Fair Youths and Dark Ladies: Shakespeare's Sonnets

For our final episode focusing on Shakespeare, we look at his sonnets, arguably the most famous collection of lyric poems in the language.

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• 14:26 (Cont.) Fair Youths and Dark Ladies: Shakespeare's Sonnets

Transcript

Hello and welcome, everyone.  I’m awfully glad you’ve dropped in.  If you’re a regular traveler with us, you know it has been a long sojourn over the last six months or so with our good friend, Mr. William Shakespeare, and today – after a fashion – we will end at the beginning.  After studying his early histories and comedies, his high tragedies, his narrative verse and late romances, today we turn to some of his earliest and, outside the plays, best known work.  It’s Shakespeare’s sonnets today on the Classic English Literature Podcast, that little corner of cyberspace where rhyme gets its reason.  

Before we kick off today . . . Last night, I got an email from Lindsey, who has been enjoying the show, but is wary of venturing into the Chaucer episodes because of a scarring episode in her high school freshman English class.  As a testament to her bravery, however, she included a thoroughly charming video of her reciting the opening lines of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English.  Bravo, my dear!  As a message to any book publishers out there listening, Lindsey is looking to break into the children’s book industry, so give the girl a chance!  She recites medieval poetry, for crying out loud!

The sonnets are arguably the most famous lyric poems in the language.  I’d lay even odds that nearly everyone in the English-speaking world, and probably well beyond, would at least recognize some line from them.  “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”  Come on!  That line is so familiar it has almost become a parody of itself.  Like all things Shakespeare, the sonnets have attracted and inspired intense scholarly attention, so, like all of our discussions, today’s will only provide a glimpse into the sonnets’ complexity and abundance.  

Shakespeare probably began seriously writing his sonnets in the early 1590s, near the same time he composed the narrative poems, when plague forced the Privy Council to close public theatres.  There is no reason to believe that he did not return to the form periodically over his career.  The first printed edition, evidently, was a bootleg.  In 1609, one Thomas Thorpe published a quarto volume entitled “Shakespeare’s Sonnets.  Never Before Imprinted.”  A rather sloppy version, incidentally, full of misprints and ridiculous punctuation.  From whence Mr. Thorpe procured his copy we are unsure.  We’ve a bit of a clue in the dedication, signed with Thorpe’s initials, reading 

TO THE ONLY BEGETTER OF THESE ENSUING SONNETS,

Mr. W.H.,  ALL HAPPINESS,AND THAT ETERNITY PROMISED

BY OUR EVER-LIVING POET WISHETH THE WELL-WISHING

ADVENTURER IN SETTING FORTH.

Well, who’s Mr. W.H.?  Is he the person who supplied the copy to Thorpe, or is W.H. the author of the poems?  The answer is lost in the mists of time, friend listener, though this has done little to prevent a thriving academic cottage industry competing to identify the bearer of those cryptic initials.  Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, is a leading contender, but his case seems to rest on the fact that his initials, if reversed, are WH and, perhaps less laughably, his being the patron of Shakespeare’s narrative poems.  Pop back to episode 61 for a bit of a brush up on Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece.  In the other corner, William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, has a claim staked.  This rests principally on the fact that the initials fit, quite a lead over H.W. of S.  Well, there’s also the little detail that he is the nephew and heir of Sir Philip Sidney, whose Astrophil and Stella sonnet sequence we looked at back in episode 35.  There’s a dark horse contender, one William Hall, a stationer’s assistant, whose job it was to procure copy for printers.  Who knows?  Nevertheless, the book failed to produce much of a splash and rather faded from memory until the 18th-century.  But this 1609 edition, which was probably not sanctioned by the author himself, remains our chief source for the poems.

Perhaps before we move on, it would be worthwhile to review what a sonnet actually is and how it is structured.  We’ve talked about them in several previous episodes (those are episodes 32, 33, 35, and 37, mainly).  The term sonnet comes from the Italian for “little song,” and was perhaps invented by Giacomo da Lentini in the 13th century.  While many Italian poets composed them, including Dante, Tasso, and Ariosto, the main influence and exporter of the form for English writers was Petrarch and his poems to Laura in Il Canzoniere.

Petrarch composed a 14 line poem, you may recall, in iambic pentameter.  The first eight lines, called the octave, introduces the theme and rhymes abba abba.  The final six lines, the sestet, resolve or comment upon the octave.  Such a compressed lyric meditates upon a single idea, emotion, or event, asking the reader to identify with the first-person speaker.

When the sonnet came to England, poets adapted the structure to suit tastes or needs.  Sir Thomas Wyatt preserved the Italian octave but introduced a quatrain and heroic couplet in place of the former sestet.  Edmund Spenser moved to all quatrains with a closing couplet.  Such innovation was permissible early on, as there are also twelve-line and 16-line poems from the era that gleefully pronounce themselves sonnets.  In the Elizabethan era, the term came to mean any brief, meditative poem, though, admittedly, the 14-liner dominated.

Shakespeare’s preferred structure – though there are some few exceptions even within his own corpus – most closely resembles that of Spenser.  A Shakespearean sonnet, as we now formally define it, contains 3 quatrains of iambic pentameter alternately rhyming – so abab cdcd efef – capped by a heroic couplet: gg.  So Shakespeare expands the rhyming count to seven, over the previous forms’ ten, thus allowing a greater range for sonic effect and connotative breadth.

Shakespeare used the sonnet in a number of his plays.  Romeo and Juliet contains three: the prologue spoken by the Chorus, the dialogue when the lovers meet, and the opening by the chorus to Act 2.  Additionally, both Love’s Labour's Lost and Henry V feature sonnets in their scripts.

But when we speak of Shakespeare’s sonnets, we refer to the 154 poems of that structure found in Thorpe’s 1609 quarto.  In addition to expanding the rhyme scheme of the form, Shakespeare also expanded the scope of what we have called the sonnet cycle.  Sidney’s Astrophil and Spenser’s Amoretti explored a single subject and addressed a single listener.  Shakespeare’s (which, to be fair, I don’t I’ve ever heard his collection referred to as a cycle) allows his poems to range over a variety of subjects and addresses at least three different auditors.  The traditional numbering of the sonnets is Thorpe’s, and while we’ve become quite used to it – some even going so far as to propose a narrative arc to the series – such numbering is pretty random within some large clusters. 

Generally speaking, the first 126 sonnets are thought to address what scholars have come to call the Fair Youth – a young, attractive man.  Like the enigmatic initials W.H., literary detectives have long sought the identity of this gorgeous young slab of beefcake, and for their efforts, seem to have come up with, once again, the earls of Southampton and Pembroke.  (Yawn) And so and so on.  Sonnets 127 to 152 address the so-called Dark Lady, a mysterious woman of a certain age with dark hair and eyes.  She, too, has piqued the curiosity of the reader.  Candidates for this woman include Emilia Lanyer, one of the first professional female poets in England (we’ll be looking at her work in an upcoming episode).  There’s also Black Luce, an African brothel owner, Mary Fitton (Pembroke’s mistress), Elizabeth Vernon (the same’s wife), and a bevy of other black-haired beauties.  Bringing up the rear of the sonnet groupings are the two Greek sonnets concerning the Roman god Cupid.  Such categorizing, unsurprisingly, has not gone unchallenged.  Many readers believe sonnets 78 to 86 address themselves to a Rival Poet, capital RP, and not the Fair Youth.  And yes, tribes have formed behind prospective candidates for this character, too, including Marlowe, Spenser, and Barnfield among the poets we’ve covered, as well as some we’ve perhaps unjustly ignored, including Michael Drayton and George Chapman.  Most recently, Dr. Paul Edmondson and Sir Stanley Wells have co-edited an edition that dispenses with the traditional numbering system altogether in favor of what they believe to be the order of composition and adds a whopping 30 more sonnets culled from the plays.  Be all that as it may, for our discussion, we’ll keep it traditional as that’s what most folks will recognize.

Obviously, we’ve not the time to address each of the sonnets individually, and there are plenty of thoroughly comprehensive studies available at fine bookstores everywhere.  The rest of today’s show will comprise readings of a small selection – ones that are super-famous and so cannot be overlooked, ones that may be a bit atypical, or ones that I just happen to like.

I think an awesome place to start is Sonnet 145.  Yep – let’s go deep.  This is an atypical sonnet.  See if you can spot the variation.  Here goes:

Those lips that Love’s own hand did make

Breath’d forth the sound that said “I hate,”

To me that languish’d for her sake:

But when she saw my woeful state,

Straight in her heart did mercy come,

Chiding that tongue that ever sweet

Was used in giving gentle doom;

And taught it thus anew to greet;

“I hate” she alter’d with an end,

That follow’d it as gentle day

Doth follow night, who, like a fiend,

From heaven to hell is flown away;

“I hate” from hate away she threw,

And sav’d my life, saying “not you.”

This poem is grouped with the Dark Lady sonnets, and might be one of the few of those to which the lady in question might not object (we’ll look at another more famous one soon).  The woman begins to speak, saying, “I hate . . . “ but pausing when she sees the speaker wince.  Her heart softens and she concludes the utterance saying “not you.”  Oh, the heart flutters!

 I started with this one because there’s a good possibility that, despite the deep numbering in the sequence, this could be the first sonnet Will Shakespeare wrote.  And it does feel, well, rather amateurish (so much so, indeed, that some doubt the great man’s authorship).  Did you note the big structural variation here?  If you said iambic tetrameter, give yourself a cookie!  Yes, here’s a sonnet with a four-beat line rather than our accustomed five-beater.  This alone goes a long way to give the impression of the poem as somewhat cruder.  It lacks the stateliness or composure of pentameter, feels more rustic or common.  As well, the shorter lines also emphasize a rather odd selection of rhymes:  they all work, don’t misunderstand, but the “ate” and “ake” rhymes of the first quatrain are a bit too close and the hustling tetrameter makes them kind of pile up noisily.  The “come” and “doom”of lines 5 and 7 sound like slant rhymes to us, but would have been pretty spot-on in original pronunciation, so we can’t complain there.  We can complain, though, of a rather jumbled opening independent clause – the whole sonnet, actually, is only full sentence– which stretches to line 7 (and odd place, in a sonnet, to end a clause).  The Dark Lady, shall we say, is addressed by a synecdoche in line one.  A synecdoche is a figure of speech wherein a part of something is used to represent the whole of that something.  Like calling your car your wheels.  Wheels are a part of the car.  In this poem, the woman is referred to by her lips, and only her lips.  For the remainder of the sonnet, Shakespeare uses the pronoun her, but its antecedent is not grammatically a woman, it’s just her lips.  Bit weird.  The third quatrain and final couplet whip a rather schoolboyish simile on us – “not you” follows “I hate” just as day follows night.  OK, it’ll do – out of something negative a positive comes.  But then we’re given that odd second simile which compares that to a demon flying from heaven to hell.  Surely that should be the other way around, shouldn’t it – that’s a positive to a negative.  Well, assuming the fiend is doing the flying – the passive voice of “is flown away” makes it somewhat difficult to tell.

OK, so I’ve pooped on this poem enough, and done so with a galling audacity.  This is Shakespeare, McDonough, you are not fit to mend the nib of his pen!  Indeed, I am not.  But one needn’t be a chicken to note the odor of a bad egg.  It’s one interesting feature is the little phrase “hate away” in line 13, which some scholars argue is a cunning pun on Hathaway, the maiden name of the lovely and talented Mrs. Shakespeare.  So maybe it was an early love poem from young Will to the more mature and worldly-wise Anne, maybe after a lover’s spat.  That would account for its rudimentary workmanship – a nervous young swain trying to win his lady-love.  Let’s go with that, yeah?

Let’s look at maybe the most famous, or infamous, of the Dark Lady poems.  Sonnet 130 never fails to exasperate, upset, or offend my students – particularly the young women.  I fail to see why.  Here ‘tis:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red than her lips' red;

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound;

I grant I never saw a goddess go;

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.

   And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

   As any she belied with false compare.

The problem, apparently, is that the speaker here, in a perversion of the Renaissance blazon (that poetic catalogue of a woman’s features), says that:

1. the sun is brighter than his mistress’s eyes
2. coral is redder than her lips
3. she’s rather tanned
4. she could use a good hair conditioner
5. roses are more colorful than her cheeks
6. perfume smells nicer than her breath
7. music sounds nicer than her voice
8. the mistress is not a goddess

All of which is undoubtedly true, yet readers balk at the speaker’s cruelty to his ostensible beloved.  “He’s calling her ugly!  He’s body shaming!  I’d slap him in the dangleys!”  Apparently, in matters of romantic flattery, honesty is not the best policy.  

Yet, dear listener, I plead with you – regard these statements objectively.  Imagine, literally, what a woman would look like – actually look like – with eyes as bright as the sun, lips red as coral, skin white as snow: right.  You imagining something from a Tim Burton film, some pasty and luminescent undead creature?  Good.  Yes, that’s far more flattering.  The tanning, I assume, my students are OK with, given that most of my female students here in Vermont turn a rather unnatural orange a few weeks before senior prom.  And mostly, their breath smells like Dunkin.  As great as is my respect and affection for my students, I must confess that, despite their helicopter-parents’ assurances, they are not goddesses.  This, of course, does nothing to placate their distaste for Sonnet 130.  Even when I point out that Shakespeare is here satirizing the ridiculous conventions of love poetry, taking the piss from the grotesque and dehumanizing imagery of contemporary sonnet cycles, very like those of Sidney or Spenser and others.  Look at the closing couplet – he loves her because she’s real, an actual flesh and blood human, and not because of the false and inflated poetic comparisons that would deny her reality.  I try to draw the parallel to modern beauty standards, how unrealistic and dangerous they are – note the rise in anxiety, eating disorders, and other mental illnesses among young women and see the toxic effects of photoshopped magazine covers and social media filters on perceptions of beauty.  I think it a rather progressive feminist poem.  The girls nod, but I sense they would still slap any boy who wrote such a poem to them in the dangleys.

According to the October 9, 2021 edition of that beacon of northern journalism, The Yorkshire Times, Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 “emerged as the nation’s favorite poem.”  Coincidentally, a towering plurality of 18% of voters secured “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” the spot as the greatest poem of all time.

I considered briefly skipping this one, thinking it too well-known, too mainstream. But how could a podcast purporting to introduce listeners to the history of English literature exclude England's favorite poem?  It couldn’t, not with any credibility.  Pour yourself a nice cup of tea and get cozy:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometime declines,

By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;

Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:

   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The first line is undoubtedly the most famous in all of English poetry.  This sonnet comes from the Fair Youth collection, in which the speaker, a middle-aged man addresses a beautiful young man of the aristocracy.  The preceding 17 poems are sometimes called the procreation sonnets, because the speaker continuously urges the Fair Youth to be fruitful and multiply.  Sonnet 1 begins “From fairest creatures we desire increase, / That thereby beauty's rose might never die.”  Sonnet 3 urges the youth to “Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest / Now is the time that face should form another.”  Sonnet 12’s couplet admonishes: “And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence / Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.”  There’s something of that teleological argument that the beautiful are made for love and procreation, the one that Venus used to reason Adonis into the clinch.  We also can detect a whiff of carpe diem-style urgency here, seizing the day while beauty thrives.  Check out episode 40 on the Pastoral Eclogues to brush up on how to carpe the diem.

But Sonnet 18 moves beyond the urgency of urges and the speaker’s feeling for the youth moves to the center.  The poem begins quite conventionally – maybe even stereotypically: comparing the loveliness of the beloved to something else lovely.  But we are surprised a little by the second line, when the lover’s temperament exceeds the mere pleasantness of summer weather.  The poem continues to expand its scope beyond the mere beauty of the beloved.  Stormy weather or cloudiness or excessive heat mar the summer – and besides, summer is too short!  

Reminds me of that old joke: The food at this restaurant is terrible!  And such small portions!

But the poem moves from the intimacy of the two friends or lovers, to the seasons to the celestial heavens to the ineluctability of Nature itself.  As the third quatrain opens – at the same line in which a Petrarchan sonnet would place the volta – the speaker shifts to an assertion of the Fair Youth’s immortality: “But thy eternal summer shall not fade.”  OK, so rather than the transitory mutability of actual summer – the favorite season of sonneteers – the youth’s summer (his youth and beauty) will live in perpetuity.  How so?  Well, at first blush, it sounds rather like the speaker in Spenser’s Sonnet 75, in which his “verse your virtues rare shall eternize.”  Poetry – the work of art – will grant some form of immortality, a life beyond the merely physical.  Shakespeare writes: “When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.”  Couple this with the earlier use of “eternal” and you think, yep – living forever in my poetry (the eternal lines are the lines of the sonnet, by the by).  But, as Helen Vendler points out, the “eternal summer” and “eternal lines” are somewhat paradoxical.  Since eternity is that which is outside time, the opposite of time, or at least beyond the limits of duration, Shakespeare’s linking the adjective to temporal and temporary nouns throws us into uncertainty.  You just said summer was not eternal and how could eternity grow into its antonym time?  When we arrive at the couplet, then, we see that the “art as granting eternal life” trope is conditional – as long as people breathe and see, they will read poetry, and poetry will give you life.  But note the paradox again – the Fair Youth’s inviobility is subject to the whims and fashions of time itself.

There’s a similar uncertainty lingering in Sonnet 116, my personal favorite love poem (and that of many others, I’m sure.  I understand it to be a quite popular selection for weddings).  While I’m a sucker for the sentiment expressed here, I also just love the way this sonnet sounds – it is one of the most mellifluous of all English utterances.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Ah!  Beautiful.  It seems to me, and to all those wedding readers, that this poems distills the very definition of true love.  It does not change when it encounters change, it does not leave when the beloved is away.  Then the speaker moves to a nautical navigation metaphor – the ever-fixed mark is a lighthouse and then the North Star, the fulcrum of celestial navigation, never obscured by storms, always steadfast as the navigator sets his quadrant.  Love is the star by which we navigate our lives.

Quatrain three somewhat belies the assumptions underlying sonnets like 18 in that love does not waver even as time passes and youth declines from beauty – “the bending sickle’s compass come” – the grim reaper, Father Time, harvesting youth.  Love bears out until Judgment Day, the eternity seemingly lacking in 18’s subjunctive “so long as” qualifier.  In this fashion, we may read the closing couplet as cockily ironic: if you can prove this false, no one ever loved and I never wrote anything.  Of course, he wrote this, so . . . the argument is circular.

And that’s the way just about everybody looks at this poem.  But then I consulted the erudite Dr. Helen Vendler and she says, “I read this poem as an example not of definition but of dramatic refutation or rebuttal.”  She says we’ve got it entirely the wrong way round!  She says this poem is a response to an earlier, rather callow, and unheard by us, imagining of love by the Fair Youth.  It’s the Youth who thinks all these romantic thoughts, and it’s the jaded middle-aged speaker who must repudiate them.  She points to the profusion of negations in the poem: all the nots, nos, and nevers.  But woe be unto you who thinks the speaker’s world-weariness is the normative position.  Vendler then argues that, in trying to refute the youth’s argument, the speaker himself has an inaccurate image of an altering, capricious, tentative love – one subject to impediments.  So perhaps we end up in largely the same place, though Prof. Vendler gives more testimony to Shakespeare’s complexity of vision.

Some of you may have noticed that large pachyderm skulking about in the corner of the room.  No, I’ve not been ignoring it – just waiting for the opportune moment to address it.  That elephant’s name is Shakespeare’s sexuality.  High school and early college students are shocked! Shocked! to find that Shakespeare compares a young man to a summer’s day and debates the definition of true love with him.  “So, was Shakespeare gay?” they tentatively ask.  Usually one bright spark notes the Bard’s marriage and the Dark Lady sonnets so the question then becomes one of Shakespeare’s bisexuality.

Honestly, I find such questions tedious.  Part of me thinks, “Who cares? and why would it be any of our business anyway?”  But then another part of me remembers that for students who may feel marginalized for their gender or sexuality, getting the world’s most influential author on your team is quite a coup.  And, it goes back to that gnostic thing I mentioned earlier – a bit of arcane knowledge always makes things a bit more interesting.

But to the point.  One, as I suggested in the recent episode on The Tempest, Shakespeare is not an author of autobiography or memoir – he is poet and a playwright, so his gig is to inhabit the minds of personalities he creates.  Such distinctions of genre and purpose are essential to any reliable appreciation of his art. The question of Shakespeare’s sexuality as potentially revealed in the sonnets must engage with contemporary poetic practice.  Consistent with the conventions of the day, while sonnet cycles were inspired by and dedicated to particular persons, those persons were also highly stylized and idealized in the poems themselves.  We are already in an artificial world.  

But, of course, poets and playwrights are flesh and blood humans and certainly their own emotional or psychological lives bear upon the types of characters they create and the ways the creator inhabits them.  I find it disingenuous in older critics when they dismiss the very apparent homoeroticism in the sonnets as merely a deep chat between two friends or fatherly advice or the guidance from a particularly close uncle.  That all may be true – indeed, it seems quite likely.  But traditional discomfort with divergent sexualities should in no way be allowed to “hush up” such blatantly sexualized sentiments as found in Sonnet 20:

A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted

Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;

A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted

With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;

An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,

Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;

A man in hue, all hues in his controlling,

Much steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.

And for a woman wert thou first created;

Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,

And by addition me of thee defeated,

By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,

Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.

Probably the most charged of sonnets cited as evidence of Shakespeare’s same-sex attraction, and I do think you have to be rather coy when trying to explain this one away.  There’s the gender-bending “master-mistress” and then the transition from “for a woman wert thou first created” to the adding of “one thing.”  What’s that one thing?  Well, line 13 makes it a verb: pricked.  So we get a very strong sense of the speaker’s erotic passion for the youth, one predicated upon a sense of gender fluidity.  

What this says about Shakespeare himself is impossible to know.  Again, he’s presenting characters in a type of drama.  How much of himself does he put into those characters?  We can’t say.

And, apart from anything else, the whole issue feels to me rather anachronistic.  It’s only rather recently, historically, that we’ve come to regard sexuality as an “identity.”  Really only within the last few decades.  Prior to that, sexuality was an inclination or activity, but did not define a self in the way we think of it today.  Famously, American writer Gore Vidal refused to call himself a homosexual.  He said that he was not an adjective.  Rather, he engaged in homosexual acts.  Of course, the fact that he felt the need to draw such a distinction points to the fact that by the late 20th century, sexuality was becoming an identity marker, almost an essence, as we tend to regard it now.  So, asking the questions “Was Shakespeare gay or was he bisexual?” evidences an uncritical prejudice in favor of current modes of thinking, ones that perhaps did not obtain in Elizabethan England.  

Let’s look at two more sonnets quickly before we wrap up.  For those who like to see a dramatic narrative encoded in the sonnet sequence, I think these nicely track.  Sonnet 29:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

I all alone beweep my outcast state,

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,

And look upon myself and curse my fate,

Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,

Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,

With what I most enjoy contented least;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,

Haply I think on thee, and then my state,

(Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;

    For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings

    That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

I like this one, especially in the classroom, because of its accessibility.  The underlying sentiment is pretty elementary: your love is worth more than anything in the world.  Of course, much more is going on here.  We note that the speaker is prone to jealousy and envy, perhaps a bit of self-loathing creeps in occasionally.  The speaker, in short, suffers some kind of depression.  Then, the speaker gets outside himself (interestingly, kind of a line late – line 10 is the actual shift in attitude rather than the more traditional line 9 volta) – he thinks of the Fair Youth and his mood lifts, like the larks who spring from the damp dirty earth in the morning to sing to the rising sun.  What a great, great image.  The whole poem, cataloging the resentments of the speaker’s misery, culminates in a beautiful simile of renewal and rebirth, a reawakening, not of the body or the senses, but of the soul.

Sonnet 73 provides us with the end of that cycle:

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,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Whereas Sonnet 29 opens out and up from the speaker’s self-pity to rebirth, Sonnet 73 once again closes the speaker in – not in exactly the same way as before; the speaker has a different understanding of love thanks to the youth – there is sense of diminution here, of slow collapse.  The speaker’s advancing age compares to the autumnal yellowing of the leaves and the bareness of trees.  Incidentally, some see that rather lovely image of winter trees as “bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang” as a reference to Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries.  Maybe – but what that bit of trivia has to do with the poem I cannot tell.  Yet it is oft-repeated.  I like to think the “late birds” are those larks from Sonnet 29.

Anyway, from autumnal decline and the silence left by absent birds, we move to a metaphor of the setting sun, so aging moves from seasonal to daily – we thus have some kind of acceleration, a hastening toward death.  Then, finally, in a very clever image, the speaker says that aging is like a fire burning down to embers which, when turned to ash, will smother what once fed it.  I’ve always loved that idea – very simple, not really more complex than the autumn or sunset images from earlier – but yet so thorough, so comprehensive: life is smothered by life spent, like a fire fed by the logs that will turn to ash that will extinguish it.  And then, curiously, in the couplet, it is the youth who will leave.  You’d think it’d be the speaker, yeah, whose death supercharges their love just before his death.  But no: Shakespeare has the “thou” leaving, the beloved.  Very curious.  Very poignant.

Well, litterbugs, there are about 147 other sonnets for you to explore.  They are, of course, well worth your time.  I hope you’ve enjoyed this brief introduction to the English language’s most famous collection of poems and, in fact, our series-within-a-series on the works of Shakespeare.  As far as I’m planning now, this is the last episode to focus on the Bard.  He may well make cameos in future episodes, but his days in the limelight of our podcast are over.  

Please leave a 5 star rating and a positive review on your platform of choice – that’s the best way to get the word round about the show.  If you are so moved, you can make a contribution by clicking the support the show button – I dearly appreciate it.  OK, folks, our revels now are ended.  I’ll talk to you soon.