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Shakespeare’s Sonnet 8 Notes

17 Tuesday Sep 2019

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Detail of “The Musicians” (about 1595) by Caravaggio

[1]      Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?

[2]       Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.

[3]       Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,

[4]       Or else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?

[5]       If the true concord of well-tunèd sounds,

[6]       By unions married, do offend thine ear,

[7]       They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds

[8]       In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.

[9]       Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,

[10]     Strikes each in each by mutual ordering,

[11]     Resembling sire and child and happy mother

[12]     Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing;

[13]     Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,

[14]     Sings this to thee: “Thou single wilt prove none.”

 

This sonnet continues the refrain, that it would be wrong to refrain from marriage and a child. Here, the overarching metaphor is the harmony of music. The object of the poem is hearing music, which should bring him pleasure; but the beautiful music is also unsettling him. Why? Because the music is a harmony of parts, a “marriage”, where one sound stands relation to the other sounds, like a husband and wife, like a father, mother and child. But the object, being single, cannot enjoy the harmony.

First Stanza

[1]       Music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly?

[2]       Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.

[3]       Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv’st not gladly,

[4]       Or else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?

 

The first two lines begin with an accented syllable:

MUSic to HEAR

SWEETS with SWEETS

The effect is to quickly demand the attention. It poses a question: Why does music sound unhappy to you? That does not make sense

Sweets with sweets war not – there is no discord in two sweet sounds.

Joy delights in joy.

Why is this music troubling you? Shakespeare is here mixing the themes of music and love. There is a missing pleasure in your hearing of this music.

Shakespeare will pick up this idea and develop as the introductory lines to the Twelfth Night:

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
‘Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe’er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.

There is the same receiving of music, and yet the troubled receiving. The Duke’s love both craves and is cannot bear the musick.

Second Stanza:

[5]       If the true concord of well-tunèd sounds,

[6]       By unions married, do offend thine ear,

[7]       They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds

[8]       In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.

If there is a trouble in hearing the music, then the fault is not in the music, but in you who hear the music. The music is “true concord” and “well-tuned sounds”.  There is no fault described in the sound. But there is a fault somewhere, because sounds, “do offend thine ear”.

In the beginning of line 6, Shakespeare puns on the word “married” to introduce a new theme in this discussion of music and the pleasure in hearing music. The “true concord” of harmony is here said to be “unions married”.

The reason for the displeasure in the music is not in the music, but that the concord of the music “sweetly chide thee”. Why? Because being single, the harmony of parts, the marriage of the sounds beckons you to a similar marriage, but you are single.

There are endless speculations about the story behind these sonnets. But this particular sonnet seems to suggest a back story that Shakespeare is writing to someone who is hesitating at a marriage.

Third Stanza

[9]       Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,

[10]     Strikes each in each by mutual ordering,

[11]     Resembling sire and child and happy mother

[12]     Who, all in one, one pleasing note do sing;

In the third stanza, he speaks of the harmony brought about in the music by developing the sounds in terms of a family. One string is “sweet husband to another”. The musician strikes one string and then another, “by mutual ordering”. The concourse of the sounds creates a resemblance, as a sire and child and mother in order together bring about “one pleasing note”. The parts do all sing together to create beauty.

Couplet:

[13]     Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,

[14]     Sings this to thee: “Thou single wilt prove none.”

The song is “speechless” because it is just music. The various notes are not many but “one”. And this harmony of notes without words is singing: If you will be single, you will be nothing.

Shakespeare Sonnet 7 (Notes)

14 Saturday Sep 2019

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Johann_Liss_006

 

The fall of Phaethon, Johann Liss,

[1]       Lo, in the orient when the gracious light

[2]       Lifts up his burning head, each under eye

[3]       Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,

[4]       Serving with looks his sacred majesty;

[5]       And having climbed the steep-up heavenly hill,

[6]       Resembling strong youth in his middle age,

[7]       Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,

[8]       Attending on his golden pilgrimage.

[9]       But when from highmost pitch with weary car

[10]     Like feeble age he reeleth from the day,

[11]     The eyes, ’fore duteous, now converted are

[12]     From his low tract and look another way.

[13]     So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon,

[14]     Unlooked on diest unless thou get a son.

 

This sonnet develops a central metaphor of the sun’s progress across the sky, which each successive stanza taking a different part of the day: morning, noon, afternoon. The progress of the sun is used a proxy for the progress of one’s life. At the end, the sun sets and life ends. From this metaphor, Shakespeare draws a conclusion, you will be like the sun after it has set if you do not have a son.

First Stanza

[1]      Lo, in the orient when the gracious light

[2]       Lifts up his burning head, each under eye

[3]       Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,

[4]       Serving with looks his sacred majesty;

 

The sun is developed in metaphoric language. In fact, Shakespeare never uses the

“sun” in the poem, apparently as a set up for the use of the word “son” in the final line.

 

The poem begins with “Lo” – Look! The rising sun draws all attention.

 

The sun rises in the “orient”, not the east. The orient, in Shakespeare time, was the land of magnificent treasure,

 

He kissed—the last of many doubled kisses—

(FTLN 0557)      [47]     This orient pearl.

 

 

Antony and Cleopatra Act I, Scene

After this, he was taken out of his chaire of Majestie, having upon him an upper robe adorned with precious stones of all sorts, orient pearles of great quantitie, but alwayes augmented in riches: it was in waight two hundred pounds, the traine, and parts thereof borne up by 6. Dukes, his chiefe imperiall Crowne upon his head very precious:

Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation Made by Sea or Overland to the Remote & Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at Any Time within the Compasse of These 1600 Yeares, vol. 2 (Medford, MA: E. P. Dutton & Co., n.d.), 271.

The sun gives a “gracious light” and “Lifts up his burning head”. The sun is a colossus which rises over the landscape. His light is gracious – he is a king. And the response is the response to a king:

 

each under eye

[3]       Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,

[4]       Serving with looks his sacred majesty

 

All pay “homage” and do so by looking upon the “sacred majesty”.

 

Second Stanza

[5]       And having climbed the steep-up heavenly hill,

[6]       Resembling strong youth in his middle age,

[7]       Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,

[8]       Attending on his golden pilgrimage.

 

The second stanza develops the image of the sun. He shows his strength by climginb up the “steep” “heavenly hill” of the sky. He power is such that even in middle age he has the beauty of youth. And he continues to receive homage by “mortal looks” which now “adore his beauty still”.

He progress is a “golden pilgrimage” which the mortals “attend” to.

Third Stanza

[9]       But when from highmost pitch with weary car

[10]     Like feeble age he reeleth from the day,

[11]     The eyes, ’fore duteous, now converted are

[12]     From his low tract and look another way.

At this point, the imagery of the sun shifts in two ways. First, it concerns the sun’s decline. Second, the sun is no longer climbing himself but now is in a car; which reminds us of  Phaethon who attempted to drive the chariot of the sun but veered wildly out of control and brought the sun too near the earth. 

Shakespeare does not make that precise point, but does allude to one who is too weak to control the sun.

But when from highmost pitch with weary car

[10]     Like feeble age he reeleth from the day,

At the height of trip, the sun in weakness: weary car, feeble age, reelth, loses control and the sun falls from the sky. Seemingly in the height of power, the sun is actually grown week.

And the response of the mortals is no longer to look but now to look-away:

[11]     The eyes, ’fore duteous, now converted are

[12]     From his low tract and look another way.

The language of homage and adoration, part kingly, part religious returns. The eyes no longer perform “duty” (like a subject). The mortals are “now converted.” With the swings in Shakespeare’s day between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism would have shown many “conversions”, thus, the language would have resonance.

The moral is obvious: you are beautiful now, but soon you will be weakened, your beauty gone – you will be like the falling sun where all look away.

 

Couplet

[13]     So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon,

[14]     Unlooked on diest unless thou get a son.

The metaphor is drawn tight: you are like the sun. Yes you are at noon, but noon does not last. Everyone will look away from you in your age and weakness, “unless thou get a son”. The use of the “son” in the last syllable is purposeful, because he has studiously avoided the word “sun” throughout the poem.

You will fail like a failing “sun” unless you get a “son” – who himself be a new “sun.”

Some observations on Shakespeare Sonnet 6 (“Make worms thine heir”)

07 Saturday Sep 2019

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[1] Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface
[2] In thee thy summer ere thou be distilled.
[3] Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
[4] With beauty’s treasure ere it be self-killed.
[5] That use is not forbidden usury
[6] Which happies those that pay the willing loan;
[7] That’s for thyself to breed another thee,
[8] Or ten times happier, be it ten for one.
[9] Ten times thyself were happier than thou art
[10] If ten of thine ten times refigured thee;
[11] Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart,
[12] Leaving thee living in posterity?
[13] Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair
[14] To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.
This sonnet picks up immediately upon the imagery of the preceding sonnet: summer must be “distilled” to last into the winter. It also picks up on the general theme of this series of sonnets, in calling upon the object of the poem to have a child. The distinction in this sonnet is in its monetary/investment imagery. The child is seen as an investment and an inheritance.

First Stanza
[1] Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface
[2] In thee thy summer ere thou be distilled.
[3] Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
[4] With beauty’s treasure ere it be self-killed.

You will die. Winter will kill, or you will kill yourself (in killing your own beauty)

Winter is an actor who will deface your summer (your beauty, your youth). The language of “deface” puts an emphasis upon appearance rather than existence. Winter is vengeance that will come and will deface you. The fact of winter’s work is not question. Winter’s existence gives intensity and necessity to the task at hand:

When winter has come, it will be too late. Therefore, you must now distill you beauty, make a vial of this perfume of beauty (have a child)

Ere: before, archaic.

The poet uses treasure as a noun and a verb: first, “treasure thou some place”: make a place where treasure is kept. In your treasure, place your treasure.

In speaking of coming age taking away your treasure, you do not treasure your Shakespeare uses an idea which he will develop elsewhere; such as in Sonnet 75, “Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure”

Second Stanza
[5] That use is not forbidden usury
[6] Which happies those that pay the willing loan;
[7] That’s for thyself to breed another thee,
[8] Or ten times happier, be it ten for one.

Usury is charging interest on a loan. The legal conception is with us in the principle limiting the amount of interest one charge for a loan. The line contains a fine pun on “use” and “usury” must like treasure and treasure in the preceding stanza.

It is not an illegal act when you make a loan which causes happiness (“Happies”) in the one who pay the loan.

It is not wrong to lend yourself to the future when you willing to do so. In fact, the return you make on making this loan will exceed any cost. In fact, you will receive a ten-to-one return on bearing a child.

Third Stanza
[9] Ten times thyself were happier than thou art
[10] If ten of thine ten times refigured thee;
[11] Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart,
[12] Leaving thee living in posterity?

A desire for happiness routinely controls our decisions: it keeps us from acting and causes us to act. We value our own happiness.

So in this stanza the controlling concept is no longer interest on a loan, it is return on our action: this will pay us back in happiness.

Now we are back to the image of “winter” here called “death”.

Death obviously cannot cause you injury if you have left and are beyond death’s action “if thou shouldst depart”. The idea here is that once you have departed you are in fact dead.

The conception comes from Romans 7 where Paul explains that that the law (and death is the sergeant who enforces the law of God):

Romans 7:1–3 (ESV)
7 Or do you not know, brothers—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? 2 For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage. 3 Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress.

Death can only enforce its demands on you so far. But there is a way to surpass death.

Shakespeare takes this idea and applies it to children: if you have a child, you have (in a manner) bypassed death.
Couplet
[13] Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair
[14] To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.

The trouble which will destroy the object is his own pride: Be not self-willed.

Why should you not be so? You are too fair.

You must face this truth: you will die. Do not be conquered by death.

The poem end with a certain irony: if you do not have heir by birth, you will have an heir death. But this heir will not save you from death but will rather make you a prey to death. And thus, you will have an heir and you have face death.

This image of worms is used to good effect in Hamlet, where Hamlet speaks with the King about the King’s counselor – whom Hamlet has just killed:

Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?
At supper king
At supper where?
Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A
certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at
him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We
fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves
for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is
but variable service—two dishes but to one table.
That’s the end.
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat
of a king and eat of the fish that hath fed of that
worm.

The imagery of worms puts a certain bite upon the concept of death. The idea of “death”. One’s own death is an abstraction: but to make it concrete, the idea of one’s body being eaten makes death a more “real” thing.

Shakespeare Sonnet 5, Walls of Glass

31 Saturday Aug 2019

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(Photo Courtesy of Jenni Sweat, Flickr)

 [1]      Those hours that with gentle work did frame

[2]       The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell

[3]       Will play the tyrants to the very same

[4]       And that unfair which fairly doth excel;

[5]       For never-resting time leads summer on

[6]       To hideous winter and confounds him there,

[7]       Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,

[8]       Beauty o’er-snowed and bareness everywhere.

[9]       Then, were not summer’s distillation left

[10]     A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,

[11]     Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,

[12]     Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.

[13]     But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,

[14]     Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

 

First Stanza: The Promised Reversal

This sonnet raises a variant on the theme of the need for beauty to make itself again in a child. In the first sonnet, the world as a whole will be the less. In the second sonnet, a child is promised as a comfort (“And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.”). In the third sonnet, after death, there will be no remembrance of you. In the fourth sonnet, the loss is to nature. All of these losses are abstracted from the object of the sonnet: the world will be the less. Here in the fifth, the certain reversal of beauty is promised (unless preserved).

[1]       Those hours that with gentle work did frame

[2]       The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell

[3]       Will play the tyrants to the very same

[4]       And that unfair which fairly doth excel;

The lines are bit cryptic: The first question is what sort of “work” was done to “frame/The lovely gaze”? It could potentially be the work of gestation, or the act of growing up: “the lovely gaze where eye doth dwell” could refer to the visage of the object of the poem.  But the “lovely gaze” could also refer to the act of gazing by third parties: the work is the fact of others looking upon the object.

The answer to the question depends upon the identity of the “tyrants.” If “lovely gaze” is the visage (the thing gazed upon), then the “tyrants” are the hours of work: All the life which at first worked to create your beauty will in the end turn upon you and become the hours of pain.

If the “lovely gaze” is the gaze of third persons, then the tyrants are those observers, those who look upon the beauty. An argument could be made for both positions: and such a purposeful ambiguity is the sort of complexity which makes Shakespeare fascinating. The ambiguity is more than just a clever wordplay; the ambiguity draws the subjective beauty and the objective admiration into a union of parts which each hangs upon the other.

I think the weight leans to the visage, because it makes more sense to spend “gentle hours” upon the creation of a visage rather than the creation of a gaze. But living in a fame and appearance obsessed world, the idea of hours being spent in the creation of a gaze makes sense: the beauty is not just there in the object, the beauty is in the relationship to those who gaze upon it.

The last line then promises the reversal: The beauty – “fair” – will become ugly; the exceeding of the “fair” will have a balanced and equivalent fall. But again, the admiration of the world can quickly turn to distain. You see, both readings make good sense of the lines.

Second Stanza: The Mechanics of the Fall

[5]       For never-resting time leads summer on

[6]       To hideous winter and confounds him there,

[7]       Sap checked with frost and lusty leaves quite gone,

[8]       Beauty o’er-snowed and bareness everywhere.

In this stanza, time is made out to be a robber who leads a naïve summer into the dangerous alley of “hideous winter”, summer is dry-gulched by time. Time will “confound”, that is ruin, the beauty of summer. This image of  time “confounding” beauty is used elsewhere by Shakespeare: Sonnet 60, line 8, “And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.” Sonnet 63, line 10, “Against confounding age’s cruel knife.”

The use of confound in this manner was contemporaneous to Shakespeare. The Geneva Bible, has the line, “Let them be confounded & put to shame, that seke my soule: let them be turned backewarde and put to rebuke, that desire mine hurt.” Ps. 70:2.

The beauty of summer’s growth (“lusty leaves”) will be “quite gone” and covered in snow.

There is an interesting use of the word “lusty” in contradistinction to an eventual reversal:

HOW DOCTOR FAUSTUS COMPLAYNED THAT HEE SHOULD IN HIS LUSTY TIME AND YOUTHFUL YEARES DIE SO MISERABLY. CHAP. 59.

THis sorrowfull time drawing neere so troubled Doctor Faustus, that he began to write his minde, to the ende he might peruse it often and not forget it and is in maner as followeth.

Ah Faustus, thou sorrowful and wofull man, now must thou goe to the damned company in vnquenchable fire, whereas thou mightest haue had the ioyfull immortalitie of the soule, the which thou now hast lost. Ah grosse vnderstanding and wilfull will, what seazeth on my limmes other than a robbing of my life’: Bewayle with me my sound & healthfull body,

wit and soule, bewayle with me my sences, for you haue had your part and pleasure as well as I. Oh enuie and disdaine, how haue you crept both at once into me, and now for your sakes I must suffer all these torments? Ah whither is pitie and mercy fled’: Vpon what occasion hath heauen repayed me with this reward by sufferance to suffer me to perish Wherefore was I created a man’: The punishment that I see prepared for me of my selfe now must I suffer. Ah miserable wretch, there is nothing in this world to shew me comfort: then woe is me, what helpeth my wayling.

Faust Book (Medford, MA: Perseus Digital Library, 5/12/97). The Faust Book was published in Germany in 1587 and was soon translated into English, were it apparently became the basis of Marlowe’s play by that name.

Third Stanza: Beauty’s Potential Preservation

[9]       Then, were not summer’s distillation left

[10]     A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,

[11]     Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,

[12]     Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.

The “distillation” of summer would be some sort of perfume: some liquid distillation of the summer kept in a bottle (walls of glass). Thus, in Cymbeline, the Queen says:

                                    I wonder, doctor,

Thou ask’st me such a question. Have I not been

Thy pupil long? Hast thou not learned me how

To make perfumes, distil, preserve—yea, so

That our great king himself doth woo me oft For

For my confections?

Act I, scene 5. The perfume has an effect upon desire.

Here, without such a perfume summer’s beauty will have no further effect. Thus, the effect of beauty is short-lived. It is a summer thing soon to be ruined by the great bandit time.

The poem is a sort of response to youth’s belief that it will never fail; that time will never come for me.

The Couplet: The Preservation of Beauty

[13]     But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,

[14]     Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

Here Shakespeare does something interesting: In the beginning “beauty” is all in the “gaze”, it is something developed and shown; beauty is scene. Then by the image of “distillation”, he transforms the concept of beauty into something separate from bare appearance. There is a “show” of beauty and the “substance” of beauty.

 

If summer beauty is distilled, its substance will preserved despite time, being kept in “walls of glass”. Yes, flowers who come to winter “leese [lose] their show [appearance].” Yet, even though appearance is lost; the substance is maintained. In fact it not merely persists it “still lives sweet”.

 

The image pushed back into reality means that while you cannot stop time from ruing your physical beauty; the true substance of your, which is a substance in life, can be preserved by a child who carries the beauty into the future.

Shakespeare Sonnet 4

21 Wednesday Aug 2019

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[1]       Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend

[2]       Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?

[3]       Nature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend,

[4]       And being frank, she lends to those are free.

[5]       Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse

[6]       The bounteous largess given thee to give?

[7]       Profitless usurer, why dost thou use

[8]       So great a sum of sums yet canst not live?

[9]       For, having traffic with thyself alone,

[10]     Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.

[11]     Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,

[12]     What acceptable audit canst thou leave?

[13]     Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,

[14]     Which usèd lives th’ executor to be.

 

 

First stanza:

[1]       Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend

[2]       Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?

[3]       Nature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend,

[4]       And being frank, she lends to those are free.

 

The first two lines set up the basic conceit of the poem: the proper investment of human beauty. The argument of this poem is profoundly countercultural to present moment. Our lives are considered our own to dispose of as we each individually please (“it’s my life and I’ll do what I want”).

We can choose our own identity to the point of actual restructuring our bodies and changing our sex in the name of gender identity.

The arguments of sexual freedom in all its related issues ultimately rest upon the proposition of a profound human autonomy in the area of sexual practice (it is interesting that the very same people most insistent upon radical sexual freedom are the most insistent upon conformity in other aspects).

Here Shakespeare attacks an “unthrifty loveliness”: beauty being wasted, misspent. It is misspent because it devolves back upon the self: why dost thou spend/Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy”. This continues the thematic strand from the other sonnets on the aspect of humanity being one of continuity and unity: there is the lineal descent from and hopefully through the object of the poem; as well as the duty to, the unity with the rest of humanity.

Thus, there is something anti-human, something unnatural in seeking to spend one’s beauty on one’s self.

The autonomy of the self is further attacked by positing in relation to nature: Your beauty does not come from you: it has been lent to you by nature to used rightly:

Nature’s bequest gives nothing but doth lend,/And being frank, she lends to those are free.

You have been given something you did not earn: it was lent to you by nature (and nature ultimately leads to God).

The last concept “those are free”: not horders, move the conceit to the next stanza.

 

Second stanza:

[5]       Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse

[6]       The bounteous largess given thee to give?

[7]       Profitless usurer, why dost thou use

[8]       So great a sum of sums yet canst not live?

This stanza then argues to the paradox of selfishness. You are given a great deal, but you hoard it (“niggard”); and in so doing abuse the wealth you were given. In fact, you are a usurer – which would normally result in a tremendous profit to the usurer, but in this case, it creates no profit. The irony of your hoarding is that are losing what you are hoarding: it does you no good to hoard this beauty, because not only is it unnatural and unhuman, it does you positive harm.

Compare this concept with the idea in our culture who refuses children because it will interfere with career or beauty? The one who spends the beauty youth on one’s own desire is an ideal. It is foolish to plunge into the great stream of human history: nothing is owed to the past or to the future. In fact, to bear children is either foolishness or evil.

So here is Shakespeare, a paragon of culture: here speaking directly against our current culture.

Third stanza:

[9]       For, having traffic with thyself alone,

[10]     Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.

[11]     Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,

[12]     What acceptable audit canst thou leave?

The final stanza turns to death: because sex and death are profoundly related and in direct competition. Birth is a race against death, and there is no ultimate Darwinian advancement. Death always works.

And so to the object: you are engaged in commerce, trade (traffic here means trade), but there is no other in your trade. You are seller and buyer, but is so doing, you are ultimately hurting yourself the most. You are deceiving yourself.

This then comes to judgment: when you die, what will be the profit of this life? You have done nothing.

Here, Shakespeare becomes even more counter cultural: not only is birth incumbent upon human beings, but without such birth, what have you actually done? What have you done to perpetuate life?

At this point, I think a word of kindness is appropriate. Many people through no fault of their own are unable to bear children. Shakespeare is not speaking to them. This is to one who is deliberately selfish. Shakespeare’s critique is of a self-centeredness which is far different than inability.

Moreover, even though it goes beyond scope of this narrow poem, it should also be known that Shakespeare world would have deep biblical roots, even among the less devoted. Shakespeare’s use of the Bible has been well documented. There are biblical promises to those without children:

Isaiah 56:4–5 (ESV)

4           For thus says the Lord:

“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,

who choose the things that please me

and hold fast my covenant,

5           I will give in my house and within my walls

a monument and a name

better than sons and daughters;

I will give them an everlasting name

that shall not be cut off.

 

And:

Isaiah 54:1 (ESV)

54 “Sing, O barren one, who did not bear;

break forth into singing and cry aloud,

you who have not been in labor!

For the children of the desolate one will be more

than the children of her who is married,” says the Lord.

The application of these passages being beyond the scope of this piece, I will not explain them beyond just point to the fact of such ideas in Shakespeare’s world.

Couplet

[13]     Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,

[14]     Which usèd lives th’ executor to be.

Your beauty will be buried. The final line means that if you used your beauty, it would remain behind to be your executor: If your beauty were used it would be your executor and deliver your estate to another.

But there may be an irony here (the line contains some ambiguity): It may be possible to read the final line as the tomb – which are are in fact using – is the only thing which lives and is your executor: delivering to your death your beauty.

Shakespeare Sonnet 3 Images and Mirrors

06 Tuesday Aug 2019

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[1]       Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest

[2]       Now is the time that face should form another,

[3]       Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,

[4]       Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.

[5]       For where is she so fair whose uneared womb

[6]       Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?

[7]       Or who is he so fond will be the tomb

[8]       Of his self-love, to stop posterity?

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

[10]     Calls back the lovely April of her prime;

[11]     So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,

[12]     Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.

[13]     But if thou live remembered not to be,

[14]     Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

 

This sonnet continues the theme of the first two: an encouragement to marry and have children.

The distinguishes mark lies with the concept of “image”.  The idea of mirror/image appears in the first & third stanzas as well as the couplet. It also brings in a new element: the subject of the poem is himself the image of another.

 

First Stanza

[1]       Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest

[2]       Now is the time that face should form another,

[3]       Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,

[4]       Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.

 

 

The first line sets up the conceit for the rest of the poem. The image which he sees in the mirror becomes a separate-self, capable of replication. That face which he sees in the mirror itself should form another face of the same image.

 

This is a subtle and curious idea: Shakespeare is not saying, Make another “your”. Rather, make another in your image.  In this respect, Shakespeare is following in the language of  the Bible

 

Genesis 5:3 (Geneva)

Now Adám lived an hũdreth and thirtie yeres and begate a childe in his owne lickenes after his image, and called his name Sheth.

 

Adam and Eve were created in the image of God. Adam has a son is created in his own image.  And so it is not the man, but the man’s imagewhich is replicated. Thus, it is the face in the mirror which should replicate the image. The man himself will be no more; but the image which appears in the mirror will persist.

[3]       Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,

[4]       Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.

This language also harkens back to Genesis. If the man will not renew the image (by having a child), he will “unbless” some potential mother by not sharing a child with her. In this, there seems to be a hint of Eve’s joy in getting a child (after the murder of Abel by Cain):

 

Genesis 4:1 (Geneva)

1 AFterwarde the man knewe Heuáh his wife, which cõceived & bare Káin, & said, I have obteined a man by yͤLord.

 

Second Stanza

 

[5]       For where is she so fair whose uneared womb

[6]       Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?

[7]       Or who is he so fond will be the tomb

[8]       Of his self-love, to stop posterity?

 

This stanza fits neatly into two characters: the woman who will not have a child with him and the man who foolishly destroys himself.

 

So who is the woman so beautiful …

 

What is an “uneared womb”?  There is an obsolete use of the word “ear” which means to plow:

1 Samuel 8:12 (Geneva)

12 Also he wil make them his captaines over thousandes and captaines over fifties, and to eare his grounde, and to reape his harvest, & to make instruments of waire, and the things that serve for his charets.

The Merriam Webster dictionary offers this instance:

 

: to form ears in growing

the rye should be earing up

Or:

 

⌜SECOND⌝MESSENGER

(FTLN 0467)      [54]     Caesar, I bring thee word

(FTLN 0468)      [55]     Menecrates and Menas, famous pirates,

(FTLN 0469)      [56]     Makes the sea serve them, which they earand

(FTLN 0470)      [57]     wound

(FTLN 0471)      [58]     With keels of every kind. Many hot inroads

(FTLN 0472)      [59]     They make in Italy—the borders maritime

(FTLN 0473)      [60]     Lack blood to think on ’t—and flush youth revolt.

 

William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (Folger Shakespeare Library, n.d.), 39.

 

Therefore an “uneared womb” would be a woman who had not been “ploughed” – this matches the image of “tillage”.  The image of the field from the previous Sonnet is here returned and applied to the potential mother.

 

So what woman is there who is so beautiful that she would refuse to be the mother of your children? (She does not want to a farmer in her field. I don’t image this imagery would be very welcome in conversation with a woman today – and I have no idea that it would have pleased a woman four hundred years ago. But he also was not writing to the woman).

 

[7]       Or who is he so fond will be the tomb

[8]       Of his self-love, to stop posterity?

 

“Fond” is an old fashioned word for foolish. It was used as late as Wordsworth, “What fond and foolish thoughts”.

 

Who is someone so foolish that he will be his own tomb, but refusing to bear children?

 

Third Stanza

 

This stanza picks up the elements of image from the first stanza and mother from the second stanza:

 

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

[10]     Calls back the lovely April of her prime;

[11]     So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,

[12]     Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.

 

He himself is the image of his own mother – and replicates her spring. He is a joy to his own mother by recalling to her, her own “April of her prime”.

 

The “mirror” is here replicated and transformed into a “window” – glass being the common medium of both.

 

At present, he looks into a mirror and sees his own image. But with a child, he sees through the glass as a window into the image replicated in another human being. There is an advancement in the image.

 

The language of mother is used to put him into relation. He has come from a mother (like Eve having a son), and he will be like Adam replicating his image.

 

The Couplet:

 

[13]     But if thou live remembered not to be,

[14]     Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

 

If he dies single – without taking a mother to him – he will not be remembered. And that image in the mirror will be nothing being that image in the mirror. He can replicate his image in a mirror only as long as he lives. But he if has a child, the image is replicated outside of the mirror – it becomes visible through a window (as he was visible to his mother).

Shakespeare Sonnet 2

05 Monday Aug 2019

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Notes on the first Sonnet are here.

[1]       When forty winters shall besiege thy brow

[2]       And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,

[3]       Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,

[4]       Will be a tattered weed of small worth held.

[5]       Then being asked where all thy beauty lies,

[6]       Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,

[7]       To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes

[8]       Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.

[9]       How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use

[10]     If thou couldst answer “This fair child of mine

[11]     Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,”

[12]     Proving his beauty by succession thine.

[13]     This were to be new made when thou art old

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

 

The first stanza raises the issue to be addressed:

[1]       When forty winters shall besiege thy brow

[2]       And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,

[3]       Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,

[4]       Will be a tattered weed of small worth held.

The basic idea here is simple enough: When grow older, your physical beauty will wear out. He expands this idea along two lines: The primary image is of a field which has been over used. The field will have forty years, but forty “winters”. There will be no spring or summer to rejuvenate the field, only years of snow and death.

The only hint of planting is in the plowing. Shakespeare makes even this unhelpful. There are not ploughed fields but “trenches”. The use of three accented syllables in a row and the alliteration on the Ds/T underscore the point:

and DIG DEEP TRENches

There will be nothing of value in the field at the end, merely “tattered weed”.

But he complicates this image of a field with the image of a “livery”:

Thy youth’s proud livery

Calling beauty the livery of youth makes instant sense: beauty is a custom of nobility worn by the youth. But Shakespeare has body of work which demonstrates a fascination with words. Livery as a custom is out-of-place in an abandoned field.

We could solve this issue by thinking of the livery as the original costume of the field – which is possible.

However, there is another possibility suggested by the origin of the word

  1. 1300, “household allowance of any kind (food, provisions, clothing) to retainers or servants,” from Anglo-French livere(late 13c.; Old French liveree, Modern French livrée), “allowance, ration, pay,” originally “(clothes) delivered by a master to his retinue,” from fem. past participle of livrer“to dispense, deliver, hand over,” from Latin liberare “to set free” (see liberate).

The sense later was reduced to “servants’ rations” and “provender for horses” (mid-15c.). The former led to the meaning “distinctive clothing given to servants” (early 14c.); the latter now is obsolete, unless livery stable (1705) survives. Related: Liveried.

A farm field is something which would yield a living. But over run and unproductive, it would cease to yield a living. The poem’s object has used beauty as a living: he makes a livery off the custom of his beauty. And thus, livery has dual usage.

The concept of livery as costume may suggest the adjective of the fourth line: “tattered”. It is unusual to think of a field as “tattered”; although that makes perfect sense of clothing.

One more thing: note that the winters will “besiege”. They will come as an army; and thus in the livery of a king. You and your livery will lose.

Second Stanza

[5]       Then being asked where all thy beauty lies,

[6]       Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,

[7]       To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes

[8]       Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.

The question: What happened to your beauty/your treasure: your costume and living?  What answer will you have then: It lies within these deep-sunken eyes. Here, can’t you see it?

That will merely be “all-eating shame” (a shame which devours everything) and a praise which does not profit.

If you allow your beauty to be lost, you will not merely lose your beauty; you will be covered in praise.

Thus, the first two stanza develop the problem which the poem seeks to resolve.

Note this is the basic structure of persuasion: set up an issue and then provide a resolution. Well, Shakespeare, if you’re so smart; what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to never get old? How could that happen?

Third Stanza

[9]       How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use

[10]     If thou couldst answer “This fair child of mine

[11]     Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,”

[12]     Proving his beauty by succession thine

If you had a child, you could point this child (who would be beautiful). This will solve two points: First, you would display your beauty. Second, you prove your present beauty by maintaining it in the future, in this child.

Rather than allowing your beauty to whither, like someone who misuses a farm; but your beauty to use and have a child.

The word “succession” is interesting here. Succession has to do with inheritance (and is used that way in Sonnet 127, the only other use of that word by Shakespeare).  Whether Shakespeare would have made the association of the word to the throne, I can’t tell. Although the question of succession is a theme in some plays.

The Couplet

This is really a brilliant end to the poem, because it picks up the strands of the poem

[13]     This were to be new made when thou art old

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

Here the winter and forty years of the first line return as “old” and “cold”. Here is the succession and child in “thy warm blood”. The blood is cold in him; just as the forty winters will dig deep trenches in your beauty. But your field will also be productive. The blood which is cold in your body will be warm in the successor’s body: and that blood will be “thy blood”.

Also to return to the besieging winters: A war draws blood; and blood which runs cold is death. But here the besieging army of time will be overcome in the warm blood of a child.

It is a strange at one level to bear a child so that will replace me.

Shakespeare Sonnet 1

26 Friday Jul 2019

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Sonnets1609titlepage

[1] From fairest creatures we desire increase,

[2] That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

[3] But, as the riper should by time decease,

[4] His tender heir might bear his memory.

[5] But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,

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

[7] Making a famine where abundance lies,

[8] Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

[9] Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament

[10] And only herald to the gaudy spring

[11] Within thine own bud buriest thy content

[12] And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.

[13] Pity the world, or else this glutton be—

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

The sonnet fits perfectly into three quatrains and a couplet. The argument fits into the form with the first line of each quatrain a topic sentence and the couplet a conclusion.

The poem is a request that the recipient of the poem (a person of endless speculation) would have children. By having children you achieve a kind of immorality and bless the world. But selfishness is a gluttony where you spend yourself upon yourself in death.

The first stanza sets out the primary argument of the poem: have children! Shakespeare gives two reasons: It is a good to the world for the best to have children; and, it is a good to you to have one who carries on your memory:

[1] From fairest creatures we desire increase,

[2] That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

[3] But, as the riper should by time decease,

[4] His tender heir might bear his memory.

The argument skillfully weaves the two argument into one.

The Perpetuation of Beauty

The first argument appears in lines 1-2.

[1] From fairest creatures we desire increase,

[2] That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

There are two elements to this argument: (a) origin, and (b) desire.

Origin of Beauty

This argument would be easily missed, because it is a concept so foreign to our “modern is best” understanding. We are anxious over the newest; we think the present is best and the future is better. We have a Hegelian progress of history (I don’t mean in some technical Hegelian manner, but as a general understanding) in which the present is better than the past.

This understandings of the progress of history is precisely the opposite of pre-Hegelian forebears. The earth at the first was pristine: It was best at first. This concept appears worldview which would have been available to Shakespeare. First, the Bible begins with the Garden of Eden. The original world was pristine. But world was altered, through the Fall of Adam into sin; and then, through the devastation of the Flood.

Second, classical mythology understands the history of the world to have progressed through a series of ages beginning with the Golden Age:

First of all [110] the deathless gods who dwell on Olympus made a golden race of mortal men who lived in the time of Cronos when he was reigning in heaven. And they lived like gods [115] without sorrow of heart, remote and free from toil and grief: miserable age rested not on them; but with legs and arms never failing they made merry with feasting beyond the reach of all evils. When they died, it was as though they were overcome with sleep, and they had all good things; for the fruitful earth unforced bare them fruit abundantly and without stint. They dwelt in ease and peace upon their lands with many good things, [120] rich in flocks and loved by the blessed gods. 

 Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Works and Days. (Medford, MA: Cambridge, MA.,Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1914). “Then” a second, silver age of men were found upon the earth:

then they who dwell on Olympus made a second generation which was of silver and less noble by far. It was like the golden race neither in body nor in spirit. 

 Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Works and Days. (Medford, MA: Cambridge, MA.,Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd., 1914).

Thus, when we think of a great good like beauty, we think of it as an artifact of the pristine world. Beauty was something in the world from an earlier age and now descended to us. The ancient was not a place of foolish superstition and bad science, it was an age of greater truth and beauty. We are not the accumulation of wisdom but the running down of the world.

With that idea in mind, consider the second line of the sonnet

That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

The rose of beauty can be lost — indeed, it will be lost if we are not careful to preserve it.

This idea, when it exists in our present age, exists in our understanding of non-human nature. This curious, but not necessarily without foundation. Remember that the Greek concept of a Golden Age comes from a Pagan conception of the universe without a Creator-Creature divide. Moreover, the relationship of human beings to the created order is fundamentally different. The concept of the “image of God” does not appear in the same way in pagan anthropology.

On that issue, the best starting place would be Peter Jone’s, The Other Worldview.

The concept of a pristine earlier age does exist in environmentalism. There is an ecological understanding of the human beings as the agent of defection, the means of devastation. The absence of human activity is good; the presence of human activity is what makes the world worse.

The Desire for Beauty

Beauty — with truth — is also an object of desire and the charm and foundation of life. Keats in his poem Ode on a Grecian Urn famously wrote:

When old age shall this generation waste,
                Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
         “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
Christianity would posit this triad, the true, the beautiful and the good.

We desire the best creatures to reproduce (increase) so that beauty will continue in the world.  We – the rest of the world – desire all of the best creatures to fill the world. There is a faint echo of a biblical theme. Prosperity is always marked as “increase”:

Psalm 115:14 (KJV): The Lord shall increase you more and more,

You and your children.

“Fairest” is the praise of Canticles 1.8, 5.9, 6.1. But this is mixed with a Roman theme of an heir to bear one’s memory.

The Beautiful Should Desire the Continuation of Beauty: Memory as Immortality

The movement of lines 2-4 take this public theme of all the world desires the perpetuating of this beauty to this continuing the beauty is a private benefit of one’s memory.

The trick in the argument is the world “But” at the beginning of line 3. The But shifts the argument to a second theme. We don’t know the rhetorical trick because the But is followed by a parenthetical which distracts us.

A second But turns the private argument on its head. But you are so concerned with yourself that you do not even consider your memory.

This stanza says you have no sense of time. A theme Shakespeare will repeatedly consider is the ever present fact of death.

Stanza Two: The effect upon you for your folly

You are consuming your beauty and youth while not even considering the effect this will have upon yourself and upon others:

5] But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,

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

[7] Making a famine where abundance lies,

[8] Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

You are making a famine of yourself.

Ironically, the poet cares for the subject than the subject does to his or her self.

The final stanza moves from argument to rebuke:

9] Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament

[10] And only herald to the gaudy spring

[11] Within thine own bud buriest thy content

[12] And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.

You are the spring of the world, but you do not care. You the Spring of the world. Your stinginess, your “niggarding” is a waste.

The beauty of your life and body can only be preserved by having a child.

One theory of Shakespeare is that Shakespeare was the front for Edward DeVere. If so, this poem makes sense as a complaint to Elizabeth Queen.

 

I am unaware of anyone advancing that theory and it may be just nonsense — but then most of the speculation on the “reality” behind the sonnets is nonsense. All or anyone of the sonnets could be fabrications of his imagination. Shakespeare was at the very least inventive.

The couplet draws these themes together into a rebuke

13] Pity the world, or else this glutton be—

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

It also multiples implications by the sheer compression of the languag.

You are a glutton who eats what is due another by dying- because you will die. You could do us good, but you will not.

The grave is a glutton and eats people. You are a glutton to yourself by giving yourself to the grave.

Selfishness is death in life and a severer death of being forgotten after death.

Something new about Shakespeare

27 Wednesday Feb 2019

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This article in the New York Times describes the work of Dennis McCarthy who used plagiarism software to discover a source mined by Shakespeare. It seems that the Bard used a book by George North, A Brief Discourse on Rebellion and Rebels. The book had been nearly lost to history, when Mr. McCarthy came upon a clue (and you’ll have to read the article yourself to find out how this happened, or everything they discovered).

I liked this bit

One of the most compelling [evidences that Shakespeare used the book] is Jack Cade, who led a failed popular rebellion against Henry VI in 1450. Shakespeare describes Cade’s final days in “Henry VI, Part 2,” in which he says he was starving and eating grass, before he was finally caught and dragged through the street by his heels, his body left to be eaten by crows. Scholars have long thought that Shakespeare invented these details, but all of them are present in a passage from North’s “Discourse” in which he inveighs against Cade and two other famous rebels. Mr. McCarthy and Ms. Schlueter argue that Shakespeare used those details to make Cade into a composite of the three.

What I like about it is how certain scholars can be of a certain “fact” and hold this fact for many, many years — and it turns out that this fact about the most famous writer of the last 1,000 years, whose work has been ransacked for evidence of every thought was wrong. I just wonder how many facts we are certain of which are simply wrong. Our ignorance is proof of our conclusion.

The book itself looks like an interesting read (especially to see how Shakespeare reworked the source material).

Or some fierce thing (Sonnet 23)

12 Friday Dec 2014

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As an unperfect actor on the stage,
Who with his fear is put beside his part,
Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage,
Whose strength’s abundance weakens his own heart;
So I, for fear of trust, forget to say
The perfect ceremony of love’s rite,
And in mine own love’s strength seem to decay,
O’ercharged with burthen of mine own love’s might.
O! let my looks be then the eloquence
And dumb presagers of my speaking breast,
Who plead for love, and look for recompense,
More than that tongue that more hath more express’d.
O! learn to read what silent love hath writ:
To hear with eyes belongs to love’s fine wit.