.

Other options: Thomas Thorpe dedicated these to some unknown person – the ‘adventurer’ in WS’ absence – perhaps as KDJ suggests he was out of London because of the plague. Even more likely is that TT simply published these on his own initiative – the sonnet craze was well and truly over and WS may have never intended to publish – TT was just acting off his name. Bate even suggests that WH is a misprint for WS who is the only true ‘begetter’ of these sonnets in the sense often used by poets – that he gave birth to them – perhaps a jibe at Jaggers. We’ll never know...

Reception
In terms of WS’ other published poetry the sonnets were a failure compared to the hits Venus & Adonis and Lucrece (1594). This could either be because the sonnet craze was really over or because of the subject matter or the frustrating lack of a narrative, which had driven other sonnet sequences – Astrophil and Stella; Delia etc:

1640 – Benson published the second edition changing the order of the Sonnets and changing three masculine pronouns to feminine ones

1780 – Malone restored their order and was the first thorough and academic editor

1803 – Wordsworth thought they were: ‘abominably harsh, obscure, and worthless’ although 20 years later he was to defend them in that sonnet!

1821 – William Hazlitt: ‘And as for their ultimate drift, as for myself, I can make neither head nor tail of it’

1938 – John Crowe Ransom: ‘generally they are ill-constructed’

It is clear that critics have long had a problem with the sequence, many trying desperately to prove that these sonnets do not form a sequence at all, or at least not one that WS authorised. There are, though, distinguishable groups within the sequence – e.g the Dark Lady sonnets, the procreation sonnets and the ‘rival poet’ sonnets. We will come back to this question – what makes WS’s sonnets so different many times as we read the sequence from the beginning….

Suggested editions

2010-01-18T07:26:00.001Z

First things first - here is the list of editions that I have used in class. You will see that each is followed by a set of initials so that I can clearly show where information in my blog posts has originated.

Suggested editions:

Burrow, C (ed) The Complete Sonnets and Poems (CB)
(Oxford University Press, 2002)
ISBN: 0-19-281933-X

Duncan-Jones, K (ed) Shakespeare’s Sonnets (KDJ)
(Arden, 1997)
ISBN: 1-903436-57-5 Note: a new edition expected April 2010.

Booth, S (ed) Shakespeare’s Sonnets (SB)
(Yale, 2000)
ISBN: 0-300-08506-0

Vendler, H The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (HV)
(Harvard, 1999)
ISBN: 0-674-63712-7 Note: there is a new edition with CD-Rom

G Blakemore Evans The Sonnets (GBE)
(Cambridge University Press, 1998 – reprinted 2004)
ISBN: 0-521-29403-7

Kerrigan, J (ed) The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint (JK)
(Penguin, 1986)
ISBN: 0-14-070732-8

Bate, J & Rasmussen E (eds) William Shakespeare: The Sonnets and Other Poems (JB)
(MacMillan, 2009)
ISBN: 978-0-230-57624-7

Audio versions
These are the three I use most and it really is worth getting as many versions as you can, as each reading gives new dimensions and emphasis. This is perversely even more useful if you just don't like a reading - I could name a few....! Only the Alex Jennings has them all.

William Shakespeare :The Sonnets read by Alex Jennings.
(Naxos, 1997)
ISBN: 962634145 9

When Love Speaks - a selection of 50+ sonnets performed by a variety of artists.
(EMI, 2002)
7243 5 57321

From Shakespeare - with love - a selection of 75 sonnets read by a small group of actors.
(Naxos, 2009)
NA195612