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Structure / Imagery
/ Sound and Rhythm / Tone
The sonnets
contained in this Study Guide belong to a sonnet sequence or cycle of
154 that Shakespeare wrote probably between 1592 and 1597 at a time
when the sonnet sequence was a sort of craze in England. The vogue had
been launched in 1591 by the publication of Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel
and Stella, a sequence addressed to a lady virtuous,
unapproachable, and of great beauty in the lover's eyes. Petrarch had
set the standard, more than two hundred and fifty years before, for the
form, theme, and imagery of the sonnet and inaugurated the practice of
linking the separate sonnets to form a unit. The unifying principle was
not a story, the essentially lyrical form the sonnet not being a fit
vehicle for a story. The unifying principle was a situation, an
emotional crisis examined from different angles and expressing the vast
range and complex maze of feelings and thoughts that affect the speaker
caught in an overwhelming passion.
After Sidney's
sequence appeared, contemporary poets like Daniel, Constable, Lodge,
Barnes, and Drayton all producted their own cycle between 1592 and
1594. They were all in the same vein. In 1595, Spenser published his
own sequence addressed not to an impossible lady but to his own finance
and ended his series with a great hymn to marriage, the Epithalamion.
Shakespeare's
sequence was published only in 1609 and probably without his knowledge.
His sonnets, it seems, had been circulating in manuscripts for some
time among his friends, for a surveyer of English literature by the
name of Meres, mentions Shakespeare's "sugard sonnets among his
friends" in 1598. But there is no way of being sure that these sonnets
are those that were published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609.
While the
other sonnet sequences all deal with the love for a woman of great
virtue and beauty and celebrate her with the hyperbolic imagery learned
from Petrach, Shakespeare's sequence deals with the passion of the
speaker in the poems for a young man of great beauty and charm but of
little virtue. The speaker also loves a lady all dark and sensual who
subjects him to the slavery of sensuality from which he has not the
power to free himself. This situation is further complicated by the
fact that the young man whom the speaker admires and loves steals the
speaker's mistress, and a rival poet tries to endear himself to the
young man. The triangle is an exceptional one indeed, as sonnet 144
shows:
Two loves I
have of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.
To win me soon to hell, my female evil
Tempteth my better angel from my side,...
The
traditional "eternal triangle" (one person being the object of two
other persons' love) becomes, in this sequence, a kind of "perverted
parallelogram":
| Persona |
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Rival Poet |
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↓
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↘
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↓
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| Dark
Lady |
→
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Young
Man |
The order of
the sequence as published by Thorpe in 1609 is far from being a
satisfactory one. We don't know what order Shakespeare had in mind. As
published the sequence presents 154 sonnets divided into three groups:
the first 126 deal with the young man mainly, the next 26 with the dark
lady, and the last two are free adaptations of two Greek poems having
apparently no immediate relation with the sequence. Within these groups
there is much disorder in the organization. Many editors have attempted
a better one but never satisfactorily and the best editions still
follow Thorpe's sequence.
Perhaps the
very disorder was meant to mirror the general messiness of such deeply
felt emotional involvements as the one presented in the sequence where
a smile from the beloved can send the soul of the lover soaring into a
heaven of high hopes and, the next moment, a frown send it crashing
into the bottom of the pit of despair.
Apart from the
crux of the real order of the sonnets, two other problems have given
rise to a great deal of controversy especially in recent years-whether
the sequence is autobiographical and whether the relationship of the
speaker and the young man in the poems is homosexual.
Since so
little is known of Shakespeare's private life some biographers of the
bard have seized upon the sonnets as a source of information and
devoted all their ingenuity, as literary detectives, to identifying the
young man and the dark lady. Every possible and impossible name has
been mentioned with certainty by various researchers too anxious to
make sensational literary news. The common characteristic of all the
books and articles claiming such infallible identification is the
confusion between speculations and facts. The only fact is that present
knowledge does not allow us to identify either the young man or the
lady. The sequence is a work of art and the original experience of the
poet is transmuted in it so that it is no longer identifiable.
Shakespeare, who was probably around thirty years of age when he wrote
these sonnets, presents an elderly speaker (or persona) as one of our
selected sonnets, number 73, well illustrates.
Yet, if the
situation in the sonnets is no more autobiographical than any other
piece of fiction, can be relationship of the speaker or persona with
the young man be qualified as homosexual?
The
relationship is, to say the least, ambiguous. In sonnet 20, the speaker
calls the young man "the master-mistress of my passion" but ends the
poem with a crude denial of physical contact: "But since she (Nature)
pricked thee out for women's pleasure,/Mine be thy love,and thy love's
use their treasure." In this poem, the poet gives the youth many of the
artibutes that the popular sequences of those days gave to the
untouchable lady love. The moral torture of the persona of the sequence
seems to come from an over-whelming passion for a person that finds no
relief in the flesh. In any case, the sequence makes clear that what
attracts the persona to the young man is his feminine beauty without
the moral defects of women and that what is craved for is a "marriage
of true minds."
Physical
relief for the speaker is provided by the dark lady whom he uses with
great disgust both with himself and her. The tension in the poems which
deal with the mistress arises from the deep contempt the speaker feels
for her and the impossibility of breaking away from her. This part of
the sequence culminates in sonnet 129.
This ueer triangle suggests that Shakespeare had not simply adopted a
fashionable poetic form and produced one more sequence in the same
vein. Rather he had to be more original, profound, and complex as he
was when he took well known stories or whole plays and transformed them
into his great dramas.
In the
following selections from the sequence, sonnets 18, 71, 73, and 116
belong to the group dealing with the young man; sonnets 129 and 130
with the dark lady.
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Structure
The sonnet
from-abab cdcd efef gg-to which Shakespeare has given his name is used
throughout the sequence (save sonnet 126 with its twelve lines rhyming
in couplets and sonnet 99 with its fifteen lines). Most of the time
each quatrain forms a complete phrase, and each line is end-stopped.
Run-on lines are rare which makes sonnet 129 something special.
Within these
rigid limits Shakespeare's infinite variety has free play. Some sonnets
perfectly adapt thought development to the structure of three quatrains
and couplet. In sonnet 73, e.g., the speaker compares himself to autumn
(first quatrain), to a sunset (second quatrain), and to dying embers
(third quatrain); the couplet brings out the point of these
comparisons. The three quatrains are not static, they show progress in
thought and feeling from incapacity for art (singing birds) to rest
from trials and tribulations and to exhaustion of passion.
This perfect
correspondence of the three metaphors with the three quatrains is rare
in Shakespeare's sequence. Although there is a subtle progress from the
first quatrain to the last in 73, yet each quatrain in itself justifies
the statement of the couplet. In a sequence of 154 sonnets such a
regularity could produce only boredom. At the other extreme from this
sort of solemn thought progression is that of sonnet 129, where three
aspects of lust-before, during, after action-are jumbled together in a
mad confusion until the couplet brings some order of reflexive thought.
Yet there is order in this madness. In the first quatrain, lust "till
action" is stressed; in the second, lust after action; in the third,
the three aspects are brought together.
In other
sonnets are thought structure comes close to the octave-sestect
division of the Italian sonnet. Sonnet 18, e.g., after stating the
subject of the poem-a comparison between the youth and the
summer-accumulates, up to line 8, notations that make the summer
imperfect. Line 9 opens with a dramatic "but" which introduces the next
six lines where the youth is shown as being made immortal by the
speaker's art. Yet under the current of thought the three
quatrain-couplet articulations retain their pattern. The accumulation
of external notations about the youth and summer that constitutes the
subject of the octave are divided into two parts through a rhetorical
device. The first quatrain contains four one-line comparisons while the
second contains two two-line notations, so that the first and the
second are well balanced. The sestet itself refers to the octave as
made of two units-the first line of the sestet to the last image of the
first quatrain:
4 Summer's
lease has too short a date
9 But thy eternal summer shall not fade
and the second
line of the sestet refers to the last image of the second quatrain:
7 And every
fair from fair sometime declines
8 By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed
10 Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st
The final
couplet does flow out naturally from the thought of line 12 and forms a
six line unit of thought with the third quatrain, and yet the rhythm,
parallelism, and rhyme of the couple set it apart from the last
quatrain.
The thought
structure of sonnet 116 is similar to that of sonnet 18 with its
one-line comparisons in the first quatrain, its two -line similes in
the second, and the dramatic "Love's not Time's fool" opening the idea
of permanence in the last quatrain. But the couplet here is used quite
differently from that of sonnet 18. It does not flow out of the third
quatrain. It looks like an after-thought, the speaker realizing that
love is perhaps not so constant as the preceding lines assert, but that
a man in love must feel that it is so.
The thought
structure of 130 is again different from the other selections offered
here. It simply accumulates for twelve lines realistic notations about
the dark lady friend. The dramatic turn of thought takes place in the
couplet: "and yet." Yet within these 12 lines the style varies and can
be divided into a quatrain followed by an octave. The first quatrain
gathers four notations in four lines while the following eight lines
mention only four further notations so that the first quatrain contains
as much as the following octave.
Shakespeare
achieves variety of structure by making the thought in the poems
override in a variety of ways the strong articulations of the sonnet
form.
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Imagery
At times
Shakespeare's use of imagery cannot bear close logical or grammatical
examination. Sonnet 18, for instance, opens with a statement of topic:
Shall I compare you to a summer's day? You are more lovely and more
temperate. Then the speaker goes on using comparisons not with a
summer's day but with the summer season which is sometimes marred by
rough winds, cloudy skies, is too short, and must end with loss of
beauty. Here the speaker's thought proceeds by association passing
unwittingly from a summer day to a summer season without blurring the
emotional content of his images.
A similar
hardly noticeable slip occurs at the beginning of the sestect, a
grammatical one this time. Lines 9 and 10 have the same grammatical
subjects; thy eternal summer. Yet the meaning of line 10 requires the
subject to be "you" and not "thy eternal summer," for otherwise we are
left with a jumbled phrase: your eternal summer shall not lose the
possession of that beauty you posses. Such disregard of logic and
grammar, however, does not blur the meaning the speaker has in mind.
Such a limpy
use of imagery is not the rule in these sonnets. In sonnet 73 we come
to a combination of logic, grammar, and aptness of metaphor in which
the whole consort dances together in perfect harmony. These three
images do not fall short of Donne's best drawn out conceits, and yet
they are far more compressed, rich in connotation, and emotionally
charged. Reduced to their simplest expression these three complex
metaphors may be expressed thus:
1. I, an old
man = late autumn wood where the birds used to sing = bare ruined
choirs = I whose sacred soul used to sing in my poems.
2. I, an old man = sunset-night = death = my rst from the trials and
tribulations you caused me.
3. I, an old man = dying embers = deathbed = I, killed by the passion
that nourished my life.
In sonnet 129
imagery is used in a structural way again. There are only two figures
in this poem, the first at the end of the octave and the other at the
end of the sestet. Much of the strength of "as a swallowed bait,/on
purpose laid to make the taker mad" comes from its position at the
center of the poem after six lines and a half of abstractions. The same
applies to "the heaven that leads men to this hell."
The following
poem, sonnet 130, on the contrary, uses similes every line for twelve
consecutives lines thus giving strength to the abstract statement of
the couplet.
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Sound
and Rhythm
Within the
strict liits of the imabic pentameter lines almost all end-stopped,
Shakespeare plays with a great variety of rhythms. Two extreme
contrasts appear clearly in the first quatrains of sonnets 73 and 129.
Both are written in the same basic iambic meter broken by spondees and
numerous caesuras and use a good number of long vowels. Yet sonnet 73
carries a slow rhythm expressive of the deep melancholy of old age
while 129 expresses raging impotence at the impossibility to shun lust.
Much of these opposite effects is due to the use of the caesuras or the
natural grouping of words according to meaning. In 73 the caesuras fall
pat with the ends of feet.
When yellow
leaves,/or none,/or few,/do hang
while the
caesuras of 129 break the feet and give the line a jerky, staccato
accent
is
perjured/murderous/bloody/full of blame
In 73, foot
and break work in harmony while, in 129, they jar against each other.
The placing of the caesura in the middle of a foot sometimes creates a
completely different effect:
Thou art
more lovely/and more temperate
This time the
caesura falls in the middle of the line and divides it into two equal
parts of five syllables with only one strongly accented syllable in
each part (lovely, temperate) creating the soft effect of a feminine
amphibrach.
Often
Shakespeare carefully combines sound and rhythm to produce his effect
Than you
shall hear the surly sullen ell (71)
where "hear"
and "bell," and "surly" and "sullen" are at the same pitch while the
rhythm follows the meter harmoniously.
Shakespeare's
combination of alliteration and assonance shows great variety. In 73
Death's
second self that seals up all in rest
Sometimes the
alliteration and assonance go as far as repetition of the same word or
word root within the same line:
Love's not
love
That alters when it alterations finds
Or bends with the remove to remove (116)
and this just
after writing the strong alliterative line
Let me not
to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.
In 129 the
repetition is double within one line
Is lust in
action, and, till action, lust
The effect of
raging impotence against lust here is well combined with the functon of
the word "lust" which is the grammatical subject of the next ten lines.
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Tone
The tone is
perhaps the most subtle and the most ambiguous element in these poems.
It is a function of structure, imagery, rhythm, alliteration, and
assonance plus undefinable factors related to the experience expressed
in the sequence. Analysis of tone can only bring out the most obvious
aspects of it.
Perhaps the
most ambiguous tonal effect can be found in sonnet 116. The strong
alliteration and repetitions of the first quatrain establish a tone of
hammering assertions prolonged by the imagery of the next eight lines
and the alliteration of the couplet: I never writ nor no man ever
loved. To the more perceptive such assertive language can only be a
mask for unconscious doubt. The less sure a man is and the more he
desires his hearer and himself to believe he is sure, the more
assertive he becomes. Viewed in relation to the sequence, the undertone
of this poem suggests that the speaker asserts the constancy unto death
of love to the very person he sees slipping away in his love. It
becomes a desperate plea to remain constant as love is said to be
constant. The assertion that love is not Time's fool may very well
cover the appalling discovery that he himself has been all along love's
fool. The undertone of plea in sonnet 71 is perhaps the most pathetic.
On the surface it does sound like a show of selfless love but the
rhythm and the diction suggest a tone of bitter irony, telling the
youth to do after his death exactly what he fears most the youth will
do-forget him completely. It would not be such a "vile world" after all
if the youth, returned his love. The repetition of "if;" "if you read
this line," "if thinking on me," "if, I say, you look upon this verse,"
and "perhaps" in the next line, all contribute to create a tone of
despair at the inefficacy of the speaker's verse to win the youth. This
poem asserts just the opposite of what sonnet 18 says of power of art.
The tone of sonnet 18 is less ambiguous. It shows a real faith in the
power of art to bestow eternity and attract love. In the sequence it
comess when the speaker has not yet experienced the infidelity of his
beloved. The tone of the couplet in 73 is a perfect example of wishful
thinking.
The tone in
the sequence dealing with the dark lady is in general much more direct.
Sonnet 129 and 130 are good examples. In 129 the tone varies within the
poem from the explosive rage in the body of the poem to the
philosophical resignation in the couplet. Sonnet 130 is an overt
mockery of the Petrachan worship of the lady love that turns in the
couplet into a compliment to the dark lady and a playful invitation to
love to a woman who cares less to be looked upon as an unreal beauty
than to be made love to.
The analysis
of individual sonnets offered in this Study Guide stresses the variety
in theme, structure, imagery, sound and rhythm, and tone. In such short
lyrical pieces as the sonnet tone is all. It is the very essence of the
poem that all the other elements contribute to create. It is the
essential thing to be perceived and relished. It is the reward of close
reading for the tone is some of the poems is so subtle that it can
easily escape a perfunctory analysis, as it has, indeed, for centuries
after Shakespeare's death.
But the tools
of the New Criticism have uncovered in this sequence a complexity of
technique and meaning that places it among the great achievements of
Renaissance poetry.
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