Recently I was teaching a poem by Yeats that has always reminded me of a stretched sonnet. 'In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz' has an octave of 20 lines and a sestet of 12 lines, but as Yeats was not interested in the sonnet form (he wrote only one sonnet), the comparison is probably subjective. The poem begins:
The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
Eight lines later, Yeats gives a reprise of the opening:
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
Pictures of the mind, recall
'That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
Immediately after this, at the beginning of the elongated second section of the poem, Yeats writes:
Dear Shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
That line 'Dear shadows, now you know it all,' I have always found almost unbearably emotional, and standing in front of a class of undergraduates I again wondered why this was. Very early the next morning I woke with the answer: the line reproduces in a slightly different pattern the o sounds in windows/open/south in the second line. The two young women are shadows now, but in saying so Yeats brings back his earlier line which blazed its light behind their silky young bodies. Then in the very last line of the poem - 'Bid me strike a match and blow' - he softens its angry, cornered, very Protestant destructiveness by concluding the poem with a final o sound that takes us back to the heaven of that opening quatrain. It's like watching someone turn from blowing vigorously into a fire in order to breathe gently against a dandelion clock. Realising the subtlety of Yeats's music, I began to imagine a critical account of his or any poet's work which would jettison all earnest explication of the text - meaning, paraphrasable content, social and historical situation - and concentrate entirely on sound, cadence, metre, rhyme, form. A critical study that would be true to Yeats's dictum 'Words alone are certain good.' And then I began to wonder where I could find such a book.
Helen Vendler's long study of the art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, is that purely aesthetic study of poetic language in action, and it begins appropriately with this statement: 'I assume that a poem is not an essay, and that its paraphrasable prepositional content is merely the jumping-off place for its real work . . . I do not regard as literary criticism any set of remarks about a poem which would be equally true of its paraphrasable content.' Taking issue with a recent editor of the Sonnets, John Kerrigan, she points to his lack of interest in the linguistic variation in sonnet 129, and says he takes 'a single-minded expository view of the poem, as though it were a self-consistent sermon'. For Vendler, the verbal imagination's true intent is 'always to make a chain of interesting signifiers, with the 'message' tucked in as best the poet can'. And she says that because many readers prefer to think of the Sonnets as 'discursive prepositional statements', rather than as 'situationally motivated speech acts', we remain condemned to a 'static view of any given sonnet'. Gently criticising Stephen Booth's account of the contrary pulls in sonnet 146, she that grants that his discussion is 'interesting', but finds it too preoccupied 'with meaning alone'. The editorial and critical accounts published over the last thirty years do not pay enough attention to the Sonnets as poems. Putting the intellectual and expository to one side, Vendler says that she is more concerned with the aesthetic experience we encounter 'temporally' as we read the sonnet. We encounter that experience in a particularly structured way, because, as she marvellously shows, each sonnet has what she terms a 'couplet tie' - the words that appear in the body of the sonnet (lines 1-12) which are repeated in the couplet (13-14). By 'words', she means 'a word and its variants': for example, lives, live and outlive count as one word. Often Shakespeare uses a more complex form of repetition than the couplet tie. In sonnet 7, the first quatrain (Q1) contains the word looks, Q2 the word looks again. Q3 the word look and the couplet the word unlooked-on. She calls the root word - in this case, look - a 'key word', and registers it at the end of her commentary on each sonnet. The couplet tie which she also prints at the end of each commentary, of course contains the key word. So far so necessarily technical, but let us see how it applies in practice in her discussion of sonnet 15 which, as with every sonnet, she prints both in the original Quarto form and in her own modernised version:
When I confider euery thing that growes
Hold in oerfection but a little moment.
That this huge ftage prefenteth nought but fhowes
Whereon the Stars in fecret influence comment.
When I perceiue that men as plants increafe,
Cheared and checkt euen by the felfe-fame skie:
Vaunt in their youthfull fap, at height decreafe,
And were their braue ftate out of memory.
Then the conceit of this inconftant ftay,
Sets you moft rich in youth before my fight,
Where waftfull time debateth with decay
To change your day of youth to fullied night,
And all in war with Time for loue of you.
As he takes from you, I ingraft you new.
When I consider every thing that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment;
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheerd and checked even by the selfsame sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory:
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with Decay
To change your day of youth to sullied night,
And all in war with Time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I ingraft you new.
The last five lines, she points out, are 'sung under the sign of the sullying scythe' and they remain a hymn to the human 'love-syllable you', which is the 'conceit of impermanence':
Sets YOU most rich in YOUTH before my sight,
Where wasteful Time debateth with decay
To change YOUr day of YOUth to sullied night;
And all in war with Time for love of YOU,
As he takes from YOU, I ingraft YOU new.
The couplet rhyme, mimetically and phonetically additive to resemble 'ingrafting', is 'YOU'/'YOU new'. Looking at the Quarto text, she remarks that she has no doubt that 'night', a noun that could be characterised by many possible adjectives, is 'sullied' because the young are youthfull and time is wastefull. And she further notes that in the Quarto spelling, the old-style s of sull- even resembles the f of -full. So this sonnet is bound together by one of those 'alliterative, assonantal and anagrammatic semantic strings' in which Shakespeare delights: 'On the stage influenced by stars is our mortal state making inconstant stay; waste debates decay to create change of a day. ' By bringing out the acoustic texture of the sonnet, Vendler makes it sensuously alive, and I would only suggest that part of the linguistic fun of the opening three lines is the way in which Shakespeare duplicates the o in grows, in Holds and moment before allowing the pejorative sense of shows to burst the round sign's fragile perfection like a bubble. This crossing out of the sound is caught up ten lines later in 'most rich in youth' where it works to subvert the obvious sense of the phrase by placing it under a type of sonic erasure. This is an effect I only noticed because of Vendler's stringent close readings of each sonnet. She concludes her account of sonnet 15 by pointing out: 'KEY WORD: YOU (It could be argued that this word is not present in Ql, but I suggest it is phonetically hiding in 'HUge', chosen precisely for its anticipation of YOU.)'
As is evident from the layout, this is a critical book which adopts the form of a handbook or reader's guide, and in her Introduction Vendler says that her Commentary is not intended to be read straight through: rather, it is 4 intended as a work of 'writerly scrutiny' which those interested in the Sonnets, or students of the lyric, or 'poets hungry for resource', may want to browse in. She has included a recording of some of the Sonnets read aloud, because the three other readings available are done by actors (who???) who, typically I would say, speak the lines with constant mis-emphases and ignore the inner antitheses and parallels. The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets is therefore not a conventional critical book and though I read it straight through at a steady rate of a hundred pages a day, it is better dipped into, but dipped into by overlapping stages. Reading it is like being offered a huge plate of oysters, or doing a Spot-the-Ball competition, or playing obsessively with a Rubik's Cube that always comes out right after the effort of following a tight technical argument accompanied often by a detailed diagram. Because it does not offer an argument that develops chapter on chapter, any account of it must explicate the initial approach and then consider a number of moments out of a multitude where the critic directs her formidable mind to the game these sonnets play. It is Vendler's supreme critical virtue that she can write from inside a poem, as if she is in the workshop witnessing its making. Her manner of setting the Quarto next to the modernised text makes the experience of reading the sonnets a 5 new and radical one: we read each poem twice and then we realise that actually Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, each of which has been rewritten by subsequent editors. Perhaps the closest analogue to this sense of never quite stepping into the same river twice is reading the first editions of John Clare's volumes and then reading the same poems in the unpunctuated original manuscript versions Eric Robinson and his fellow editors print in the big Oxford edition of Clare.
A good example is sonnet 19:
Deuouring time blunt thou the Lyons pawes,
And make the earth deuoure her owne fweet brood,
Plucke the keene teeth from the ficrce Tygers yawes,
And burne the long liu'd Phænix in her blood,
Make glad and forry feafons as thou fleet'ft,
And do what ere thou wilt fwift-footed time
To the wide world and all her fading fweets:
But I forbid thee one moft hainous crime,
O carue not with thy howers my loues faire brow,
Nor draw noe lines there with thine antique pen,
Him in thy courfe vntainted doe allow,
For beauties patterne to fucceding men.
Yet doe thy worft ould Time difpight thy wrong.,
My loue fhall in my verfe euer liue young.
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood,
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
And burn the long-lived phoenix in her blood,
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet'st,
And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets:
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime,
0 carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
Reading the Quarto text with its furred type, I catch an accent which I once heard many years ago reproduced in a television documentary where John Barton coached members of the RSC in the 'correct' pronunciation of Shakespearean English: the accent sounded like a mixture of the Ambridge, Birmingham and Ulster accents. In 19, we hear not 'phoenix' but Phaenix, not 'heinous' but hainous, not 'old' but ould. Elsewhere there are other sounds still current in Ulster - cowld for 'cold', hower for 'hour' - and words such as brave for 'fine, good, bold, nonchalant', or miching for 'playing truant'. Hearing that deep guttural accent - an accent made deeper by the collied print of the Quarto text - I register the fourth line like this: 'And barn the lane-liv'd Phayinix in har bludd.'
Reading the modernised equivalent beside it - 'And burn the long-lived Phoenix in her blood' - is rather like emerging onto a trim lawn where tea and cucumber sandwiches are being served. The Quarto text sounds like Stephen Rea, the modernised one like Gielgud or Prince Charles. The same or very similar modernised texts in Katherine Duncan-Jones's scholarly and accessible new edition seem perfectly presentable on their own, but in Vendler are often destabilised by their immediate adjacency to the Quarto texts. Duncan-Jones prints 'And burn the long-lived Phoenix in her blood;' and includes some of the Quarto spellings (not Phaenix, though) below her text. I agree with her punctuation of the line, but feel very strongly that Arden's general editorial policy ought to have been broadened to include the Quarto texts (an index of first lines would be a help too).
In her commentary on this sonnet, Vendler suggests that the 'murderous vitality' of the opening quatrain issues from the Shakespeare 4, Pr of the tragedies, while the rest of the poem with its mentions of 'swift-footed Time' and 'fading sweets' fits more equably in the elegiac mode. This type of comment is an essential part of what I can only call the dramatic experience of reading Vendler: a few pages earlier she takes sonnet 18's famous opening line - 'Shall I compare thee to a Summers day?' - and in a lovely run of exact adjectives worthy of Hazlitt remarks that it is 'gentle, light, innocuous, dulcet'. Commenting on sonnet 19, she notes that the imaginative effort is spent on 'the great hard words', with their frequent trochaic or spondaic emphasis: blunt, pans, brood, pluck, keen, teeth, tiger's jaws, burn, blood. And she then points out that 'Devouring Time . . . the earth devour . . . with thy hours' tolls the progression that turns devouring Time to swift-footed Time and then to old Time. The effect of this patterning is to jettison 'all values' except beauty's pattern, young in verse. Prompted by this highly sensitive analysis, I would add that in the last line the letter v is triumphantly asserted so that we get the idea of vitality expressed in an almost tactile fashion. Here, the modernised line -'My love shall in my verse ever live young' - makes this almost sculpted effect visually more apparent.
It is a strong theme in Vendler's Commentary that Shakespeare delights in anagrams, graphic or phonetic puns, and in what she calls 'graphic overlaps': stars, astrology, constant and art. In sonnet 7, for example, the central image of the sun's Car generates 'anagramatically scrambled' cars elsewhere in gracious, sacred and tract. The ageing of the sun in the poem seems to generate homage, age, golden pilgrimage. The poem also suppresses the word sun until the closing word of the last line - 'Unlooked on diest unless thou get a son' - leaps off the page with complete inevitability. The sun/son theme runs throughout the sequence, nowhere more pervasively than in sonnet 33:
Fvll many a glorious morning haue I feene,
Flatter the mountaine tops with foueraine eie,
Kiffing with golden facc the meddowes greene;
Guilding pale ftreames with heauenly alcumy:
Anon permit the bafeft cloudes to ride,
With ougly rack on his celeftiall face,
And from the for-'orne world his vifage hide
Stealing vn eene to weft with this difgrace:
Euen fo my Sunne one early morne did fhine,
With all triumphant fplendor on my brow,
But out alack, he was but one houre mine,
The region cloude hath mask'd him from me now.
Yet him for this, my loue no whit difdaineth,
Suns of the world may ftaine, whe heauens fun ftainteh.
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the f6rlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all triumphant splendour on my brow;
But out alack, he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath masked him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth,
Suns of the world may stain, when heaven's sun staineth.
Katherine Duncan-Jones's notes are as always helpful: glossing the word ride, she says in a rather Yeatsian manner that the clouds are 'upstart cavaliers, beggars on horseback; as they cross the sun's face they may also figure lines or wrinkles: cf. Fr. se rider, to become wrinkled'. She also notes that rack which is 'a mass of clouds driven before the wind in the upper air', is cognate with 'wrack' or 'wreck', suggesting an obstruction that is at once 'ruinous and fragile'. And she notes the internal rhyme with alack in line 11. Elsewhere, she points out various numerological moments (the total of the 'dark lady' sonnets is 28, which reflects male disgust with the lunar, menstrual, cycle alluded to in their number, and I would guess that the number 33 is chosen as a trinal number which picks up the reference to 'heaven's sun' - i.e. Christ. Vendler demonstrates how this sonnet displays a 'progressive acceleration' of its narrative from eight to four lines to one line, and she includes a diagram to demonstrate this shrinking formal movement:
Yet him for this my love no disdaineth:
Although Vendler's diagrams aren't always helpful, this one does expose the technical playfulness of the form. Unlike Duncan-Jones, she tends not to make detailed links with Shakespeare's plays, but I believe it is necessary to set two passages from Richard II and Henry IV Part I next to this sonnet - which, as Vendler says, is the first to remark on 'a true flaw' in the friend.
In Act III of Richard II, Bolingbroke and his party confront Richard at Flint Castle in Wales:
See, see, King Richard doth himself appear,
As doth the blushing discontented sun
From out the fiery portal of the East,
When he perceives the envious clouds are bent
To dim his glory, and to stain the track
Of his bright passage to the Occident.
The Duke of York replies:
looks he like a king: behold his eye,
bright as is the eagle's, lightens forth
Controlling majesty. Alack, alack for woe,
That any harm should stain so fair a show.
The link between these speeches and sonnet 33 seems clear: track and alack, alack point to the rack/alack internal rhyme, partly because 'track' contains 'rack'. This would mean that in the sonnet Shakespeare - the Jacobean Shakespeare, Duncan-Jones convincingly argues -is both remembering lines he wrote perhaps ten years earlier in the reign of Elizabeth, and also recalling performances by the actors who spoke his lines. He seems to be drawing on nature for his conceit, but equally he is drawing on the created nature of his own art. The young man is a flawed, brilliant royal actor, and he is also an actor playing that actor. A performance of the play was subsidised by the Essex conspirators on the eve of their rebellion in 1601. Essex, like Richard, had returned from a military campaign in Ireland, though from the conspirators' point of view what counted was the justified deposition of an annointed monarch. The other, I think important, and as I realise from Kerrigan's superb notes, often remarked, connection with the history plays is the way that cool, sly verb permit picks up Prince Hal's speech after he has been left alone by Falstaff and Poins:
I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness.
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world.
The young man in the Sonnets is by implication as ruthless, manipulative and detached as Hal, and Shakespeare's complicated feelings for him are given a deliberately formulaic shape in the last couplet's apparently forgiving statement. But if we apply the sun/son pun and read 'heaven's sun' as Christ then an abyss of contradictions is opened up, because Christ is stainless. Therefore sons of the, world can never 'stain', a word that appears three times in Richard II, and three in Henry IV Part 1. This is to argue the necessity of analysing the intertextuality of the Sonnets, but it is Vendler's ambition to concentrate on the complex dazzle of their linguistic surfaces. One of my favourite moments is her discussion of sonnet 29.
When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate,
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.