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Tag Archives: Worms

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

07 Saturday Sep 2019

Posted by memoirandremains in Shakespeare, Uncategorized

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poem, poety, Shakespeare, Sonnet, Worms

[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.

Edward Taylor, Would God I in that Golden City Were.3

15 Wednesday Mar 2017

Posted by memoirandremains in Edward Taylor, Literature, Uncategorized

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Edward Taylor, Horror, Mites, poem, Poetry, Replusion, Sin, Worms, Would God I in that Golden City were

The previous post on this poem may be found here.

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I am to Christ more base than to a King
A mite, fly, worm, ant, serpent, devil is,
Or can be, being tumbled all in sin,
And shall I be his spouse? How good is this?
It is too good to be declared to thee
But not too good to be believed by me.

This stanza repeats the theme of the previous two stanzas: the wonder that God should love human beings; that Christ should join himself to such as us. There are two movements which must take place to fully appreciate what the poet does here: the first is to fully understand what he does in the poem itself. The second is to move past our natural prejudice in favor of ourselves.

The stanza breaks neatly into two; the break taking place in the middle of the fourth line (the 34th line of the poem). The first portion reads:

I am to Christ more base than to a King
A mite, fly, worm, ant, serpent, devil is,
Or can be, being tumbled all in sin,
And shall I be his spouse?

The them of this section is the sheer improbability that Christ should love the poet. There are three aspects of this: First, there is the comparison of Christ to a king and the poet to a loathsome creature. Second, the reference to “being tumble all in sin.” Third, that such a one should be brought into intimate relationship.

Technically, the second line is the key here: The first line sets up the comparison Christ equals a King. The second stays to ten syllables but then crams it full of stresses:
a MITE, FLY, WORM, ANT, SERpent, DEVil is. The lien can only be read very slowly and then tails off. The idea picks up in the third line OR can be, which comes along as an afterthought. Of these vermin, ants, worms, and serpents appeared in the previous stanza.

We miss the horror here if we don’t stop to realize what life is like without houses which are sealed against the weather, and screens, and traps, and poisons, and medicines and antidotes. Imagine being invested with mites or worms and being unable to rid your body of the beasts infecting you. Imagine ants and flies getting into and spoiling all of the food which you could have. Imagine fearing that a snake would strike unaware and kill. And most moderns could not imagine any sort of devil that did not exist only in horror movies and was capable of being driven off with a crucifix. When you read this line, you must have a sense of disgust, fear and an uncanny horror.

The purpose of this bestiary is to evoke the sensation which should be stirred by the real reason for wonder: sin. Why should God have anything to do with those in sin? We are supposed to real revulsion and then that explained by the word “sin”:

Psalm 5:4–6 (AV)
4 For thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness: neither shall evil dwell with thee. 5 The foolish shall not stand in thy sight: thou hatest all workers of iniquity. 6 Thou shalt destroy them that speak leasing: the LORD will abhor the bloody and deceitful man.
We fail to understand what is happening here as long as we think of sin solely in terms of discrete actions. Yes, sin entails discrete acts of sin. But is also a status offense (as such things are called in the law). It is like being an illegal alien in a country: the status is an offense even without additional bad acts. The Mosaic covenant aims at this concept by the matter of being ritually clean or unclean. Many things which were morally neutral were unclean. Likewise inanimate objects could be “holy” because they were dedicated to God.

To be tumbled in sin is to be subsumed it: to be repulsive, unclean.

And yet, it is precisely such repulsive people who are brought into intimate union with Christ. The poet cannot understand it, but for all that, he will not reject it but believe it:

How good is this?
It is too good to be declared to thee
But not too good to be believed by me.

We see in this a hint at why “belief” is at the core of receipt of justification, right standing with God. To believe this gift is to receive it with joy and thankfulness. It is not a bare historical opinion that some event took place. It is a joyful reception of something marvelous being offered.

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