Music to hear, why hear'st thou music sadly?
Sweets with sweets war not; joy delights in joy.
Why lov'st thou that which thou receiv'st not gladly,
Or else receiv'st with pleasure thine annoy?
If the true concord of well-tuned sounds
By unions married do offend thine ear,
They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds
In singleness the parts that thou should'st bear.
Mark how one string sweet husband to another,
Strike each in each my mutual ordering,
Resembling sire, and child, and happy mother,
Who all in one, one pleasing note do sing,
Whose speechless song--being many, seeming one--
Sings this to thee: "Thou single wilt prove none."
Quatrain 1
1 Music / to hear, // why hear'st / thou mu/sic 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 plea/sure thine / annoy?
Quatrain 2
5 If the / true con/cord of / well-tu/ned sounds >
6 By u/nions mar/ried do / offend / thine ear,
7 They do / but sweet/ly chide / thee, // who / confounds >
8 In si/ngleness / the parts / that thou / should'st bear.
Quatrain 3
9 Mark how / one string / sweet hus/band to / another,
10 Strike each / in each / my mu/tual or/dering,
11 Resem/bling sire, / and child, / and hap/py mother,
12 Who all / in one, / one plea/sing note / do sing,
Couplet
13 Whose speech/less song/--being ma/ny, see/ming one--
14 Sings this / to thee: // "Thou si/ngle wilt / prove none."
8/28/09
Sonnet 7/VII "Lo, in the Orient"
Lo, in the Orient when the gracious light
Lifts up his burning head, each under eye
Doth homage to his new appearing sight,
Serving with looks his sacred majesty.
And having climb'd the steep up heavenly hill,
Resembling strong youth in his middle age,
Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,
Attending on his golden pilgrimage.
But when from high-most pitch, with weary car,
Like feeble age he reeleth from the day,
The eyes (fore dutious) now converted are
From his low tract and look another way,
So thou, thy self out going in thy noon,
Unloodk'd on diest unless thou get a son.
Quatrain 1
1 Lo, in / the O/rient // when / the gra/cious light >
2 Lifts up / his bur/ning head, // each un/ der eye >
3 Doth ho/mage to / his new / appea/ring sight,
4 Serving / with looks / his sac/red ma/jesty.
Quatrain 2
5 And ha/ving climb'd / the steep / up hea/v'nly hill,
6 Resem/bling strong / youth in / his mid/dle age,
7 Yet mor/tal looks / adore / his beau/ty still,
8 Atten/ding on / his gol/den pil/grimage.
Quatrain 3
9 But when / from high-/most pitch, / with wea/ry car,
10 Like fee/ble age / he ree/leth from / the day,
11 The eyes / (fore du/tious) now / conver/ted are >
12 From his / low tract / and look / ano/ther way.
Couplet
13 So thou, / thy self / out go/ing in / thy noon,
14 Unloodk'd / on diest // unless / thou get / a son.
Q1-3 provide one side of an extended simile; the C, the other side.
7.1-12
Most commentaries point out that this resembles Ovid's Metamorphoses, 15.184-227 (Golding, 202-249); E is surprisingly alone is pointing to comparable moments in Romeo and Juliet, in 2.2, for example: "But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun" (2-3).
Since there is no "as," one does not even know until the C, though one might suspect earlier, that this is a simile. "Orient" is periphrastic for the eastern direction from which the sun, never named until punned upon in 7.14, rises. This sun is clearly personified as a regal presence whose "sacred majesty" awes "each under eye" ("under" is an adverb, here used as an adjective) of his subjects. Metrically, the interest is in the three opening trochees, the dawn's reversal of light from darkness sonically emphasized in the first two--"Lo in" and "Lifts up"; in the third, "Serving," the subjects' reversal from predawn non-attendance to dawn worship. A says that there is no caesura after the first two feet of 7.1, but I believe there is, especially if one wants to pause before the coming enjambment. (Notice that enjambment encourages caesuras.)
Q2 represents the next stage of the "diurnal" progress as the sun rises. A argues for a spondee in the third foot of 7.5, slowing the line to indicate the difficulty of the up-hill climb as the "strong youth" shines in his "middle age"--not, as commentators are quick to note, connoting decline, but vigor. It's clear that the participial phrases--"having climb'd" and "resembling"--do not refer to the subject of the clause--"mortal looks"--so WS is guilty of the dreaded dangling modifier that English teachers love to hate, as is made clear with the terminal one--"Attending"--which does refer to those looks.
The sonnet's volta, "But," begins the daily, tragic ritual of a reversal of Apollo's car. I'm not sure why commentators miss the Ovidian intertext (the Phaethon tale in Book 2), but remembering the tragic course of Apollo adds a significant dimension to the mundane tract of the sun's glory: Not all rises and falls of glory are the same; after all, some leave brightness behind and some don't, as the S is trying to point out to the FY.
7.13-14
With the coordinate conjunction "So," we realize that we have been in an extended simile for the FY's deliberation, a simile which becomes vivid in the pun--"son/sun," get it? We have lost the love of puns that characterizes WS and his culture--by the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson was already teasing him about it--but CB makes a fine point about this one: "The word 'sun' is not used in this poem; the pressure to name the gracious light is only released by the pun on 'son.'"
W has some nasty things to say about V's admittedly far-fetched reading of the poem and her dismissal of its quality, but it isn't one of the better ones. Even so, I find the image of eyes converted to "look another way" from the tragedy of beauty's loss is moving in the way one is moved by Lear's loss of retainers with his fall.
Lifts up his burning head, each under eye
Doth homage to his new appearing sight,
Serving with looks his sacred majesty.
And having climb'd the steep up heavenly hill,
Resembling strong youth in his middle age,
Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,
Attending on his golden pilgrimage.
But when from high-most pitch, with weary car,
Like feeble age he reeleth from the day,
The eyes (fore dutious) now converted are
From his low tract and look another way,
So thou, thy self out going in thy noon,
Unloodk'd on diest unless thou get a son.
Quatrain 1
1 Lo, in / the O/rient // when / the gra/cious light >
2 Lifts up / his bur/ning head, // each un/ der eye >
3 Doth ho/mage to / his new / appea/ring sight,
4 Serving / with looks / his sac/red ma/jesty.
Quatrain 2
5 And ha/ving climb'd / the steep / up hea/v'nly hill,
6 Resem/bling strong / youth in / his mid/dle age,
7 Yet mor/tal looks / adore / his beau/ty still,
8 Atten/ding on / his gol/den pil/grimage.
Quatrain 3
9 But when / from high-/most pitch, / with wea/ry car,
10 Like fee/ble age / he ree/leth from / the day,
11 The eyes / (fore du/tious) now / conver/ted are >
12 From his / low tract / and look / ano/ther way.
Couplet
13 So thou, / thy self / out go/ing in / thy noon,
14 Unloodk'd / on diest // unless / thou get / a son.
Q1-3 provide one side of an extended simile; the C, the other side.
7.1-12
Most commentaries point out that this resembles Ovid's Metamorphoses, 15.184-227 (Golding, 202-249); E is surprisingly alone is pointing to comparable moments in Romeo and Juliet, in 2.2, for example: "But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun" (2-3).
Since there is no "as," one does not even know until the C, though one might suspect earlier, that this is a simile. "Orient" is periphrastic for the eastern direction from which the sun, never named until punned upon in 7.14, rises. This sun is clearly personified as a regal presence whose "sacred majesty" awes "each under eye" ("under" is an adverb, here used as an adjective) of his subjects. Metrically, the interest is in the three opening trochees, the dawn's reversal of light from darkness sonically emphasized in the first two--"Lo in" and "Lifts up"; in the third, "Serving," the subjects' reversal from predawn non-attendance to dawn worship. A says that there is no caesura after the first two feet of 7.1, but I believe there is, especially if one wants to pause before the coming enjambment. (Notice that enjambment encourages caesuras.)
Q2 represents the next stage of the "diurnal" progress as the sun rises. A argues for a spondee in the third foot of 7.5, slowing the line to indicate the difficulty of the up-hill climb as the "strong youth" shines in his "middle age"--not, as commentators are quick to note, connoting decline, but vigor. It's clear that the participial phrases--"having climb'd" and "resembling"--do not refer to the subject of the clause--"mortal looks"--so WS is guilty of the dreaded dangling modifier that English teachers love to hate, as is made clear with the terminal one--"Attending"--which does refer to those looks.
The sonnet's volta, "But," begins the daily, tragic ritual of a reversal of Apollo's car. I'm not sure why commentators miss the Ovidian intertext (the Phaethon tale in Book 2), but remembering the tragic course of Apollo adds a significant dimension to the mundane tract of the sun's glory: Not all rises and falls of glory are the same; after all, some leave brightness behind and some don't, as the S is trying to point out to the FY.
7.13-14
With the coordinate conjunction "So," we realize that we have been in an extended simile for the FY's deliberation, a simile which becomes vivid in the pun--"son/sun," get it? We have lost the love of puns that characterizes WS and his culture--by the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson was already teasing him about it--but CB makes a fine point about this one: "The word 'sun' is not used in this poem; the pressure to name the gracious light is only released by the pun on 'son.'"
W has some nasty things to say about V's admittedly far-fetched reading of the poem and her dismissal of its quality, but it isn't one of the better ones. Even so, I find the image of eyes converted to "look another way" from the tragedy of beauty's loss is moving in the way one is moved by Lear's loss of retainers with his fall.
8/10/09
Sonnet 6/VI "Then let not winter's ragged hand"
Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface
In thee thy summer ere thou be distill’d:
Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
With beautie’s treasure ere it be self-kill’d.
That use is not forbidden usury
Which happies those that pay the willing loan;
That’s for thy self to breed another thee,
Or ten times happier, be it ten for one.
Ten times thy self were happier than thou art,
If ten of thine ten times refigur’d thee.
Then what could death do if thou should’st depart,
Leaving thee living in posterity?
Be not self-will’d, for thou art much too fair
To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.
Quatrain 1
1 Then let / not win/ter’s rag/ged hand / deface >
2 In thee / thy sum/mer // ere / thou be / distill’d:
3 Make sweet /some vi/al; // trea/sure thou / some place
4 With beau/tie’s trea/sure ere / it be / self-kill’d.
Quatrain 2
5 That use / is not / forbid/den u/sury
6 Which hap/pies those / that pay / the wil/ling loan;
7 That’s for / thy self / to breed / ano/ther thee,
8 Or ten / times hap/pier, // be / it ten / for one.
Quatrain 3
9 Ten times / thy self / were hap/pier than / thou art,
10 If ten / of thine / ten times / refi/gur’d thee.
11 Then what / could death / do if / thou should’st / depart,
12 Leaving / thee li/ving in / poste/rity?
Couplet
13 Be not / self-will’d, // for thou / art much / too fair >
14 To be / death’s con/quest and / make worms / thine heir.
Q1 is a distilled summary of Sonnet 5; Q2-3 develop the economy of reproduction; the C concludes with his thesis.
6.1-4
The “then”—a conjunctive adverb—signifies consequence, so indicating that this sonnet follows upon the last. Sometimes, the S’s sonnets are continuous; sometimes, discrete. Like the Psalms, they are sometimes so continuous as to seem parts of one double or triple sonnet. As B puts it, Sonnet 5 is practically “the second-half of a 28-line unit." The season of death is personified by its “hand,” here a terrifying vandal of the FY’s “summer,” the season of life now a metaphor for the FY’s beauty. The tenor is deliberative as the S pleads with the FY, but he is not arguing that the FY should not age—that is an impossibility—but, instead, he should not age before being “distilled”—the process already explained in 5.13-14. The spondee of line 3’s opening—especially when attended by the imperative mood of the verb combines both the deliberative—“[m]ake”—and the epideictic “sweet,” and the caesura provides a pause of hoped-for wonder of the FY’s impregnation of some woman. The repetition of “treasure” from 2.6 repeats and deepens the Gospel intertext, even if the FY’s treasure is only his beauty. The rhyme of “distilled” and “self-killed” offers the FY the disjunct of two options, but the spondee of "self-killed" provides a sonic antithesis, one whose emphasis on “self” repeats the accusation of narcissism.
6.5-12
The next eight lines ring the changes upon the economic metaphor of reproduction. The FY’s selfish waste of his semen is now a form of usury. As B points out, usury, “lending money at interest, was no longer illegal in England, [but] it was still considered sinful.” The sin is that of greed. The relative pronoun, “[w]hich,” is not restrictive, but goes back to the “use” that is not usury; it “happies” or makes happy--anthimeria uses a word normally used as one part of speech as another--those who are willing to give a free loan of their semen, which, paradoxically will pay back great interest—more FYs—making him happier still. The S represents the rate of interest here with a tedious extension of “ten”: this excess is WS treating the S with some irony, for the S’s refigurings are often repetitive. B points out that “refigure” means duplicated through number (142), but, of course, the S’s own poetic mathematics “refigures” the FY through a repetition (re-) of the figure (rhetorical figure): “Ten times” is repeated and emphasized as a spondee (the interest rate in England at the time was 10%, but the S’s here is, as B points out 1,000%). Of course, the S is envisioning a ten-fold increase—ten children will have ten children, who will have ten of their own, and so on, imagining apparently that the FY’s exponentially increasing beauty will not only live on, but increase in scope. What are we to make of the hyperbole here. After all, some of the children will be daughters who will, given the weird patriarchy imagined here, reproduce their husband’s looks, not their father’s or grandfather’s. And where did the FY’s beauty come from? Be that as it may, the appeal is again to the FY’s capacity to challenge death through the immortality of procreation. The trochaic reversal—“do if”—stresses death’s powerlessness in the face of the FY’s procreation of himself, “[l]eaving thee living,” the alliteration relating as cause and effect the reproduction and the immortality. B explains that “leaving” puns not only on making leaves, but also on subtracting one figure from another. The trochee stresses the FY’s freedom to choose to leave his narcissism behind by leaving children behind.
6.13-14
Again in the imperative mood, the S commands that the FY be not “self-willed,” willing himself to isolation—notice the accord of “self-killed” and “self-willed.” (CB points out that Quarto has “selfe-wild,” allowing a pun which reminds the FY of his savage obstinacy.) The FY’s beauty is “too fair” for the FY to succumb to the death he can vanquish. If he will not refigure himself through children, his only heirs will be worms. The poetic reminder that death is a matter of worms is given chilling force here since they are now seen, through comparison, as the FY’s children. They will bear, not his memory (1.4), but his flesh, now no longer fair, but merely worm food, nourishing worms to reproduce only themselves. As K points out, conquest is opposed to inheritance in early modern law—property not passed on through inheritance is “conquered”—so the metaphor of conquest becomes that of inheritance. V points out that the poem’s exhortation fits the pattern found in homily: negative (1-1), positive (3-12), negative (13-14).
In thee thy summer ere thou be distill’d:
Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
With beautie’s treasure ere it be self-kill’d.
That use is not forbidden usury
Which happies those that pay the willing loan;
That’s for thy self to breed another thee,
Or ten times happier, be it ten for one.
Ten times thy self were happier than thou art,
If ten of thine ten times refigur’d thee.
Then what could death do if thou should’st depart,
Leaving thee living in posterity?
Be not self-will’d, for thou art much too fair
To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.
Quatrain 1
1 Then let / not win/ter’s rag/ged hand / deface >
2 In thee / thy sum/mer // ere / thou be / distill’d:
3 Make sweet /some vi/al; // trea/sure thou / some place
4 With beau/tie’s trea/sure ere / it be / self-kill’d.
Quatrain 2
5 That use / is not / forbid/den u/sury
6 Which hap/pies those / that pay / the wil/ling loan;
7 That’s for / thy self / to breed / ano/ther thee,
8 Or ten / times hap/pier, // be / it ten / for one.
Quatrain 3
9 Ten times / thy self / were hap/pier than / thou art,
10 If ten / of thine / ten times / refi/gur’d thee.
11 Then what / could death / do if / thou should’st / depart,
12 Leaving / thee li/ving in / poste/rity?
Couplet
13 Be not / self-will’d, // for thou / art much / too fair >
14 To be / death’s con/quest and / make worms / thine heir.
Q1 is a distilled summary of Sonnet 5; Q2-3 develop the economy of reproduction; the C concludes with his thesis.
6.1-4
The “then”—a conjunctive adverb—signifies consequence, so indicating that this sonnet follows upon the last. Sometimes, the S’s sonnets are continuous; sometimes, discrete. Like the Psalms, they are sometimes so continuous as to seem parts of one double or triple sonnet. As B puts it, Sonnet 5 is practically “the second-half of a 28-line unit." The season of death is personified by its “hand,” here a terrifying vandal of the FY’s “summer,” the season of life now a metaphor for the FY’s beauty. The tenor is deliberative as the S pleads with the FY, but he is not arguing that the FY should not age—that is an impossibility—but, instead, he should not age before being “distilled”—the process already explained in 5.13-14. The spondee of line 3’s opening—especially when attended by the imperative mood of the verb combines both the deliberative—“[m]ake”—and the epideictic “sweet,” and the caesura provides a pause of hoped-for wonder of the FY’s impregnation of some woman. The repetition of “treasure” from 2.6 repeats and deepens the Gospel intertext, even if the FY’s treasure is only his beauty. The rhyme of “distilled” and “self-killed” offers the FY the disjunct of two options, but the spondee of "self-killed" provides a sonic antithesis, one whose emphasis on “self” repeats the accusation of narcissism.
6.5-12
The next eight lines ring the changes upon the economic metaphor of reproduction. The FY’s selfish waste of his semen is now a form of usury. As B points out, usury, “lending money at interest, was no longer illegal in England, [but] it was still considered sinful.” The sin is that of greed. The relative pronoun, “[w]hich,” is not restrictive, but goes back to the “use” that is not usury; it “happies” or makes happy--anthimeria uses a word normally used as one part of speech as another--those who are willing to give a free loan of their semen, which, paradoxically will pay back great interest—more FYs—making him happier still. The S represents the rate of interest here with a tedious extension of “ten”: this excess is WS treating the S with some irony, for the S’s refigurings are often repetitive. B points out that “refigure” means duplicated through number (142), but, of course, the S’s own poetic mathematics “refigures” the FY through a repetition (re-) of the figure (rhetorical figure): “Ten times” is repeated and emphasized as a spondee (the interest rate in England at the time was 10%, but the S’s here is, as B points out 1,000%). Of course, the S is envisioning a ten-fold increase—ten children will have ten children, who will have ten of their own, and so on, imagining apparently that the FY’s exponentially increasing beauty will not only live on, but increase in scope. What are we to make of the hyperbole here. After all, some of the children will be daughters who will, given the weird patriarchy imagined here, reproduce their husband’s looks, not their father’s or grandfather’s. And where did the FY’s beauty come from? Be that as it may, the appeal is again to the FY’s capacity to challenge death through the immortality of procreation. The trochaic reversal—“do if”—stresses death’s powerlessness in the face of the FY’s procreation of himself, “[l]eaving thee living,” the alliteration relating as cause and effect the reproduction and the immortality. B explains that “leaving” puns not only on making leaves, but also on subtracting one figure from another. The trochee stresses the FY’s freedom to choose to leave his narcissism behind by leaving children behind.
6.13-14
Again in the imperative mood, the S commands that the FY be not “self-willed,” willing himself to isolation—notice the accord of “self-killed” and “self-willed.” (CB points out that Quarto has “selfe-wild,” allowing a pun which reminds the FY of his savage obstinacy.) The FY’s beauty is “too fair” for the FY to succumb to the death he can vanquish. If he will not refigure himself through children, his only heirs will be worms. The poetic reminder that death is a matter of worms is given chilling force here since they are now seen, through comparison, as the FY’s children. They will bear, not his memory (1.4), but his flesh, now no longer fair, but merely worm food, nourishing worms to reproduce only themselves. As K points out, conquest is opposed to inheritance in early modern law—property not passed on through inheritance is “conquered”—so the metaphor of conquest becomes that of inheritance. V points out that the poem’s exhortation fits the pattern found in homily: negative (1-1), positive (3-12), negative (13-14).
Sonnet 5/V "Those hours"
Those hours that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell
Will play the tyrants to the very same,
And that unfair which fairly doth excel.
For never-resting time leads Summer on
To hideous winter, and confounds him there,
Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'er-snowed and bareness everywhere.
Then were not summer’s distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was.
But flowers distill'd, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.
Quatrain 1
1 Those ho/urs that / with gen/tle work / did frame >
2 The love/ly gaze / where ev'/ry eye / doth dwell >
3 Will play / the ty/rants to / the ve/ry same,
4 And that / un-fair / which fair/ly doth / excel.
Quatrain 2
5 For ne/ver-res/ting time / leads Sum/mer on >
6 To hi/deous win/ter, // and / confounds / him there,
7 Sap checked / with frost, // and lus/ty leaves / quite gone,
8 Beauty / o’er-snowed / and bare/ness e/v'rywhere.
Quatrain 3
9 Then were / not sum/mer's dis/tilla/tion left >
10 A li/quid pris/'ner pent / in walls / of glass,
11 Beauty's / effect / with beau/ty were / bereft,
12 Nor it, / nor no / remem/brance what / it was.
Couplet
13 But flow'rs / distill'd, // though they / with win/ter meet,
14 Leese but / their show; // their sub/stance still / lives sweet.
Q1-2 provide the fact of time’s effect upon its own beauty; Q3-C then provide a form of hope.
5.1-4
"[H]ours" is disyllabic and is spelled “howers” in Quarto. The sentence of Q1 provides its subject—"[t]hose hours"—then delays its first verb—"will play"—until after line 2's relative clause, the coordinate conjunction joining that verb to a second—"unfair." "And that unfair" is an instance of anastrophe or hyperbaton since the object precedes the verb. "Hours" is a metonym for time, and the enjambments of lines 1-2 and 2-3 enact time's insistence in both framing and tyrannizing beauty. "Unfair" is a neologism (and with "fairly" a form of polypteton). The S believes that there is a cosmic injustice in time's creation and destruction of beauty; it is because of his forensic complaint that he deliberates with the FY. For now, the FY's beauty excels others', and it does so justly. There is here a conflation of beauty and justice which will later be sundered. Q1’s temporal point of view is, according to V, “stereoscopic”: “did frame,” doth dwell,” and “will play” provide past, present and future actions of time, social world, and time, respectively. Notice that the two verbs of the main clause provide the past and future actions of time, both of which enclose the present effect of the beauty of the FY. Q1 is metrically regular, except for the spondees of "Those hours" and "un-fair": the grammatical subject and its second verb.
5.5-8
The next metonym for time—a season, not an hour—enlarges the unit of time, thus increasing the speed to decline, providing a mythically horrific pace. The epithet "never-resting" for time recounts the counter-law of beauty—the time that makes beauty mars it. The leading of summer (capitalized in Quarto), now personified as a person, into winter, where he is confounded and his beauty destroyed, is both natural yet diabolic. K notes that the enjambment of lines 5-6 makes the definition of "lead" as "lure" or "beguile" "initially latent, suddenly and shockingly primary." Lines 7-8 are full of spondees, enacting the apparently slow gravity of that destruction: "Sap checked," "quite gone" and "o'er-snowed." Alden in R remarks that line 7 is one of a number of "spondaic lines" in the sequence, and they often enact an elegiac tone. There is in the language here an almost allegorical myth of Beauty led by Time from Summer's Fair to Winter's Ruin: winter is "hideous" (here dissyllabic) .
5.9-12
"Summer’s distillation" and "liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass" are metaphors for immortal traces of the beautiful one left behind after he is confounded by time. Rose water outlasts the rose from which it comes. This distillation process is procreative, but it is hard not to hear already the other form of saving beauty's trace other than sexual reproduction—poetry—since a poem is also a distilled flower. (An anthology is literally a gathering of flowers.) As V puts it, "liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass" is "a self-reflexive figure literally picturing perfume, but analogically picturing the emotionally labile contents of any sonnet as they preserve their mobility within the transparent walls of prescribed length, meter, and rhyme." B points out that the last line of the quatrain must assume an ellipted verb phrase: "Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was [would exist]." The ellipsis, then, enacts the annihilation. According to Abbott, the double-negative emphasizes, it does not undo, the negation.
This sonnet is the first in which the S begins to think about an alternative to sexual reproduction; he goes from speaking of sexual reproduction to sexual and poetic, and from sexual and poetic reproduction to poetic alone. One presumes that he senses his own impossible rhetorical purpose in the "procreation sonnets" so early that he begins to seek an alternative, perhaps suggested by his own sonnets so far.
5.13-14
The spondee of the sonnet's last foot extends in time the distilled essence of the flower--"still lives sweet"--though the line reads perfectly well if "lives" is not stressed. The sibylant alliteration—“still lives sweet”—provides a delicate afterlife for the “sweet self” of the dying beauty distilled, either in children or in poetry, before death. V notes that "still" dwells within "distillation." (She has done an enormous amount of work in her commentary on such wordplay.) What, exactly, is the “substance” or essence of the FY distilled in child and poem? For the S, his beauty. V points out that the implicit exhortation—"So you, too, must be distilled before your winter comes”—is missing, thus generating the next sonnet. In rhetorical terms, it is an enthymeme: the conclusion is left to be inferred by the reader.
"Leese" is a common variant of "lose" in the period, but CB suggests that it may actually be "lease"; that is, the FY does not not own, he is only leasing, his beauty.
Sonnets 5-6 form a sub-unit within the sub-sequence of the procreation sonnets. It is one of the double sonnets: According to A, there are eight others doubles (15/16, 27/28, 44/45, 50/51, 67/68, 73/74, 89/90, 133/134) and one triple (91/92/93).
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell
Will play the tyrants to the very same,
And that unfair which fairly doth excel.
For never-resting time leads Summer on
To hideous winter, and confounds him there,
Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'er-snowed and bareness everywhere.
Then were not summer’s distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was.
But flowers distill'd, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.
Quatrain 1
1 Those ho/urs that / with gen/tle work / did frame >
2 The love/ly gaze / where ev'/ry eye / doth dwell >
3 Will play / the ty/rants to / the ve/ry same,
4 And that / un-fair / which fair/ly doth / excel.
Quatrain 2
5 For ne/ver-res/ting time / leads Sum/mer on >
6 To hi/deous win/ter, // and / confounds / him there,
7 Sap checked / with frost, // and lus/ty leaves / quite gone,
8 Beauty / o’er-snowed / and bare/ness e/v'rywhere.
Quatrain 3
9 Then were / not sum/mer's dis/tilla/tion left >
10 A li/quid pris/'ner pent / in walls / of glass,
11 Beauty's / effect / with beau/ty were / bereft,
12 Nor it, / nor no / remem/brance what / it was.
Couplet
13 But flow'rs / distill'd, // though they / with win/ter meet,
14 Leese but / their show; // their sub/stance still / lives sweet.
Q1-2 provide the fact of time’s effect upon its own beauty; Q3-C then provide a form of hope.
5.1-4
"[H]ours" is disyllabic and is spelled “howers” in Quarto. The sentence of Q1 provides its subject—"[t]hose hours"—then delays its first verb—"will play"—until after line 2's relative clause, the coordinate conjunction joining that verb to a second—"unfair." "And that unfair" is an instance of anastrophe or hyperbaton since the object precedes the verb. "Hours" is a metonym for time, and the enjambments of lines 1-2 and 2-3 enact time's insistence in both framing and tyrannizing beauty. "Unfair" is a neologism (and with "fairly" a form of polypteton). The S believes that there is a cosmic injustice in time's creation and destruction of beauty; it is because of his forensic complaint that he deliberates with the FY. For now, the FY's beauty excels others', and it does so justly. There is here a conflation of beauty and justice which will later be sundered. Q1’s temporal point of view is, according to V, “stereoscopic”: “did frame,” doth dwell,” and “will play” provide past, present and future actions of time, social world, and time, respectively. Notice that the two verbs of the main clause provide the past and future actions of time, both of which enclose the present effect of the beauty of the FY. Q1 is metrically regular, except for the spondees of "Those hours" and "un-fair": the grammatical subject and its second verb.
5.5-8
The next metonym for time—a season, not an hour—enlarges the unit of time, thus increasing the speed to decline, providing a mythically horrific pace. The epithet "never-resting" for time recounts the counter-law of beauty—the time that makes beauty mars it. The leading of summer (capitalized in Quarto), now personified as a person, into winter, where he is confounded and his beauty destroyed, is both natural yet diabolic. K notes that the enjambment of lines 5-6 makes the definition of "lead" as "lure" or "beguile" "initially latent, suddenly and shockingly primary." Lines 7-8 are full of spondees, enacting the apparently slow gravity of that destruction: "Sap checked," "quite gone" and "o'er-snowed." Alden in R remarks that line 7 is one of a number of "spondaic lines" in the sequence, and they often enact an elegiac tone. There is in the language here an almost allegorical myth of Beauty led by Time from Summer's Fair to Winter's Ruin: winter is "hideous" (here dissyllabic) .
5.9-12
"Summer’s distillation" and "liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass" are metaphors for immortal traces of the beautiful one left behind after he is confounded by time. Rose water outlasts the rose from which it comes. This distillation process is procreative, but it is hard not to hear already the other form of saving beauty's trace other than sexual reproduction—poetry—since a poem is also a distilled flower. (An anthology is literally a gathering of flowers.) As V puts it, "liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass" is "a self-reflexive figure literally picturing perfume, but analogically picturing the emotionally labile contents of any sonnet as they preserve their mobility within the transparent walls of prescribed length, meter, and rhyme." B points out that the last line of the quatrain must assume an ellipted verb phrase: "Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was [would exist]." The ellipsis, then, enacts the annihilation. According to Abbott, the double-negative emphasizes, it does not undo, the negation.
This sonnet is the first in which the S begins to think about an alternative to sexual reproduction; he goes from speaking of sexual reproduction to sexual and poetic, and from sexual and poetic reproduction to poetic alone. One presumes that he senses his own impossible rhetorical purpose in the "procreation sonnets" so early that he begins to seek an alternative, perhaps suggested by his own sonnets so far.
5.13-14
The spondee of the sonnet's last foot extends in time the distilled essence of the flower--"still lives sweet"--though the line reads perfectly well if "lives" is not stressed. The sibylant alliteration—“still lives sweet”—provides a delicate afterlife for the “sweet self” of the dying beauty distilled, either in children or in poetry, before death. V notes that "still" dwells within "distillation." (She has done an enormous amount of work in her commentary on such wordplay.) What, exactly, is the “substance” or essence of the FY distilled in child and poem? For the S, his beauty. V points out that the implicit exhortation—"So you, too, must be distilled before your winter comes”—is missing, thus generating the next sonnet. In rhetorical terms, it is an enthymeme: the conclusion is left to be inferred by the reader.
"Leese" is a common variant of "lose" in the period, but CB suggests that it may actually be "lease"; that is, the FY does not not own, he is only leasing, his beauty.
Sonnets 5-6 form a sub-unit within the sub-sequence of the procreation sonnets. It is one of the double sonnets: According to A, there are eight others doubles (15/16, 27/28, 44/45, 50/51, 67/68, 73/74, 89/90, 133/134) and one triple (91/92/93).
Sonnet 4/IV "Unthrifty loveliness"
Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thy self thy beautyies' legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
And, being frank, she lends to those are free.
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thy self alone,
Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive.
Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable Audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Which, used, lives th’ executor to be.
Quatrain 1
1 Un-thrif/ty love/liness, // why dost / thou spend >
2 Upon / thy self / thy beau/tie's le/gacy?
3 Nature’s / bequest / gives no/thing // but / doth lend,
4 And, be/ing frank, // she lends / to those / are free.
Quatrain 2
5 Then, beau/teous nig/gard, // why / dost thou / abuse >
6 The boun/teous lar/gess gi/ven thee / to give?
7 Profit/less u/surer, // why dost / thou use >
8 So great / a sum / of sums, // yet canst / not live?
Quatrain 3
9 For ha/ving traf/fic // with / thy self / alone,
10 Thou of / thy self / thy sweet / self dost / deceive.
11 Then how, // when na/ture calls / thee to / be gone,
12 What ac/cepta/ble Au/dit canst / thou leave?
Couplet
13 Thy un/used beau/ty must / be tombed / with thee,
14 Which, u/séd, // lives / th’ exe/cutor / to be.
Q1-3 indict the FY with questions, the dark answer to which follows in the C.
The S makes a sustained economic argument in the poem in favor of the paradox of investment: the more you give, provided you give in the right way, the more you get. The FY’s "loveliness" is not unthrifty; he is so with his loveliness (hypallage). There are three epithets in the sonnet in the “abusive vocative” (W)--"Unthrifty loveliness," "beauteous niggard," and "[p]rofitless usurer"--all three of which reveal the presence of forensic and epideictic rhetorical genres. Unless the FY follows the S's deliberative advice, he is guilty of a crime for which he can be blamed.
4.1-4
Compound words are very interesting metrically in English: the "un" of "unthrifty" can be stressed, provided one notes the word as a compound. Again, emphasizing the privative delivers the privation the world will experience without the FY's progeny. Foot 3 after the caesura can be scanned variously, depending upon performance: throughout, I have stressed the “why” of “why dost” to deliver the hysteria of the S’s perplexed anxiety over the FY's self-annihilating narcissism. The S continues his economic metaphor here: the FY’s beauty is a legacy—that is, an inheritance from nature—that he is supposed to give or spend upon others, not hoard. The question in lines 1-2 (and those coming) may or may not be rhetorical. One hears a S who really does not understand his friend’s disposition toward his own beauty. The enjambments inside the questions, propelling the syntax forward over the line, enact the S’s hurried confusion. Nature is, of course, personified here as female. V points out that she is one "who benevolently circulates her currency," and that she is replacing God as an origin of life: "homily has been secularized."
4.5-8
The quatrain, this poem, and the sub-sequence play upon an antithesis between the use and abuse of the gift of beauty: the rhyme in lines 5 and 7 is the most forcefully sonic indicator of that difference. Not to use beauty is to abuse it and oneself. Abuse, especially self-abuse, has onanistic connotations. As the British say, the FY is a wanker.
The S deepens the antithesis between the first two and a half feet of lines 5-6—“beauteous niggard” and “bounteous largess”—by ensuring that the first noun phrase is an oxymoron (again, hypallage), but the second is not. As B point out, both adjectives are disyllabic by syncopation. The FY's beauty is an unmixed blessing; his abuse of it, though, is mixed. Notice the combined effects of prosody and sentence structure. B explains the ambiguity of "live" here as livelihood and immortality. The FY is a profitless usurer since he denies himself both. The polypteton in line 6, the repetition of a word in a different form—“given . . . give”—is “a vital weapon in Shakespeare’s rhetorical armoury” (W).
4.9-12
The opening of Q3 puts to rest any doubt about the FY’s sexual crime—"having traffic with thyself alone." In doing so, the FY deceives himself of his "sweet self" (cf. 1.8). The rhetorical question of lines 11-12 are peculiar: Line 11 beings as a “how” question before its dependent clause—"when nature calls thee to be gone"; after it, though, line 12 ends as a “what” question. A spends quite a bit of time explaining that this is WS's grammatical error, without noting that the figure of anacolouthon disrupts syntax, beginning a sentence one way, then starting partially or completely over. In WS, it indicates the confusion of a character. (King Lear, for example, loses his syntax as he loses his cool when he threatens his daughter.) As the S articulates the FY's vice to him, it becomes clearer yet more perplexing to the S himself.
"Audit" is capitalized and italicized in Q, and the metaphor of judgment as an economic audit runs throughout the sequence. According to R, line 12’s "acceptable" takes its primary stress is on its first syllable, acceptable, but he offers no explanation how one determines when that is or is not the case. (Other editors follow suit. B says that reading words with their modern accent "deadens the rhythm of the line," but he may only be "norming" the scansion. My scansion maintains stress on the question words, and here allows the contemporary pronunciation to deliver trochaic disturbance in the first two feet of line 12.
4.13-14
The C combines the economic inheritance metaphor with the self-entombment one: the unused inheritance of beauty, which is an abuse of beauty, is entombed with one. Were that beauty to be used, though, it would be an executor of beauty’s future; that is, the FY’s progeny would himself decide how and to whom to use the FY’s gift of beauty to him, thus allowing both the FY's progeny and the FY himself to be.
Upon thy self thy beautyies' legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing but doth lend,
And, being frank, she lends to those are free.
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thy self alone,
Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive.
Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable Audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Which, used, lives th’ executor to be.
Quatrain 1
1 Un-thrif/ty love/liness, // why dost / thou spend >
2 Upon / thy self / thy beau/tie's le/gacy?
3 Nature’s / bequest / gives no/thing // but / doth lend,
4 And, be/ing frank, // she lends / to those / are free.
Quatrain 2
5 Then, beau/teous nig/gard, // why / dost thou / abuse >
6 The boun/teous lar/gess gi/ven thee / to give?
7 Profit/less u/surer, // why dost / thou use >
8 So great / a sum / of sums, // yet canst / not live?
Quatrain 3
9 For ha/ving traf/fic // with / thy self / alone,
10 Thou of / thy self / thy sweet / self dost / deceive.
11 Then how, // when na/ture calls / thee to / be gone,
12 What ac/cepta/ble Au/dit canst / thou leave?
Couplet
13 Thy un/used beau/ty must / be tombed / with thee,
14 Which, u/séd, // lives / th’ exe/cutor / to be.
Q1-3 indict the FY with questions, the dark answer to which follows in the C.
The S makes a sustained economic argument in the poem in favor of the paradox of investment: the more you give, provided you give in the right way, the more you get. The FY’s "loveliness" is not unthrifty; he is so with his loveliness (hypallage). There are three epithets in the sonnet in the “abusive vocative” (W)--"Unthrifty loveliness," "beauteous niggard," and "[p]rofitless usurer"--all three of which reveal the presence of forensic and epideictic rhetorical genres. Unless the FY follows the S's deliberative advice, he is guilty of a crime for which he can be blamed.
4.1-4
Compound words are very interesting metrically in English: the "un" of "unthrifty" can be stressed, provided one notes the word as a compound. Again, emphasizing the privative delivers the privation the world will experience without the FY's progeny. Foot 3 after the caesura can be scanned variously, depending upon performance: throughout, I have stressed the “why” of “why dost” to deliver the hysteria of the S’s perplexed anxiety over the FY's self-annihilating narcissism. The S continues his economic metaphor here: the FY’s beauty is a legacy—that is, an inheritance from nature—that he is supposed to give or spend upon others, not hoard. The question in lines 1-2 (and those coming) may or may not be rhetorical. One hears a S who really does not understand his friend’s disposition toward his own beauty. The enjambments inside the questions, propelling the syntax forward over the line, enact the S’s hurried confusion. Nature is, of course, personified here as female. V points out that she is one "who benevolently circulates her currency," and that she is replacing God as an origin of life: "homily has been secularized."
4.5-8
The quatrain, this poem, and the sub-sequence play upon an antithesis between the use and abuse of the gift of beauty: the rhyme in lines 5 and 7 is the most forcefully sonic indicator of that difference. Not to use beauty is to abuse it and oneself. Abuse, especially self-abuse, has onanistic connotations. As the British say, the FY is a wanker.
The S deepens the antithesis between the first two and a half feet of lines 5-6—“beauteous niggard” and “bounteous largess”—by ensuring that the first noun phrase is an oxymoron (again, hypallage), but the second is not. As B point out, both adjectives are disyllabic by syncopation. The FY's beauty is an unmixed blessing; his abuse of it, though, is mixed. Notice the combined effects of prosody and sentence structure. B explains the ambiguity of "live" here as livelihood and immortality. The FY is a profitless usurer since he denies himself both. The polypteton in line 6, the repetition of a word in a different form—“given . . . give”—is “a vital weapon in Shakespeare’s rhetorical armoury” (W).
4.9-12
The opening of Q3 puts to rest any doubt about the FY’s sexual crime—"having traffic with thyself alone." In doing so, the FY deceives himself of his "sweet self" (cf. 1.8). The rhetorical question of lines 11-12 are peculiar: Line 11 beings as a “how” question before its dependent clause—"when nature calls thee to be gone"; after it, though, line 12 ends as a “what” question. A spends quite a bit of time explaining that this is WS's grammatical error, without noting that the figure of anacolouthon disrupts syntax, beginning a sentence one way, then starting partially or completely over. In WS, it indicates the confusion of a character. (King Lear, for example, loses his syntax as he loses his cool when he threatens his daughter.) As the S articulates the FY's vice to him, it becomes clearer yet more perplexing to the S himself.
"Audit" is capitalized and italicized in Q, and the metaphor of judgment as an economic audit runs throughout the sequence. According to R, line 12’s "acceptable" takes its primary stress is on its first syllable, acceptable, but he offers no explanation how one determines when that is or is not the case. (Other editors follow suit. B says that reading words with their modern accent "deadens the rhythm of the line," but he may only be "norming" the scansion. My scansion maintains stress on the question words, and here allows the contemporary pronunciation to deliver trochaic disturbance in the first two feet of line 12.
4.13-14
The C combines the economic inheritance metaphor with the self-entombment one: the unused inheritance of beauty, which is an abuse of beauty, is entombed with one. Were that beauty to be used, though, it would be an executor of beauty’s future; that is, the FY’s progeny would himself decide how and to whom to use the FY’s gift of beauty to him, thus allowing both the FY's progeny and the FY himself to be.
Sonnet 3/III "Look in thy glass"
Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest,
"Now is the time that face should form an other,"
Whose fresh repair, if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear'd womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
But if thou live rememb'red not to be,
Die single and thine image dies with thee.
Quatrain 1
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.
Quatrain 2
5 For where / is she / so fair / whose un/ear’d womb >
6 Disdains / the til/lage of / thy hus/bandry?
7 Or who / is he / so fond / will be / the tomb >
8 Of his / self-love / to stop / poste/rity?
Quatrain 3
9 Thou art / thy mo/ther’s glass, // and she / in thee >
10 Calls back / the love/ly Ap/ril of / her prime;
11 So thou / through win/dows of / thine age / shalt see,
12 Despite / of wri/nkles, // this / thy gol/den time.
Couplet
13 But if / thou live / remem/b'red not / to be,
14 Die si/ngle // and / thine i/mage dies / with thee.
Q1 imagines the FY's soliloquy upon his own face; in Q2, the S cannot imagine the FY's not finding a partner. Q3 compares the FY to his own procreative mother. The C offers a hypothetical curse upon the FY.
3.1-4
The opening trochee of line 1 emphasizes the imperative mood of the first verb, coordinated with a second which commands the FY to look at himself in a mirror and provides him with a one-line soliloquy to his face. The demonstrative adjective--"that face" (it can be performed as iamb, trochee or spondee)-- alienates the FY from his own beautiful face so that he can reproduce it. The "face" functions as an instance of synecdoche, substitution of part for whole or whole for part, "the Figure of Quick Conceit." Notice that, if one delivers "that face" as an iamb, the stress is on the body part; as a trochee, on its singularity; as a spondee, on both equally.
Hypotaxis is what we would call subordination; parataxis, coordination. The grammar and syntax of the relative clause of lines 3-4, when it is interrupted by a dependent clause (hypotaxis)—“if thou not renewest”—is strange and interesting. I believe that there is an ellipted "of" before "[w]hose." The paratactic, parallel isocolon (phrases or clauses of equal length) in line 4 with its two verbs ("beguile" and "unbless") allows for ellipsis: "Thou dost beguile the world, [and thou dost] unbless some mother." The caesura after "world" and the asyndeton of the ellipted coordinate conjunction hammers the privative "un." Notice yet another such privative in line 5: "unear’d." The S envisions the FY's failure to reproduce as a kind of anti-genesis.
3.5-8
The S organizes the quatrain by means of two, parallel rhetorical questions: Where is she so fair; who is he so fond? The spondees of "so fair" and "so fond" confirm the parallelism. The metaphor within each rhetorical question is quite distinct: The "she" is a field disdaining to be tilled by the FY and his seed; the "he" is a self-loving suicide. Antithesis and rhyme allow for a choice between womb or tomb. The S’s use of the metaphor of the FY’s narcissism as a tomb alludes to the Gospels’ understanding that the only way to transcend the tomb is through salvation (see Matthew 27.60). Here, the S believes that sexual reproduction alone can achieve transcendence. Later, he will allow that poetry can. Nowhere in the FY portion of the sequence does he discuss conventional Christian salvation. WS is either ironizing his S's paganism, or not.
W observes that "tillage of thy husbandry" is a pun, though he under-emphasizes its vulgarity. The S's attitude toward heterosexual love, whether here or in the DL sonnets, is not just bawdy; it's often dehumanizing. The FY is at least a human farmer; the hypothetical woman is a field.
3.9-12
The S likens the FY to the young man’s mother, who sees herself in him. (Notice that the patriarchal argument is now qualified: children resemble their mothers, too.) The glass or mirror of line 1 in which the FY views his face becomes the glass of a child reminding his mother of her earlier loveliness. The S repeats the seasonal metaphor for age—winter—yet varies it: the FY’s mother can "call back" or recall her lovely spring, specifically April. "Calls back" can be performed as an iamb, a trochee, or a spondee—each bringing a different sonic effect and meaning. In the simile of the FY’s situation with his mother's, the nostalgic glass becomes a window through which the FY may view his earlier youth, a portal to a lost, now recoverable time of beauty, the stressed "this" bringing the FY back to the present time, the golden time, during which he deliberates his future.
3.13-14
V argues that the poem's deep structure is that Q1-3 concern life, and the C, death, the coordinate conjunction "but" the hinge between the two. The hypothetical proposition of the couplet is peculiar since the if-clause (the antecedent) represents an event after the then-clause (the consequent). The S suggests that a consequent can precede its antecedent, a logical impossibility. This is why, no doubt, B allows that line 13 can mean not only "in such a way that you will not be remembered," but also "with the intent of being forgotten." Yet its primary meaning is futuristic. The logical impossibility collapses temporal frames so that the FY can see what his present actions are doing to his future life after death. He is destroying his own "image."
This image of beauty exists within him now, but it can only survive him if he reproduces it. The image is a kind of Platonic form, yet the form is dependent upon actions of its current instantiation. "Die" may have a trace of the imperative in it, a kind of curse, as V points out. WS comes upon Platonism in Hoby's translation of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, specifically in Bembo's great speech on love in Book 4, where Castiglione channels Plato's Symposium through a discussion of the beloved's face.
"Now is the time that face should form an other,"
Whose fresh repair, if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose unear'd womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
But if thou live rememb'red not to be,
Die single and thine image dies with thee.
Quatrain 1
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.
Quatrain 2
5 For where / is she / so fair / whose un/ear’d womb >
6 Disdains / the til/lage of / thy hus/bandry?
7 Or who / is he / so fond / will be / the tomb >
8 Of his / self-love / to stop / poste/rity?
Quatrain 3
9 Thou art / thy mo/ther’s glass, // and she / in thee >
10 Calls back / the love/ly Ap/ril of / her prime;
11 So thou / through win/dows of / thine age / shalt see,
12 Despite / of wri/nkles, // this / thy gol/den time.
Couplet
13 But if / thou live / remem/b'red not / to be,
14 Die si/ngle // and / thine i/mage dies / with thee.
Q1 imagines the FY's soliloquy upon his own face; in Q2, the S cannot imagine the FY's not finding a partner. Q3 compares the FY to his own procreative mother. The C offers a hypothetical curse upon the FY.
3.1-4
The opening trochee of line 1 emphasizes the imperative mood of the first verb, coordinated with a second which commands the FY to look at himself in a mirror and provides him with a one-line soliloquy to his face. The demonstrative adjective--"that face" (it can be performed as iamb, trochee or spondee)-- alienates the FY from his own beautiful face so that he can reproduce it. The "face" functions as an instance of synecdoche, substitution of part for whole or whole for part, "the Figure of Quick Conceit." Notice that, if one delivers "that face" as an iamb, the stress is on the body part; as a trochee, on its singularity; as a spondee, on both equally.
Hypotaxis is what we would call subordination; parataxis, coordination. The grammar and syntax of the relative clause of lines 3-4, when it is interrupted by a dependent clause (hypotaxis)—“if thou not renewest”—is strange and interesting. I believe that there is an ellipted "of" before "[w]hose." The paratactic, parallel isocolon (phrases or clauses of equal length) in line 4 with its two verbs ("beguile" and "unbless") allows for ellipsis: "Thou dost beguile the world, [and thou dost] unbless some mother." The caesura after "world" and the asyndeton of the ellipted coordinate conjunction hammers the privative "un." Notice yet another such privative in line 5: "unear’d." The S envisions the FY's failure to reproduce as a kind of anti-genesis.
3.5-8
The S organizes the quatrain by means of two, parallel rhetorical questions: Where is she so fair; who is he so fond? The spondees of "so fair" and "so fond" confirm the parallelism. The metaphor within each rhetorical question is quite distinct: The "she" is a field disdaining to be tilled by the FY and his seed; the "he" is a self-loving suicide. Antithesis and rhyme allow for a choice between womb or tomb. The S’s use of the metaphor of the FY’s narcissism as a tomb alludes to the Gospels’ understanding that the only way to transcend the tomb is through salvation (see Matthew 27.60). Here, the S believes that sexual reproduction alone can achieve transcendence. Later, he will allow that poetry can. Nowhere in the FY portion of the sequence does he discuss conventional Christian salvation. WS is either ironizing his S's paganism, or not.
W observes that "tillage of thy husbandry" is a pun, though he under-emphasizes its vulgarity. The S's attitude toward heterosexual love, whether here or in the DL sonnets, is not just bawdy; it's often dehumanizing. The FY is at least a human farmer; the hypothetical woman is a field.
3.9-12
The S likens the FY to the young man’s mother, who sees herself in him. (Notice that the patriarchal argument is now qualified: children resemble their mothers, too.) The glass or mirror of line 1 in which the FY views his face becomes the glass of a child reminding his mother of her earlier loveliness. The S repeats the seasonal metaphor for age—winter—yet varies it: the FY’s mother can "call back" or recall her lovely spring, specifically April. "Calls back" can be performed as an iamb, a trochee, or a spondee—each bringing a different sonic effect and meaning. In the simile of the FY’s situation with his mother's, the nostalgic glass becomes a window through which the FY may view his earlier youth, a portal to a lost, now recoverable time of beauty, the stressed "this" bringing the FY back to the present time, the golden time, during which he deliberates his future.
3.13-14
V argues that the poem's deep structure is that Q1-3 concern life, and the C, death, the coordinate conjunction "but" the hinge between the two. The hypothetical proposition of the couplet is peculiar since the if-clause (the antecedent) represents an event after the then-clause (the consequent). The S suggests that a consequent can precede its antecedent, a logical impossibility. This is why, no doubt, B allows that line 13 can mean not only "in such a way that you will not be remembered," but also "with the intent of being forgotten." Yet its primary meaning is futuristic. The logical impossibility collapses temporal frames so that the FY can see what his present actions are doing to his future life after death. He is destroying his own "image."
This image of beauty exists within him now, but it can only survive him if he reproduces it. The image is a kind of Platonic form, yet the form is dependent upon actions of its current instantiation. "Die" may have a trace of the imperative in it, a kind of curse, as V points out. WS comes upon Platonism in Hoby's translation of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, specifically in Bembo's great speech on love in Book 4, where Castiglione channels Plato's Symposium through a discussion of the beloved's face.
Sonnet 2/II "When forty winters"
When forty Winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauties' field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a totter'd weed of small worth held.
Then, being asked, where all thy beauty lies—
Where, all the treasure of thy lusty days—
To say within thine own deep sunken eyes
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserv'd thy beauties' use,
If thou couldst answer, "This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,"
Proving his beauty by succession thine.
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.
Quatrain 1
1 When for/ty Win/ters shall / besiege / thy brow
2 And dig / deep tren/ches in / thy beau/ties' field,
3 Thy youth's / proud li/very, // so gazed / on now,
4 Will be / a tot/ter'd weed / of small / worth held.
Quatrain 2
5 Then, be/ing asked, // where all / thy beau/ty lies—
6 Where, // all / the trea/sure of / thy lus/ty days—
7 To say / within / thine own / deep sun/ken eyes >
8 Were an /all-ea/ting shame / and thrift/less praise.
Quatrain 3
9 How much / more praise / deserv'd / thy beau/ties' use,
10 If thou / could'st an/swer, // "This / fair child / of mine >
11 Shall sum / my count / and make / my old / excuse,"
12 Proving / his beau/ty by / succes/sion thine.
Couplet
13 This were / to be / new made / when thou / art old,
14 And see / thy blood / warm // when / thou feel'st / it cold.
Q 1 explains that, in the future, the FY's beauty will be gone; Q2 imagines a shameful interview if he does not procreate, and Q3 and the C, a praiseworthy one.
2.1-4
Q1-2 provide the FY with a prophetic vision of his aging. Q1 is a complex sentence, the dependent clause of lines 1-2 providing the FY's future, the independent one of 3-4, the state of his beauty then. Shakespeare likes to open sonnets with such clauses, especially when-clauses (cf. 30). Line 1's metrical regularity enacts the natural condition of aging, and its metaphor identifies advanced age with the season of winter, a conventional metaphor, yet he then identifies the season with an army besieging the FY’s face, a field where beauties are grown. The spondee of foot 2 in line 2—"And dig / deep trenches"—slows the line, and the dental alliteration emphasizes the labor required to age the FY. That field is then imagined as clothing—the body clothes the soul—which becomes a worn garment, yet the S's metaphor of that clothing as now a weed brings one back full circle to "beauties' field": the FY's beauties are now weeds. Many editors turn the "beauties" of Q into "beauty's"; I prefer to maintain it in the plural--"beauties'."
2.4-8
In that prophetic future, the S imagines the FY interviewed about his beauty, now metaphorically identified with treasure. "[W]here all" may be scanned three ways, depending on interpretation, but it's no pyrhhic. Does one wish to emphasize the location of loss ("where") or its totality ("all") or both? The repetition of "where all" (an instance of anaphora, the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses) sets up a double-question in Psalm-like, parallel structure, where the second colon specifies the first. Notice that the parallel structure (as emphasized by the anaphora) allows ellipsis or omission of the second "lies," the repetition of phrasing and structure intensifying the import of the question. Anaphora is "the Figure of Report" for Puttenham.
"Treasure" here alludes to Matthew 6.19-21 and to 13.44: The field of the FY’s treasure is his face, not his heart; since that is the case, he must reproduce it. By opening the second line with a spondee broken by a caesura, the S’s tone for the imagined interlocutor is hectoring. In the imagined response to the interlocutor, the S identifies the FY's unwillingness to reproduce with a burial within his own eyes, now seen as grave-like (cf. 1.13-14)—“deep sunken.” The S then indicts the FY, his emotional appeal one to a shameful act which devours everything of worth about the FY, the beauty for which he is praised now seen as thriftless since its hoarding is not real economy, yet the adjective “thriftless” logically belongs, not to the praise, but to the FY, an instance of hypallage, where the adjective properly belonging to one noun is used for another, related one--what Puttenham calls "the Changeling."
2.9-12
Q3 and C provide the remedy to that grim future. The praise of the S's volta in line 9—"How much more praise"—is greater than the "thriftless praise" because it will be merited, not by possession, but by use. Yet the conditional construction of line 10's introduction of the imagined response—"If . . . could"—makes that response more, not less remote. The hypallage of “old excuse” indicates that it is the FY who will be old, not his excuse. The metaphor within "sum my count" is economic: the child’s beauty will rectify the FY's financial records—where the FY's old age puts him into debt, the child's beauty pays that debt off. The final participial phrase of line 12 opens with a trochee-- "Proving"--reversing the fear over the tottered weed of Q1, yet it is difficult to tell who the antecedent of the participial phrase is: Is it the FY during his answer, or is it the FY's child? The ambiguity here is wonderful since it enacts the lineal argument of the S's appeals in the procreation sonnets; after all, whose beauty proves, or is proven by, reproduction? Whose beauty is warrant for whose? As B would have it, "This line exemplifies the constructive vagueness by which S. makes a word or phrase do double duty." The regal metaphor of "succession" indicates a monarchy, whose legitimacy is not political, but aesthetic. The FY is a king of beauty who requires a prince of beauty to both continue and confirm his once beautiful rule. Though it will strike us as peculiar, the patriarchal assumption that the father's appearance, not the mother's, will be transmitted to the child was common in the period. Shakespeare ironizes it, I suspect, in order to show the S's hyperbolic intensity of focus upon his beloved. Puttenham calls hyperbole "the Overreacher" or the "Loud Liar."
V points out that WS's S's "report" of the FY's speech here, like that of the DL's later, is "one way of building up a credible existential character for these dramatis personae over time." The entirety of the sequence is in the voice of WS's S since a report, even if accurate, is in the voice of the reporter. We need not assume that the S is falsifying their speech, but we ought to remember that this is an epic of the S's lyric love, not of theirs.
2.13-14
W points out that the couplet is composed entirely of monosyllabic words, giving it "bite." The bite results, I suspect, from the direct overlap of meter and word.
The ambiguity of the demonstrative pronoun here ("[t]his"), especially when accompanied by trochaic emphasis, is common: What is its antecedent? I suspect it refers to all that the S has represented in Q3—the imagined response of a prince of beauty to a future social world skeptical of the FY's own earlier beauty. Sexual reproduction will redeem the FY's beauty: he will be "new made," the spondee providing heretical grandeur to resurrected beauty—redemption now understood as profane. The consolation here is modulated by the shift from sight—the FY will "see" his blood warm in his offspring—to sense—he will "feel" his own to be cold. That "thy"—the belief that children have the father's "blood"—is a consolation, yet a consolation for loss, loss of beauty in the cold season of old age.
And dig deep trenches in thy beauties' field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a totter'd weed of small worth held.
Then, being asked, where all thy beauty lies—
Where, all the treasure of thy lusty days—
To say within thine own deep sunken eyes
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserv'd thy beauties' use,
If thou couldst answer, "This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,"
Proving his beauty by succession thine.
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.
Quatrain 1
1 When for/ty Win/ters shall / besiege / thy brow
2 And dig / deep tren/ches in / thy beau/ties' field,
3 Thy youth's / proud li/very, // so gazed / on now,
4 Will be / a tot/ter'd weed / of small / worth held.
Quatrain 2
5 Then, be/ing asked, // where all / thy beau/ty lies—
6 Where, // all / the trea/sure of / thy lus/ty days—
7 To say / within / thine own / deep sun/ken eyes >
8 Were an /all-ea/ting shame / and thrift/less praise.
Quatrain 3
9 How much / more praise / deserv'd / thy beau/ties' use,
10 If thou / could'st an/swer, // "This / fair child / of mine >
11 Shall sum / my count / and make / my old / excuse,"
12 Proving / his beau/ty by / succes/sion thine.
Couplet
13 This were / to be / new made / when thou / art old,
14 And see / thy blood / warm // when / thou feel'st / it cold.
Q 1 explains that, in the future, the FY's beauty will be gone; Q2 imagines a shameful interview if he does not procreate, and Q3 and the C, a praiseworthy one.
2.1-4
Q1-2 provide the FY with a prophetic vision of his aging. Q1 is a complex sentence, the dependent clause of lines 1-2 providing the FY's future, the independent one of 3-4, the state of his beauty then. Shakespeare likes to open sonnets with such clauses, especially when-clauses (cf. 30). Line 1's metrical regularity enacts the natural condition of aging, and its metaphor identifies advanced age with the season of winter, a conventional metaphor, yet he then identifies the season with an army besieging the FY’s face, a field where beauties are grown. The spondee of foot 2 in line 2—"And dig / deep trenches"—slows the line, and the dental alliteration emphasizes the labor required to age the FY. That field is then imagined as clothing—the body clothes the soul—which becomes a worn garment, yet the S's metaphor of that clothing as now a weed brings one back full circle to "beauties' field": the FY's beauties are now weeds. Many editors turn the "beauties" of Q into "beauty's"; I prefer to maintain it in the plural--"beauties'."
2.4-8
In that prophetic future, the S imagines the FY interviewed about his beauty, now metaphorically identified with treasure. "[W]here all" may be scanned three ways, depending on interpretation, but it's no pyrhhic. Does one wish to emphasize the location of loss ("where") or its totality ("all") or both? The repetition of "where all" (an instance of anaphora, the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses) sets up a double-question in Psalm-like, parallel structure, where the second colon specifies the first. Notice that the parallel structure (as emphasized by the anaphora) allows ellipsis or omission of the second "lies," the repetition of phrasing and structure intensifying the import of the question. Anaphora is "the Figure of Report" for Puttenham.
"Treasure" here alludes to Matthew 6.19-21 and to 13.44: The field of the FY’s treasure is his face, not his heart; since that is the case, he must reproduce it. By opening the second line with a spondee broken by a caesura, the S’s tone for the imagined interlocutor is hectoring. In the imagined response to the interlocutor, the S identifies the FY's unwillingness to reproduce with a burial within his own eyes, now seen as grave-like (cf. 1.13-14)—“deep sunken.” The S then indicts the FY, his emotional appeal one to a shameful act which devours everything of worth about the FY, the beauty for which he is praised now seen as thriftless since its hoarding is not real economy, yet the adjective “thriftless” logically belongs, not to the praise, but to the FY, an instance of hypallage, where the adjective properly belonging to one noun is used for another, related one--what Puttenham calls "the Changeling."
2.9-12
Q3 and C provide the remedy to that grim future. The praise of the S's volta in line 9—"How much more praise"—is greater than the "thriftless praise" because it will be merited, not by possession, but by use. Yet the conditional construction of line 10's introduction of the imagined response—"If . . . could"—makes that response more, not less remote. The hypallage of “old excuse” indicates that it is the FY who will be old, not his excuse. The metaphor within "sum my count" is economic: the child’s beauty will rectify the FY's financial records—where the FY's old age puts him into debt, the child's beauty pays that debt off. The final participial phrase of line 12 opens with a trochee-- "Proving"--reversing the fear over the tottered weed of Q1, yet it is difficult to tell who the antecedent of the participial phrase is: Is it the FY during his answer, or is it the FY's child? The ambiguity here is wonderful since it enacts the lineal argument of the S's appeals in the procreation sonnets; after all, whose beauty proves, or is proven by, reproduction? Whose beauty is warrant for whose? As B would have it, "This line exemplifies the constructive vagueness by which S. makes a word or phrase do double duty." The regal metaphor of "succession" indicates a monarchy, whose legitimacy is not political, but aesthetic. The FY is a king of beauty who requires a prince of beauty to both continue and confirm his once beautiful rule. Though it will strike us as peculiar, the patriarchal assumption that the father's appearance, not the mother's, will be transmitted to the child was common in the period. Shakespeare ironizes it, I suspect, in order to show the S's hyperbolic intensity of focus upon his beloved. Puttenham calls hyperbole "the Overreacher" or the "Loud Liar."
V points out that WS's S's "report" of the FY's speech here, like that of the DL's later, is "one way of building up a credible existential character for these dramatis personae over time." The entirety of the sequence is in the voice of WS's S since a report, even if accurate, is in the voice of the reporter. We need not assume that the S is falsifying their speech, but we ought to remember that this is an epic of the S's lyric love, not of theirs.
2.13-14
W points out that the couplet is composed entirely of monosyllabic words, giving it "bite." The bite results, I suspect, from the direct overlap of meter and word.
The ambiguity of the demonstrative pronoun here ("[t]his"), especially when accompanied by trochaic emphasis, is common: What is its antecedent? I suspect it refers to all that the S has represented in Q3—the imagined response of a prince of beauty to a future social world skeptical of the FY's own earlier beauty. Sexual reproduction will redeem the FY's beauty: he will be "new made," the spondee providing heretical grandeur to resurrected beauty—redemption now understood as profane. The consolation here is modulated by the shift from sight—the FY will "see" his blood warm in his offspring—to sense—he will "feel" his own to be cold. That "thy"—the belief that children have the father's "blood"—is a consolation, yet a consolation for loss, loss of beauty in the cold season of old age.
8/9/09
Sonnet 1/I "From fairest creatures"
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's Rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory.
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.
Quatrain 1
1 From fair/est crea/tures // we / desire / increase,
2 That there/by beau/ty's Rose / might ne/ver die,
3 But as / the ri/per should / by time / decease,
4 His ten/der heir / might bear / his me/mory.
Quatrain 2
5 But thou, // contrac/ted to / thine own / bright eyes,
6 Feed'st thy / light's flame / with self-/substan/tial fuel,
7 Making / a fa/mine where / abun/dance lies,
8 Thyself / thy foe, // to thy / sweet self / too cruel:
Quatrain 3
9 Thou that / art now / the world's / fresh or/nament
10 And on/ly he/rald // to / the gau/dy spring
11 Within / thine own / bud // bu/riest thy / content,
12 And, ten/der churl, // mak'st waste / in nig/garding:
Couplet
13 Pity / the world, // or else / this glut/ton be,
14 To eat / the world's / due, // by / the grave / and thee.
A few preliminaries. An English or Shakespearean sonnet is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter (five feet of verse, the base two-syllable foot an iamb [unstressed-stressed] often varied with a trochee [stressed-unstressed], a spondee [stressed-stressed], or a pyrhhic [unstressed-unstressed] for varied rhythm and drama). The meter is always in a delicate tension with the syntax of the sentences as sentences.
Stress is often hard for people to hear since our oral culture is flat sonically (even if loud). It's easy for any native speaker with one word of two or more syllables: no one says, "tender." Try it. Single-syllable words are more difficult: the quality of the consonants and the length of the vowel are both helpful. Stress can include volume, pitch, timber, and emphasis. The sounded word is musical--the poet is a musician whether accompanied by an instrument or not. The ancient figure for the poet, Orpheus (Shakespeare [WS] knew him from Virgil and Ovid), played the lyre; the Biblical one, David (from the Bible), the harp. The music is there with or without the lyre or harp. It's in the delivered meter. The art of delivery is a rhetorical art (more anon), and scanning/reading aloud is an interpretive art. Read poetry aloud as often as possible since it is your voice which is WS's instrument.
I have indicated a foot break with /; a caesura (or cut or pause) with //; the relatively stressed syllables with bold; a debatable stress with italics; and enjambment (the wrap-around of one line to the next) with >.
A sonnet has four subsections or stanzas (a stanza in Italian is a room): three quatrains and a couplet (the units defined by the rhyme [abab; cdcd; efef; gg]). Because the sonnet came to England from Italy, there is a vestigial trace of the Italian or Petrarchan form--not a 4/4/4/2 structure, but an 8/6 one--in the English or Shakespearean one, the sonnet's turn or volta often (but not always) comes at line 9. Shakespeare's sonnets have multiple turns.
A sonnet is an integrated whole and can stand alone as a rhetorical, poetic act, but in Shakespeare's Sonnets each is also a part of the whole of the epic sequence. (Some critics dispute this, but it is, I think, true.) #1, for example, is an introduction to the entire sequence, to the Fair Youth (FY) Sonnets (1-126) as opposed to the Dark Lady (DL) Sonnets (127-154), and to those called the Procreation Sonnets (1-17) because in them the Speaker--WS's poetic ethos (rhetorical character or poetic voice)--tries to persuade his beloved friend to reproduce himself sexually. WS's Speaker (S) is the result of continuities of concern and language from sonnet to sonnet: "We are thereby made to believe throughout the sequence in the sustained and real existential being of the speaker" (V), who may, of course, be WS himself.
The first 17 sonnets echo a letter by Erasmus to a young man to marry (included in Thomas Wilson's Art of Rhetoric). In early modern, as in ancient culture, rhetoric (including the grammar and logic which precede them in the trivium) and poetics are thought of as coordinate arts within one art of language.
Q1 establishes the law of love's desire for beauty's increase; Q 2-3 indict the FY for his failure to increase; the C exhorts him to remedy that failure.
1.1-4
The opening quatrain (Q) provides the thesis of the sequence: beauty arouses the desire to perpetuate that beauty in the face of its eventual decline and demise. Though this is a general human response to any beauty, the desire is intensified when we love the beautiful one. This is the Speaker's understanding of the human impulse to lyric poetry--making and receiving. 1.1 is an instance of anastrophe or hyperbaton (unusual word order), what Puttenham calls "the Trespasser" since the poet trespasses against ordinary syntax. WS throws the prepositional phrase ("From fairest creatures") back before the predication ("we desire increase"). The pyrhhic in the 3rd foot (separated by a caesura) allows a mid-line pause between object of desire and desire, the anastrophe and caesura combining to sharpen the focus on the moment of beauty experienced, its (re)productive immortality then desired. By speaking for himself and others--"we," the first person, plural personal pronoun--the S would have his thesis be a law of human nature.
Notice that "increase," which will allow either of its syllables to receive the primary stress, can be performed "increase," thus sonically enacting the word's meaning. This raises interesting possibilities with its rhyme word, "decease" in 1.3, where the sound pulls against its meaning. In 1.2 the beloved is "beauty's Rose"--a conventional metaphor which the Speaker will use unconventionally later. Shakespeare's Rose of Beauty is very different than Dante's Rose of the Elect in Paradise. At 1.3, we know that the reproduction will be sexual (later it will be artistic). The "tender heir" might carry or "bear" (an important word in the sequence) the memory of the FY, the "riper," the comparative adjective used as a substantive (perhaps a neologism). Notice the internal rhyme of "heir" and "bear." B points out that the metaphor suggests "the bearing of heraldic arms." Yet the metaphor of the FY's beauty as a rose then figures the "tender heir" as a new shoot replacing the fading old one, the "riper" one.
Puttenham calls metaphor "the Figure of Transport" since the poet transports meaning from one field of reference to another: trans-portare is a literal Latinization of the Greek meta-pherein, both meaning "to carry across." It is the most important figure of speech there is.
1.5-8
The turn comes in 1.5. Q2 shows us that the FY is failing to reproduce himself because he misunderstands the need for procreation. The S's rhetorical goal is deliberative--he wants to persuade the FY to an advantage or good in the future--though there creeps in a forensic rhetoric in his indictment of the FY's act of self-demolition. In 1.5-6, the coordinate conjunction ("But") lets us know that Q2 will give us an antithesis of the FY's counter-act against that natural principle of increase, marked by the violence of the the trochaic reversals opening both 1.6 and 1.7. He "[f]eed'st" off of the fuel of himself; he is "[m]aking" of his own abundance a famine, the metaphoric register here becoming dark. The FY is a "self-cannibal" (V) blasting his own fecundity to waste. He is his own devouring enemy. The spondee of "bright eyes" gives sonic density to their beauty, yet, since he's "contracted"--married, but also diminished and bound to his own eyes--we have our first allusion to the myth of Narcissus.
He is cruel to his "sweet self"--a loving spondee. "Sweet" is one of the Speaker's favorite adjectives for the FY, but we have trouble hearing the eros of the word: for a time, the young were catching it when they drew out the word as a compliment: "swwweeeeeet." Notice the half-alliteration within the spondee ("-sw-" in "sweeet" and "-s-" in "self"), providing a sonic depth to the S's love for the FY. Ethos is revealed by delivery. The rhyme words of lines 6 and 8--"fuel" and "cruel" are dissylabic (B), in which case the lines have an extra, unaccented syllable. Sutton delivers them as monosyllables to avoid affectation.
V examines the juxtaposition of a metaphor of culture (the FY is a candle burning out) and that of nature (he is a rose refusing to bloom) as a kind of catachresis, or mixed metaphor: "The cognitive dissonance of the metaphors presses the reader into reflection; and this technique, recurrent throughout the sonnets, is the chief source of their intellectual provocativeness." Whether this is, strictly speaking, catachresis (what Puttenham calls "the Figure of Abuse") or not--when does a shift from one metaphor to another become a mixed metaphor?--V is certainly right that shifts from one metaphoric field to another are a central part of the S's "mind" and the sonnets' capaciousness.
1.9-12
1.9-10 provide a cosmic frame for the FY's beauty--he is the fresh ornament of "the world," and announcer of a season (notice the scope of space and time)--making the FY's self-regard a world-historical event, which it does seem to be, of course, to the S because he loves him. One's beloved is a world-historical event. The pun in "content"--"content" means material substance, but "content" means happiness--requires that a reader deliver one or the other, not both interpretations. The second syllable of "buriest" is one syllable by syncopation (B), the last two vowels pronounced as one, rich vowel. The FY buries either his body or his happiness; either way, he "mak'st waste"--the spondee giving us the FY, who is the paragon of the sweet beauty of the world, yet also, through his own narcissistic auto-consumption, a destroyer of that world. The FY is entombing himself.
1.13-14
In the couplet (C), WS employs only single-syllable words: As Gascoigne would have it, "The more monosyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seem, and the less you shall smell of the inkhorn" (in R), the inkhorn of the student studying Latin's multi-syllable words. The S offers the FY a way out--a re-reversal of his reversal--"Pity the world"--within a logical disjunct: either pity, or be "this glutton"--to eat what belongs to another--the world, in fact--and in so doing, be both victim of death and deathly self-victimizer. Pity is a kind of love; gluttony, a deadly sin. The S figures the FY as a kind of Christ-like dispenser of his own beauty--unless, that is, he eats himself.
Shakespeare's Sonnets are full of beauty and ugliness, and both must be experienced imaginatively and sonically, especially since the FY, as we will see, is beautiful, according to the S, but not good.
Rhetorically, 1.1-4 is an introduction to the sequence and 5-14 to the FY Sonnets (at least the "procreation sonnets"). Included here is both an exordium which establishes the S's ethos, the FY as his audience, and the S's purpose, and a narratio, the narration of circumstances requiring the S's appeal to his audience. Thomas Wilson explains that organization or dispositio is "the knowledge to frame an oration," and such framing within a sonnet, of course, makes flexible if bound use of the sonnet structure itself. Framing or design in discourse is both a rhetorical and a poetic art, a substantial part of rhetorical poetics. Wilson's specific point that an oration requires "an entrance" is standard. We are in. In what? The lyric world made by WS's S.
That thereby beauty's Rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory.
But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel:
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament
And only herald to the gaudy spring
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding:
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.
Quatrain 1
1 From fair/est crea/tures // we / desire / increase,
2 That there/by beau/ty's Rose / might ne/ver die,
3 But as / the ri/per should / by time / decease,
4 His ten/der heir / might bear / his me/mory.
Quatrain 2
5 But thou, // contrac/ted to / thine own / bright eyes,
6 Feed'st thy / light's flame / with self-/substan/tial fuel,
7 Making / a fa/mine where / abun/dance lies,
8 Thyself / thy foe, // to thy / sweet self / too cruel:
Quatrain 3
9 Thou that / art now / the world's / fresh or/nament
10 And on/ly he/rald // to / the gau/dy spring
11 Within / thine own / bud // bu/riest thy / content,
12 And, ten/der churl, // mak'st waste / in nig/garding:
Couplet
13 Pity / the world, // or else / this glut/ton be,
14 To eat / the world's / due, // by / the grave / and thee.
A few preliminaries. An English or Shakespearean sonnet is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter (five feet of verse, the base two-syllable foot an iamb [unstressed-stressed] often varied with a trochee [stressed-unstressed], a spondee [stressed-stressed], or a pyrhhic [unstressed-unstressed] for varied rhythm and drama). The meter is always in a delicate tension with the syntax of the sentences as sentences.
Stress is often hard for people to hear since our oral culture is flat sonically (even if loud). It's easy for any native speaker with one word of two or more syllables: no one says, "tender." Try it. Single-syllable words are more difficult: the quality of the consonants and the length of the vowel are both helpful. Stress can include volume, pitch, timber, and emphasis. The sounded word is musical--the poet is a musician whether accompanied by an instrument or not. The ancient figure for the poet, Orpheus (Shakespeare [WS] knew him from Virgil and Ovid), played the lyre; the Biblical one, David (from the Bible), the harp. The music is there with or without the lyre or harp. It's in the delivered meter. The art of delivery is a rhetorical art (more anon), and scanning/reading aloud is an interpretive art. Read poetry aloud as often as possible since it is your voice which is WS's instrument.
I have indicated a foot break with /; a caesura (or cut or pause) with //; the relatively stressed syllables with bold; a debatable stress with italics; and enjambment (the wrap-around of one line to the next) with >.
A sonnet has four subsections or stanzas (a stanza in Italian is a room): three quatrains and a couplet (the units defined by the rhyme [abab; cdcd; efef; gg]). Because the sonnet came to England from Italy, there is a vestigial trace of the Italian or Petrarchan form--not a 4/4/4/2 structure, but an 8/6 one--in the English or Shakespearean one, the sonnet's turn or volta often (but not always) comes at line 9. Shakespeare's sonnets have multiple turns.
A sonnet is an integrated whole and can stand alone as a rhetorical, poetic act, but in Shakespeare's Sonnets each is also a part of the whole of the epic sequence. (Some critics dispute this, but it is, I think, true.) #1, for example, is an introduction to the entire sequence, to the Fair Youth (FY) Sonnets (1-126) as opposed to the Dark Lady (DL) Sonnets (127-154), and to those called the Procreation Sonnets (1-17) because in them the Speaker--WS's poetic ethos (rhetorical character or poetic voice)--tries to persuade his beloved friend to reproduce himself sexually. WS's Speaker (S) is the result of continuities of concern and language from sonnet to sonnet: "We are thereby made to believe throughout the sequence in the sustained and real existential being of the speaker" (V), who may, of course, be WS himself.
The first 17 sonnets echo a letter by Erasmus to a young man to marry (included in Thomas Wilson's Art of Rhetoric). In early modern, as in ancient culture, rhetoric (including the grammar and logic which precede them in the trivium) and poetics are thought of as coordinate arts within one art of language.
Q1 establishes the law of love's desire for beauty's increase; Q 2-3 indict the FY for his failure to increase; the C exhorts him to remedy that failure.
1.1-4
The opening quatrain (Q) provides the thesis of the sequence: beauty arouses the desire to perpetuate that beauty in the face of its eventual decline and demise. Though this is a general human response to any beauty, the desire is intensified when we love the beautiful one. This is the Speaker's understanding of the human impulse to lyric poetry--making and receiving. 1.1 is an instance of anastrophe or hyperbaton (unusual word order), what Puttenham calls "the Trespasser" since the poet trespasses against ordinary syntax. WS throws the prepositional phrase ("From fairest creatures") back before the predication ("we desire increase"). The pyrhhic in the 3rd foot (separated by a caesura) allows a mid-line pause between object of desire and desire, the anastrophe and caesura combining to sharpen the focus on the moment of beauty experienced, its (re)productive immortality then desired. By speaking for himself and others--"we," the first person, plural personal pronoun--the S would have his thesis be a law of human nature.
Notice that "increase," which will allow either of its syllables to receive the primary stress, can be performed "increase," thus sonically enacting the word's meaning. This raises interesting possibilities with its rhyme word, "decease" in 1.3, where the sound pulls against its meaning. In 1.2 the beloved is "beauty's Rose"--a conventional metaphor which the Speaker will use unconventionally later. Shakespeare's Rose of Beauty is very different than Dante's Rose of the Elect in Paradise. At 1.3, we know that the reproduction will be sexual (later it will be artistic). The "tender heir" might carry or "bear" (an important word in the sequence) the memory of the FY, the "riper," the comparative adjective used as a substantive (perhaps a neologism). Notice the internal rhyme of "heir" and "bear." B points out that the metaphor suggests "the bearing of heraldic arms." Yet the metaphor of the FY's beauty as a rose then figures the "tender heir" as a new shoot replacing the fading old one, the "riper" one.
Puttenham calls metaphor "the Figure of Transport" since the poet transports meaning from one field of reference to another: trans-portare is a literal Latinization of the Greek meta-pherein, both meaning "to carry across." It is the most important figure of speech there is.
1.5-8
The turn comes in 1.5. Q2 shows us that the FY is failing to reproduce himself because he misunderstands the need for procreation. The S's rhetorical goal is deliberative--he wants to persuade the FY to an advantage or good in the future--though there creeps in a forensic rhetoric in his indictment of the FY's act of self-demolition. In 1.5-6, the coordinate conjunction ("But") lets us know that Q2 will give us an antithesis of the FY's counter-act against that natural principle of increase, marked by the violence of the the trochaic reversals opening both 1.6 and 1.7. He "[f]eed'st" off of the fuel of himself; he is "[m]aking" of his own abundance a famine, the metaphoric register here becoming dark. The FY is a "self-cannibal" (V) blasting his own fecundity to waste. He is his own devouring enemy. The spondee of "bright eyes" gives sonic density to their beauty, yet, since he's "contracted"--married, but also diminished and bound to his own eyes--we have our first allusion to the myth of Narcissus.
He is cruel to his "sweet self"--a loving spondee. "Sweet" is one of the Speaker's favorite adjectives for the FY, but we have trouble hearing the eros of the word: for a time, the young were catching it when they drew out the word as a compliment: "swwweeeeeet." Notice the half-alliteration within the spondee ("-sw-" in "sweeet" and "-s-" in "self"), providing a sonic depth to the S's love for the FY. Ethos is revealed by delivery. The rhyme words of lines 6 and 8--"fuel" and "cruel" are dissylabic (B), in which case the lines have an extra, unaccented syllable. Sutton delivers them as monosyllables to avoid affectation.
V examines the juxtaposition of a metaphor of culture (the FY is a candle burning out) and that of nature (he is a rose refusing to bloom) as a kind of catachresis, or mixed metaphor: "The cognitive dissonance of the metaphors presses the reader into reflection; and this technique, recurrent throughout the sonnets, is the chief source of their intellectual provocativeness." Whether this is, strictly speaking, catachresis (what Puttenham calls "the Figure of Abuse") or not--when does a shift from one metaphor to another become a mixed metaphor?--V is certainly right that shifts from one metaphoric field to another are a central part of the S's "mind" and the sonnets' capaciousness.
1.9-12
1.9-10 provide a cosmic frame for the FY's beauty--he is the fresh ornament of "the world," and announcer of a season (notice the scope of space and time)--making the FY's self-regard a world-historical event, which it does seem to be, of course, to the S because he loves him. One's beloved is a world-historical event. The pun in "content"--"content" means material substance, but "content" means happiness--requires that a reader deliver one or the other, not both interpretations. The second syllable of "buriest" is one syllable by syncopation (B), the last two vowels pronounced as one, rich vowel. The FY buries either his body or his happiness; either way, he "mak'st waste"--the spondee giving us the FY, who is the paragon of the sweet beauty of the world, yet also, through his own narcissistic auto-consumption, a destroyer of that world. The FY is entombing himself.
1.13-14
In the couplet (C), WS employs only single-syllable words: As Gascoigne would have it, "The more monosyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seem, and the less you shall smell of the inkhorn" (in R), the inkhorn of the student studying Latin's multi-syllable words. The S offers the FY a way out--a re-reversal of his reversal--"Pity the world"--within a logical disjunct: either pity, or be "this glutton"--to eat what belongs to another--the world, in fact--and in so doing, be both victim of death and deathly self-victimizer. Pity is a kind of love; gluttony, a deadly sin. The S figures the FY as a kind of Christ-like dispenser of his own beauty--unless, that is, he eats himself.
Shakespeare's Sonnets are full of beauty and ugliness, and both must be experienced imaginatively and sonically, especially since the FY, as we will see, is beautiful, according to the S, but not good.
Rhetorically, 1.1-4 is an introduction to the sequence and 5-14 to the FY Sonnets (at least the "procreation sonnets"). Included here is both an exordium which establishes the S's ethos, the FY as his audience, and the S's purpose, and a narratio, the narration of circumstances requiring the S's appeal to his audience. Thomas Wilson explains that organization or dispositio is "the knowledge to frame an oration," and such framing within a sonnet, of course, makes flexible if bound use of the sonnet structure itself. Framing or design in discourse is both a rhetorical and a poetic art, a substantial part of rhetorical poetics. Wilson's specific point that an oration requires "an entrance" is standard. We are in. In what? The lyric world made by WS's S.
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