Oct
22
"Remembrance of Things Past" and the Problem of Order In Memory: On Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30
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Shakespeare
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.
Comment:
Why is the couplet satisfactory to the speaker? It seems to contradict every other line in the poem.
To answer that question, we need to ask how the stanzas correspond to one another. Thus one of the most difficult literary puzzles ever conceived confronts us - it looks like there are several plausible orderings, each corresponding to a different theme.
It could turn out that the couplet is not satisfactory to the speaker, that he’s making a joke to the audience he’s addressing. But we’ll only know that if we can explain the relation of the couplet to the stanzas before exactly.
The first interpretation I want to attempt involves seeing the second stanza as a line-by-line comment on the first stanza in reverse.
What this means is that “And with old woes new wail my dear’s time waste” is directly extended by “Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow” - the former is an internal, mental wailing, and the latter is an external, physical crying. Both are two sides of the same coin.
We then find that “precious friends” hid in the “darkness” could be an extension of lacking something “sought.” The speaker in the first stanza is using his mind’s eye to see a gap, and sighs. The searching for precious friends in a dateless realm is at once both metaphorical and yet strangely more concrete: we are told what exactly he is seeking, and death is equated with something very real, “night.”
A summoning up of the “remembrance of things past” could correspond exactly to “love’s long since-cancell’d woe:” the difference between weeping and summoning is the difference between effect and cause. And the “moan” of the expense of “many a vanished sight” is critical: moaning contrasts very much with “silent thought,” and yet it is the “sessions of silent thought” which caused moaning and weeping.
The past has become the present, and mind has exerted an influence over the body which is total and yet not good at all.
Generally speaking, the third stanza is serving the function of tying the previous two stanzas together in some way. It does so by moving beyond the contents of the mind (”woes”) and the action of the body (”drown an eye”), focusing instead on a state of mind (grief), an action (speaking - “tell o’er” the sad account of fore-bemoaned moan”), and, strangely enough, obligation (”I new pay as if not paid before”).
Now at this point you might be puzzled about my characterizing the first stanza as “the speaker’s mind,” and the second stanza as “the speaker’s body/actions.” After all, the speaker sighs, seeks (”sought”) and wails in the first stanza. The quick and dirty argument I have is this: We can’t discuss the mind except in metaphorical terms. Notice that Shakespeare’s metaphorical terms curiously point to mind more than body. The key to the line with the sighing and the seeking is the word “lack” - the lack doesn’t actually exist, it is something thought of. Furthermore, the “old woes” are themselves his “new wail:” in wasting time wailing the wasting of time previous, there is no need for external comment so he can attack his thought. The thought itself is the condemnation, and the woes are thoughts.
But what is the order of the third stanza? One could say it is a line-by-line comment on the second stanza, where the eye drowning corresponds with grieving, the precious friends hid are the movement from woe to woe, the moaning about things past over again is the literal manifestation of “love’s long since cancell’d woe,” and an expense thought not to be paid is paid yet again.
That ordering makes sense if we focus on a “lack” and an “expense.” Mind lacks, and the body pays - to not see what one wants to see takes its toll over time. The third stanza tells us that the repetition of the grief - that which the speaker has condemned himself for having - can enable the speaker to realize that debts have been paid. And maybe that fits nicely and neatly into the speaker thinking about his “dear friend,” and escaping the cycle. The debt has been paid, so a precondition for present happiness has been fulfilled. It does seem like we are moving from past to present in this sonnet.
But I think there are other ways to order this sonnet. One might want to try to get the two lines that begin with “I” in the first stanza to match up with the lines that begin with “And” in the second. Another project that can be attempted is trying to see if the lines that contain “woe” in one form or another correspond, or if the lines that contain the image of the speaking seeing or emitting speech or something speech-like matter.
This is an outrageously complicated sonnet, and yes, I have a real and almost final interpretation of it. I’m not giving it out because I’m still working through some issues. I will say that I am convinced the couplet is cynical, but not towards the “dear friend,” but about “thought” itself - note that the three stanzas and the couplet each give us different objects of attention for the speaker.
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Sep
9
Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73
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The earlier discussion of Sonnet 73
A suggestion of Helen Vendler’s regarding Sonnet 116 has made me rethink what I said earlier about 73. In 116, Vendler argues, Shakespeare’s speaker is struggling to refute a notion of love that all too many beautiful people have today - why can’t love alter when it alteration finds? Why doesn’t beauty alone allow for caprice in matters of the heart?
Vendler says that the speaker in 116 struggles to find metaphors to describe love’s constancy, and runs into a deep problem: love depends on a choice where one bears it out even to the edge of doom. Only then does time matter less - when beauty matters not - but time still has a powerful grip on what love is.
The issue of the internal audience’s dismissive perspective is accidentally made stronger by the wiser speaker realizing that love does not guide man entirely from without. “Alteration,” “removal” - these things injure beauty, and since beauty is the audience’s only estimation of his own worth, the rhetoric that there might be something time-less is failing even as it rings truer and truer. The speaker has written, men have loved, but whether that convinces who it needs to convince is a different question altogether.
73, I think, has a parallel rhetorical structure. We are given three images by which the speaker attempts to justify why he is worth loving. The first image, in the first stanza, is that of a tree. Trees give shade from those affected adversely by light, and allow the more musical to dwell within their branches. The tree is a symbol for man’s intellectual life benefiting others, but because it will cease to benefit others necessarily beyond the tree’s existence, it is an image which the speaker rejects.
The second stanza of 73 has the speaker imagining himself as twilight, fading away slowly into night. But the language of the second stanza changes when the speaker realizes that Death, as night, has agency in the image - it is not so much that the intellectual light is fading away, as much as it is consumed by darkness. Any intellectual comfort the speaker has for himself is negated as Death approaches, for one’s mind can literally go to pieces. Also, as those of us who neglect to post on the Internet at times know, not being around as much means one can be more easily ignored.
The final stanza of 73 throws away the images related to knowledge and its effects public and personal to move to an image the idiot of an audience might “understand:” a fire burning so intensely that it chokes itself to death. It is the act of the will that is romanticized here, and appreciation for that act is passed off as a credible definition of love in the couplet, when it clearly isn’t. All of us who are intellectual have dealt with those who are openly jealous of our minds and hateful. I dealt with someone once that would at critical moments put me down as “arrogant” for asserting things I had worked long on, and tried my best to be balanced about. That was “overthinking,” and I was actually happy to hear charges against me at those moments, because silence would have meant I was absent from her life totally. Silence was the worst, knowing I was being responded to and dismissed for the sake of blithe was at least a bit more comforting.
I didn’t have then the rhetoric Shakespeare uses, where he can appeal to such people by literally saying “Hey, I work hard too.” I don’t know that I want such rhetoric - the “failed” attempts of the first two stanzas actually do justify the speaker. This poem has lasted after all, and no one knows or really cares who the actual audience for the work was. And Shakespeare’s mind lives on through his speaker, someone who has exerted his will for the sake of thought, and thus is the twilight of many days fading and the tree from which some may sing.
May
31
"That Time of Year," Indeed: Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 as an Introduction to New Criticism
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Sonnet 73
Shakespeare
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth steal away,
Death’s second self, which seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
A reading of Sonnet 73
Ashok Karra
1. First Impressions: You probably read this poem at first (if you don’t have formal training reading poetry) and went “Huh. It’s about getting older, death, and love.” That first impression is not to be discarded: it is very accurate and very helpful.
What I am going to show you now is a method for working with those impressions. The method should make you fearless: you should be able to approach any work of literature, any poem, maybe even art and film and music and be confident that while you will not figure everything out, you will have important and thoughtful things to say about a work.
2. Critical Method: Formal & Thematic Approaches. The fancy terminology is my own. The concepts behind both approaches are simple, and you will need to use both approaches to understand poetry generally.
Formal: Every work has an internal speaker and an internal audience. (A dialogue between two participants shows this principle exactly.) The author of a work ought to be considered an external speaker, as he is speaking to us indirectly through his art. Biographical information about the external speaker, such as gossip about an author’s life, is usually irrelevant to a poem, or causes greater confusion about the poem itself. Also, if I were to say “I, Ashok, a dude born in 1980 and a horrible student, am the audience for Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73,” that “I” would be an external audience. The trick is to find whom the speaker is talking to through what the speaker is talking about.
What we want is for the author’s art to speak to what we feel is important, not for the author himself to speak directly to us.
- I should say that this is only one way of looking at a poem. There are historical approaches, and reader-response theory, and a million other ways to work through literature. Nonetheless, I think you will find this way the most satisfying. -
Thematic: When one gets stronger at reading works, or realizes that certain themes are always at play in certain authors or artists, one can track what elements mean what through continuity of theme, and can see how an artist/author is responding to certain ideas, or other artists.
- Let us see these approaches in action, shall we? -
3. Shakespeare, Sonnet 73: Begin by noting that a sonnet has a formal structure which helps interpretation greatly: there are three stanzas of 4 lines, each stanza with a particular rhyme scheme, and a couplet at the end.
Now this poem is a bit tricky, because the major idea is in the couplet. Nonetheless, I want to walk through this poem stanza by stanza.
Stanza 1:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
“Thou” (internal audience) and “me” (internal speaker) are the puzzles: what is the relation between these two? What importance is it to us?
“Thou” sees a time of year in “me?” That must be a metaphor for one’s seeing a friend age. The age is a peculiar age - it is a time in life near death; after all, one can say Spring is when one is born, and Winter is when one dies. The speaker is at a strange moment in life, for he is at late Autumn. He does not know when he will die - hence the confused order of “none, or few.” It should be “few, or none,” but the speaker is clearly in some turmoil about death. Hemight not want to die, after all.
Now the rest of the image is a tree image. Cf. Rousseau in Emile - I think the tree is a symbol of a man of immense learning. A tree places its roots in the ground and grows outward. Firmly rooted in the Earth, it literally branches everywhere, giving shelter and protection (knowledge is useful, and it is useful when it is directly related to Earthly things, no?) while staying at rest (a man of learning must study, like roots sucking up water, and his knowledge means he is very difficult to sway).
But this tree has lost its leaves, and lost the music it once enjoyed and allowed the world to hear, and it does not look like it will be a legacy of any sort, or will live on in some way. A speaker in turmoil about death needs something more substantial than a tree image to consider what made his life worthwhile, or to find some other hope that will help him confront his own death.
Stanza 2:
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth steal away,
Death’s second self, which seals up all in rest.
Here the image is that of light - again, an image of learning or knowledge. But the sunlight is attacked by “black night.” It is “night” that has agency, it is “night” which is attacking the light as day passes on, not so much light on its own receding.
Again, note that this image is unsatisfactory to the speaker. While he feels the internal audience understands his immense learning and quest for knowledge, both the images introduced with “in me” so far have failed to aid the speaker himself make sense of his own predicament.
You might want to ask yourself what the difference between the light and tree images is on a more personal level. I think that “night” is the struggle one has with oneself when one is thinking about death, actually: As one gets older, one’s immense knowledge is literally clouded by the awareness that it could all be for naught. Such a tension erases one’s own knowledge, as it destroys the lack of worry needed for true contemplation.
But that is my own thought.
Stanza 3:
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This is the image that is the most satisfactory to the speaker: Why? Well, what’s happening is that a large fire, a fire that consumed enormous energy, it putting itself out - putting itself out through using up its fuel rapidly and throwing up ashes into the air that blanket it eventually.
Why is this good? It is a notion of death where death is not something that happens to us, but comes about by us using life as best we can. This is a very humanist notion of death, although I think the life of St. Thomas Aquinas can be said to fit into this pattern, sort of (he worked himself to death). The larger point is that death is here, in a sense, in one’s control.
Couplet:
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
Here, the internal audience is credited with realizing that love and death are intimately connected, and that is the true knowledge. If we cannot die, we cannot love. And so love increases with a certain awareness of death and how people are struggling with death and how to make sense of life.
Mar
2
I like Paul Cantor, but…
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I do think his observations about the Japanese in the article might be a point of further discussion. I’ve loved watching anime at times because it is better at discussing the problems of adolescence and the first pangs of love (i.e. FLCL, Neon Genesis Evangelion), the trouble with love and duty that makes the best of us merely symbols (i.e. Cowboy Bebop), and the problem of technology and a world where what is human is the literal, not just metaphorical, question (i.e. Big O, Ghost in the Shell). I wonder if taking the feudal seriously is taking love seriously, and that consideration is what creates depth of theme.
I mean, what strikes me about most people my age and younger is how literal we are, and how efficient we are. We get depressed when we’re not in control. Does it take a whole other conception of society in order to imagine?
- I don’t know. I think I’m ranting more than asking, but I’m not in right-wing reactionary mode at all, or feeling hostile or anything. -
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Feb
20
The Theologian Post-Machiavelli: Shakespeare on Love and Lust in Sonnet 129
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Sonnet 129: “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame…”
Shakespeare
The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait
On purpose laid to make the taker mad;
Mad in pursuit and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.
Comment:
The whole poem is based around the list of 9 given to us in lines three and four. That list of nine divides into a list of 4 and 5, and all things in that list are “pre-action:” nothing regarding lust has actually been done yet.
The first item is “perjured,” which has one definition only, unless one has an OED and therefore a million other uses for this word. To have committed perjury is to have taken an oath to tell the truth, and then lied. There’s a double lie going on, at the very least: not only has one lied to everyone else, but one has denied there can be anything which compels one to tell the truth. To perjure yourself is to assume that one has one’s hands on the greatest Truth, that one is in the right no matter what one does. So one is lying to oneself in a deep sense when one commits perjury.
I think if we use that as a starting point, we can see those first four elements in line 3 linked. The perjured condition and a murderous mood create an atmosphere where one feels one is drenched with blood, and full of blame. There could be a link between perjury and murder, aside from the obvious courtroom-drama metaphor: it could be that the lie one tells oneself and everyone is a killing of sorts, the killing of the Truth that man is social, and that one cannot just exert oneself on the world (this Truth reaches refinement in the Golden Rule and the “New Commandment” all of you know from Leviticus). Lust probably works the same as love in its possessiveness, and probably assumes itself to be the greatest good for oneself and maybe even another, when in reality it is situated in the darkness of the imagination. Like all things love and relationship related, lust is a really difficult thing to ascribe to others, or even oneself, as having.
In my life, there were one or two who were obsessive about others in a way I thought innocent, once, but I’m convinced now that even when their desire wasn’t manifest wholly as sexual, it was lust. There was just no ability on their part to appreciate anything else the “beloved” had to offer or that anyone else, for that matter, had to offer. Their lives were just focused on having that one person, and it was really scary to behold, and even more difficult to talk them out of. For not only do all of us, good and bad, make mistakes, but love can look an awful lot like lust. Real concern for another can be seen as wanting to control another sometimes. The line is really fine between these things.
And yet Shakespeare uses very bold imagery to discuss where lust is: it is not merely love making a mistake, or indulgence in a sinful pleasure. It is a state that is an untruth, and that is murderous. “Bloody” and “full of blame” seem to indicate that someone external to the lustful one could identify their condition, but given that no actions have occurred, I lean toward saying that the drama is internal. Only one who is lusting can know they are lusting, and the tip-off is seeing the dark brooding one engages in, and where that brooding is directed.
The next five in the list, though, make it pretty clear that recognizing one’s own dark brooding is a Herculean task: if the list is taken as a whole of nine, the central word is “savage.” Savage man doesn’t think - he is beast, he just acts. The central element of the list of 5 is “rude,” and it bridges “savage” and “extreme,” qualities of man prior to civilization, with “cruel” and “not to trust,” qualities of man that the some of the most refined utilize to great extent (contrast with Sonnet 94 here). Now those “most refined” we would probably not characterize as “rude,” so in what sense does Shakespeare mean rude? - We have seen the word “murderous” used, and one could take “rude” to be short for “crude,” that lust is the action which in desiring the beloved will kill the beloved, in a sense. -
But perhaps the rest of the poem can help give an answer. To (c)rudely march through: “Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight” almost begs one to change the ‘but’ to ‘than.’ One cannot do that, though, because if that is done, the next two lines about “past reason” mean the exact same thing as that line. I think Shakespeare’s point has to be that one never enjoys lust, it is only “hunted” and “hated.”
You’re probably seeing, at this point, what I saw before: the list of nine above repeats in the rest of the poem: something “enjoyed” just as soon as it is despised is something we’re lying to ourselves about; “hunting” evokes murder; the image of the swallowed bait driving the taker mad recalls both the word “bloody,” as poison gets into the blood, and the phrase “full of blame,” as both the trap and the taker can both be blamed for the occurrence. Some editors have “mad” as “made,” and the idea that a savage would make madly, or make madness in pursuit and possession is exactly correct. Savagery isn’t art, and if it imitates art, it does so only in execution. “Extreme” is the most direct link to the list of nine, and it is tied to possession in the past, present and future, and the unlimited nature of the desire underlying the possession/quest for possession. “A bliss in proof” absolutely corresponds to “rude:” rudimentum is Latin for a trial or attempt; rudo is the Latin verb meaning “to roar.” “Rudis,” is directly cognate with our word “rude,” and means raw and uncultivated, that power which also disgusts. “Cruel,” I think, corresponds to the woe occurring from the proof, and finally, “not to trust” is the hope for joy that is only a dream when all is said and done.
So what hinged on the word “rude” that made it, like “savage,” so central? The issue is that of action stemming from love. Action and love aren’t enough to overcome the problem of lust: in fact, they can feed the fire of lust, as the perception of joy, of an immediate good, can not only cause ignorance of the bigger issue but result in the confusion of the issue. We wouldn’t be lustful if we didn’t feel there was some good in it, and lust does push us to action. Now is there another use of the spirit we can conceive of, one that is more noble, that carries us away from shame and waste? That possibility isn’t really discussed in this poem: instead is emphasized the failure of knowledge and perhaps even the failure of religion on this count (”heaven”/”hell”). I submit that Shakespeare is taking us through lust before action to show how problematic it is, and yet how we are defined by it, each and every one of us. He probably also wants to show us that if we think this is bad, “lust in action” is a heck of a lot worse: the natural condition of man is man as savage, and this might not be able to be transcended.
Yet the ability to see the negative conclusion above rests on a lot of observations about “love” in accordance with theology and with actually knowing another and oneself that I have gone through, also above. The fundamental condition of man, as awful as it is, still divides the world into two groups, although those groups aren’t “those who lack lust” and “those who have lust.” There are those who want to want to be defined by lust and like the fact it might spur them to action. And then there are those of us who want to get beyond it. The poem inspires reflection that is an “expense of spirit,” and an “expense of time,” certainly. But a “waste of shame?”