SONNET 101 GILDED TOMB: O truant Muse what shall be thy amends

O truant Muse what shall be thy amends
For thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed?
Both truth and beauty on my love depends;
So dost thou too, and therein dignified.
Make answer Muse: wilt thou not haply say,
'Truth needs no colour, with his colour fixed;
Beauty no pencil, beauty's truth to lay;
But best is best, if never intermixed'?
Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
Excuse not silence so, for't lies in thee
To make him much outlive a gilded tomb
And to be praised of ages yet to be.
   Then do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how
   To make him seem, long hence, as he shows now.


SONNET INDEX

Mnemonic Image: A GILDED TOMB

Memory Passage: A CROOKED KNIFE rests upon a sarcophagus in a GILDED TOMB

Couplet Imagery:

   Then do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how
   To make him seem, long hence, as he shows now.

The Muse sitting like Durer's Melancholy Angel upon an enigmatic stone. She is staring at the Numinous Presence of the Young Man as he stands in the center of a Sacred Circle, of which she is not allowed to pass into. She is waiting, hungry, for the Young Man to die so she may do her Sacred Duty, to illuminate the interior of the sonnet so that it will burn brightly for future ages, so the Young Man's Beauty and Truth might appear before them as it does to her now.

Melencolia I,  Albrecht Dürer - source

Do your sacred duty, Muse. No longer spend your time on "worthless song," whiling away your days in distraction of unworthy praises, word-drunk, full of forgetting of your true purpose. No longer dwell in absence, neglecting the responsibilities of your being with regard to Truth, Beauty and Goodness. By the simple invention of this sonnet, I will show you how to make amends for, to mend, to repair your neglect. Through the lines of this poem, unpainted and unadorned art(ifice), I will point the way for you to make his numinous presence seem (appear) to future beings as it shows now in his living person.

Priestess of Delphi, John Collier  (1850–1934)
source

El beso de la muerte, Jaume Barba - Barcelona - source
"His young heart is thus extinguished. The blood in his veins grows cold.
And all strength has gone. Faith has been extolled by his fall into the arms of death. Amen."

The Angel of Death Victorious, Herman Matzen
Lake View Cemetery - Photo by S. Casey

"Is it that by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, when beholding the white depths of the milky way? Or is it, that as in essence whiteness is not so much a color as the visible absence of color; and at the same time the concrete of all colors; is it for these reasons that there is such a dumb blankness, full of meaning, in a wide landscape of snows-a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink? And when we consider that other theory of the natural philosophers, that all other earthly hues-every stately or lovely emblazoning - the sweet tinges of sunset skies and woods; yea, and the gilded velvets of butterflies, and the butterfly cheeks of young girls; all these are but subtile deceits, not actually inherent in substances, but only laid on from without; so that all deified Nature absolutely paints like the harlot, whose allurements cover nothing but the charnel-house within; and when we proceed further, and consider that the mystical cosmetic which produces every one of her hues, the great principle of light, for ever remains white or colourless in itself, and if operating without medium upon matter, would touch all objects, even tulips and roses, with its own blank tinge--pondering all this, the palsied universe lies before us a leper; and like wilful travellers in Lapland, who refuse to wear coloured and colouring glasses upon their eyes, so the wretched infidel gazes himself blind at the monumental white shroud that wraps all the prospect around him. And of all these things the Albino whale was the symbol. Wonder ye then at the fiery hunt?" - Herman Melville Moby-Dick, Chapter 42, The Whiteness of the Whale


The Sonnet

O truant Muse what shall be thy amends
For thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed?
Both truth and beauty on my love depends;
So dost thou too, and therein dignified.

Q1: The invocation of the Truant Muse calls forth a terrible angelic being to the outer boundary of the temenos, sacred space, of the poem. Truant and truth ring against each other like a hammer on an anvil. The Muse is held at bay outside the temenos, the fiery invention / machine / mending of The Poet; she is indignant over accusations of neglect and confounded as to how she might amend her ways. In the center of this temenos, like a radiant totem / lingham is the Young Man, embodiment of Truth, dyed in Beauty, dripping with Beauty as Eros, Life - but this dye of Beauty with which he has been soaked runs down the following lines of the sonnet like black ink into a pool, coloring the language with dying and death. The Poet cautions the ebullient energies of the Muse, seeking perhaps to paint over the Young Man with language of praise, that if he were to die, so dies Beauty, Truth (S14) and even the Muse herself. Without the presence of the Young Man, her dignity, duty, office (Booth, Kerrigan), opus facere, "the work to do," is meaningless. Words and roots of words chiming together: muse, amuse, music, truant, true, amend, mend, neglect, legere, collect, beauty, duty, youth, dyed, dye, die, died, truth, youth, love, depends, pends, suspends, thou, dignified, digni-ficare, indignant, dig. Note: depends as a necklace or ornament hangs upon the neck of Beauty. Thus, dignified as a medal of office.

Make answer Muse: wilt thou not haply say,
'Truth needs no colour, with his colour fixed;
Beauty no pencil, beauty's truth to lay;
But best is best, if never intermixed'?

Q2: The Poet invents language to silence the Muse's enthusiastic tongue, commanding her to open her mouth, then placing his words there to paradoxically silence her: Truth needs no color added, no language. Beauty needs not to painted upon. The Best is pure: any addition is pollution, dilution. The Muse is made to understand that she herself, the breath / inspiration of language, has no place in the sacred space wherein dwell the superabundant presentations of Truth and Beauty and Goodness of the Young Man.

The sonnet itself is a liminal incantation that composes the boundary of the sacred space, separating / protecting the Muse from the Numinous Presence of the Young Man. Here ringing with each other: make, mend, facere, fake, answer, swear, muse, music, haply, perhaps, chance, truth, youth, color, covering, celare, concealing, hue, appearance, fixed, immovable, beauty, duty, pencil, painter's brush, penis, lay, lie, song, poem, verse, place, cover.

Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
Excuse not silence so, for't lies in thee
To make him much outlive a gilded tomb
And to be praised of ages yet to be.

Q3: The Muse is now dumbfounded, confounded. The Poet calls her out once again, admonishing her to make amends, to "fix" things, for when the Young Man dies, she must cross over the language of the sonnet and enter into the sacred temenos. It is her power, her very definition, to reanimate / re-store the Beauty and Truth of the dead flesh and bones of the Young Man and transubstantiate it (mend, make, recreate, create) back, to re-turn - into an everlasting Ideal - even though it be through the painted cosmetics of language. The precious thin cover of a gilded tomb will not endure. The Truth and Beauty of the Young Man must persevere until the End of Time. Listening here to because, cause, case, praise, raise, rays, rise, will, wilt, Will, dumb, excuse, accuse, cause, silence, lies, lays, lees, belies, make, mend, create, outlive, live, life, gilded, gilt, guilt, tomb, tum, time, praised, raised, ages, rages.

Mark the difference between praise in L9 and praised in L12. One of the typically considered duties of the Muse was to inspire laudatory language, but the message of this sonnet is that the Young Man needs no color, no pencil, no adornment or ornament for his Living Presence. This particular office of the Muse is no longer relevant while there exist the Living Presence. However, after the death of the Young Man, the Muse is required to guarantee / inspire his future praise through the reception and continued endurance of the language of the sonnet itself  (even though, it is tacitly acknowledged this is merely artifice, a lie, compared to the real transcendent Beauty) here echoed in the hinted double meaning of lie in for't lies in thee (Booth).

   Then do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how
   To make him seem, long hence, as he shows now.

C: The Poet commands: do your office, the work you are meant to do. By the making of this poem, I have created a ring of language, temenos, to contain the energies of Truth and Beauty that reside in the Young Man. After his death, the cosmetics of this language will allow you to re-create, re-make, amend his appearance, to re-cover the Truth and Beauty of his dead form to represent his living presence, as he does now to me. Hearing do, dew, office, opus facere, fix, muse, use, music, teach, show, make, fake, fashion, seem, see him, long, song, hence, since, sense, shows, knows.

Temple of Vesta - source

Druid's temple (England) Photo by George Hodan - source

Om Mani Padme Hum Mandala - source

 And he who desires to understand Shakespeare truly must understand the relations in which Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance and the Reformation, to the age of Elizabeth and the age of James; he must be familiar with the history of the struggle for supremacy between the old classical
forms and the new spirit of romance, between the school of Sidney, and Daniel, and Johnson, and the school of Marlowe and Marlowe's greater son; he must know the materials that were at Shakespeare's disposal, and the method in which he used them, and the conditions of theatric presentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, their limitations and their opportunities for freedom, and the literary criticism of Shakespeare's day, its aims and modes and canons; he must study the English language in its progress, and blank or rhymed verse in its various developments; he must study the Greek drama, and the connection between the art of the creator of the Agamemnon and the art of the creator of Macbeth; in a word, he must be able to bind Elizabethan London to the Athens of Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare's true position in the history of European drama and the drama of the world. The critic will certainly be an interpreter, but he will not treat Art as a riddling Sphinx, whose shallow secret may be guessed and revealed by one whose feet are wounded and who knows not his name. Rather, he will look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province to intensify, and whose majesty his privilege to make more marvelous in the eyes of men. - Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist

Thomas Banks Shakespeare attended by Painting and Poetry - source

Mnemosyne - source

When I set before myself a sonnet to be memorized, at first, there is simply the brute force of rote memorization. I repeat out loud the line, O truant Muse what shall be thy amends, until I have a sense of it. Then, I add the second line, For thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed? to get a more complete sentence. Here is where it gets interesting, where mechanical repetition wonderfully and mysteriously deepens, overflows and soaks the heart, where the words repeated begin to acquire the weight of meaning. Often Shakespeare's language has semantic and syntactical difficulties that occlude understanding. Rote memorization carries me through these rocky passages in the sonnet until, typically with the assistance of other commentators and some "looking up" in dictionaries, the sterile ground alchemizes into fertile soil. Here is where the seeds within the poem are "activated" (Booth) in the memory, take root and mature over time into a network of obvious connections, understood associations, shadowy evocations, clever hints and haunting echoes (Mnemomic Culture). The long Booth quote below from his commentary on Sonnet 101 is a beautiful example of this.

It has been my experience few people experience anything resembling joy in memorizing Shakespeare's sonnets. Unfortunately, memorization brings back dismal high-school exercises that rarely evolved beyond the rote mechanical stage. Through arduous effort and deadening mechanical repetition, one or another of the more popular sonnets, (S18, S29, S55) was forced / imprinted into their memory to the extent that many can faithfully recite it many years later with little or no sense of the meaning and none of the beauty. The memories of the sonnet are dead memories, they were not taken into the heart to live and thread through the weft of the ever lengthening warp of one's life.

I often have only a vague sense of what Shakespeare is saying upon first reading through a sonnet. Often, it seems the words seem to have been assembled in a deliberately opaque manner. However, I know meaning is under and through - and not simply meaning, but beauty. The sonnet is something of a puzzle to be figured out. Indeed, this is a delightful key to memorizing a sonnet: figuring it out. Initially figured, if even vaguely or partially, these images and forms dance with each other as the interior workings of an elaborate clock or automaton, wheels and springs effecting the semblance of life. Then as I sink the sonnet automaton deeper into the muscle of my own heart, bathe the gears and mechanisms with my own blood and breathe my own breath through the mechanisms of its words, the sonnet acquires its own life within me, a living thing born out of the animated machinery of language.


In The Work of Local Culture, Wendell Berry writes:

However small a landmark the old bucket is, it is not trivial. It is one of the signs by which I know my country and myself. And to me it is irresistibly suggestive in the way it collects leaves and other woodland sheddings as they fall through time. It collects stories too as they fall through time. It is irresistibly metaphorical. It is doing in a passive way what a human community must do actively and thoughtfully. A human community too must collect leaves and stories, and turn them into an account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself—in lore and story and song—which will be its culture. And these two kinds of accumulation, of local soil and local culture, are intimately related.


Human beings build memories of themselves, composing culture. We are buckets that collect, recollect and remember, stories. Stories take root in our memory. How do Memory Champions remember the randomly shuffled order of a deck of 52 playing cards? By creating a story around them, a meaningless narrative, but a story nonetheless. If you want to remember a set of unrelated objects, create a story to connect them. And if there is relation between the elements we wish to remember, the story assembles naturally, almost unconsciously. What we remember of our own lives as a series of stories. These self-defining stories illuminate our meaning and purpose. Over time, each of our stories and our ancestor's stories are grouped, collected, retold, amplified and diminished, merged together, shaped by cultural resonance, smoothed and nacred over again and again by time to evolve from individual biography, to family history, to group and community identity and, eventually, to cultural myths, archetypal evocations.

A poem is a special type of story, a story that overflows itself, that works through language to transcend language, to express the inexpressible. Through various inventions and neurological devices, such as rhythm and rhyme, poems function as memory machines. And the easiest and the best way to memorize a poem, to activate the machine, is to figure out its story, to body forth the forms of things unknown. 

HIPPOLYTA
'Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.

THESEUS
More strange than true. I never may believe
These antique fables nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact.
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold—
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.
The poet’s eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven.
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy.
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!
- Midsummer Night's Dream 5.1


Poetry is knit of words compacted with every conceivable mode of operative force. These words are, in Coleridge's simile, 'hooked atoms', so construed as to mesh and cross-mesh with the greatest possible cluster of other words in the reticulations of the total body of language. The poet attempts to anchor the particular word in the dynamic mould of its own history, enriching the core of its present definition with the echo and alloy of previous use. He is an etymologist, often violent and arbitrary as was Holderlin, who attempts to break open the eroded or frozen shell of speech in order to compel to daylight and release the dynamics, the primal crystallizations of perception that may lie at the roots. The poet's discourse can be compared to the track of a charged particle through a cloud-chamber. An energized field of association and connotation, of overtones and undertones, of rebus and homophone, surround its motion, and break from it in the context of collision (words speak not only to the ear, but to the eye and even to the touch). Multiplicity of meaning, 'enclosedness', are the rule rather than the exception. We are meant to hear both solid and sullied, both toil and coil in the famous Shakespearean cruces. Lexical resistance is the armature of meaning, guarding the poem from the necessary commonalities of prose. - Steiner, p 21.

My memorization methodologies - as much as they can be considered such as all - often strive, most unconsciously,  to approximate George Steiner's categories of difficulty from his valuable essay, On Difficulty (online version). For many people, the sonnets are difficult, as poetry itself is difficult, with no obvious handles to grasp hold of, no openings to see through. Steiner breaks down these difficulties into four categories: contingent, modal, tactical and ontological.

Contingent difficulties are mostly words that have to be looked up. Steiner writes, "contingent difficulties are the most visible, they stick like burrs to the fabric of the text." In the current sonnet, words such as "truant", "amends", "dyed", "fixed", "pencil", "lay", "gilded" and "office" all have burr like qualities - their meanings strange or warped from how they are understood in contemporary context. These are words that, while they do not prevent the meaning of the lines to be understood, cause catches, glitches in comprehension. Once looked up, the sense of the sentence is clearer.

In this particular sonnet, "pencil" seems odd.

Beauty no pencil, beauty's truth to lay;

Looking up the word in Booth, he explains: "painter's brush. (The word was not used to describe and instrument of writing until the eighteenth century)." The image of the the face of beauty being lined with a lead pencil - which seems slightly odd - is now replaced with a more understandable and appropriate image of a small painter's brush applying colour.

There is also an awkwardness and "lexical resistance" to lay. Vendler rephrases as, "Beauty [needs] no pencil to lay beauty's truth." She glosses, "nothing in the self-sufficient original presence requires that is be aesthetically reproduced for present consumption." Booth's primary definition is helpful: lay is to "apply, lay on (i.e. achieve with cosmetics)." He also notes "the logically irrelevant extra pertinence" of  lay also meaning song or hymn. Here Beauty needs no cosmetic (kosmos, order or adornment) to show beauty's truth. (Note the hint of deception lurking there in show, as the display of a spectacle, a traveling show. Language itself cannot escape its ornamenting tricks.) Beauty's Truth simply is. Phenomenological issues abound.

Modal difficulties are those that appear after having looked everything up. Typically, after I've read through the commentary in Booth and Kerrigan, both of whom provide definition and gloss on words and phrases, examples of proverbs and illustrative quotation, if a line still isn't making sense, I will turn to Paterson and Vendler, make a closer reading of Booth and Kerrigan, refer to online sources. There is always a sense the answer is right there in front of me, I just need to figure it out. Steiner writes:

Yet we may find ourselves saying 'this is a difficult poem' or 'I find it difficult to grasp, to place this poem' (the shift into a first-person register of experience is, here, significant) even where the lexical-grammatical components are pellucid. We have looked up what there is to look up, we have confidently parsed the elements of phrase — and still there is opaqueness. In some way, the centre, the rationale of the poem's being, holds against us. The sensation is almost tactile. There is, at empirical levels, 'understanding' — of the rough and ready order represented by paraphrase — but no genuine 'comprehension', no in-gathering in the range of senses inseparable from the archaic Greek legein (to 'assemble', to 'enfold in meaningful shape'). The experience of obstruction is at once banal and elusive. A move in American slang, though already somewhat dated, may pinpoint the cardinal distinction: we 'get the text' but we don't 'dig it' (and the suggestion of active penetration is exactly apposite). The poem in front of us articulates a stance towards human conditions which we find essentially inaccessible or alien. The tone, the manifest subject of the poem are such that we fail to see a justification for poetic form, that the root-occasion of the poem's composition eludes or repels our internalized sense of what poetry should or should not be about, of what are the intelligible, morally and aesthetically acceptable moments and motives for poetry. The poem enacts language in modes we find illicit; there is radical impropriety between its performative means and what we take to be the spirit, the native pulse, the constraints of the relevant tongue or idiom. Here the notoriously abbreviated and therefore elusive Aristotelian notion of 'propriety', of that which is proper to a given poetic genre, would be pertinent.  - Steiner, p 27.

The first two lines of 101 offer immediate modal difficulties to comprehension:

O truant Muse what shall be thy amends
For thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed?

What does this mean? You can picture the truant Muse, the absent (as a child from class in school), the resty, indolent, forgetful Muse - a continuation of the figure from the previous sonnet. Now this Muse is being called upon by the Poet to make amends, reparations, excuses, improvements for having neglected the Young Man, here described as truth in beauty dyed. But what is truth in beauty dyed? You can imagine the Young Man whose very being is Truth - in The Poet's eyes - dipped into a giant vat of Beauty. Note the implication that while Truth will endure, the dye of Beauty might fade; Beauty as the outward "covering" / "show" of Truth. But the meaning of this conceit is slippery. It has Modal difficulties.

These difficulties are resolved further on in Q2 with the Muse's discourse concerning the Neoplatonic Triad of Truth, Beauty and Goodness in the second quatrain:

Make answer Muse: wilt thou not haply say,
'Truth needs no colour, with his colour fixed;    TRUTH
Beauty no pencil, beauty's truth to lay;              BEAUTY
But best is best, if never intermixed'?                 GOODNESS

So this shifts interpretation towards a mystical philosophical poem wherein the Young Man can be seen as the Neoplatonic Ideal, The One, from which all things emanate and into which all things, including the transcendentals, dissolve.  The Young Man is revealed to [the Poet] as being of infinite scared importance (Auden).

Along with this modal identification is the sonnet theme expressed in the couplet:

   Then do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how
   To make him seem, long hence, as he shows now.

Do your sacred duty, Muse. No longer spend your time on "worthless song," wasting your hours in a fog of forgetfulness, no longer dwell in absence, neglecting Truth, Beauty and Goodness. I will show you how to make amends, to mend, to repair your neglect. By the making of this poem, I have created a ring of language, temenos, to contain the energies of Truth and Beauty that reside in the Young Man. After his death, the cosmetics of this language will allow you to re-create, re-make, amend his appearance, to re-cover the Truth and Beauty of his dead form to represent his living presence, as he does now to me.

Vendler is good here:

Though the actual presence of the beloved in the world may be entirely sufficient for the moment, the world needs art to keep his appearance alive in the future, after his death. The Muse errs, says the speaker-poet, by forgetting her future usefulness. There is, however, no real need for her in the present, according to the poem. Eternizing becomes here the sole function of art; the other three functions named in the poem (mimetic representation, adornment and praise) have no present use, since, with respect to the first, the world can behold the beloved (and needs no substitute image of him); and with respect to the others, the beloved is too beautiful to need adornment or praise. p 430

But note (with Booth), the reversal here: the Eternal Ideal of The One (showing / substance) is represented as a Temporal Reality of the Young Man (seeming / shadow). (Also S53.) Some heresy here. A deifying kind of flattery. Beyond hyperbole and more akin to a mystical worship. I get the sense of the Young Man barely containing the radiant numinous light within him; he is overfilled with the Divine, and on the verge of dissolving in a paroxysm of divine presence.

 there appears a face
That over-goes my blunt invention quite (S103)

Also note three other modal difficulties pulsing deep in the engine of the sonnet:

Truth needs no colour, no adornment, no rhetorical flourishes or descriptive modifiers, nothing extra. Truth is simply truth. There's an old adage about not trusting a man who makes a promise with more words than are needed.

"He said, and stood...."
 - Paradise Regained, IV, 561. - The epigraph to the essay, Standing by Words by Wendell Berry.

True Beauty needs no cosmetics, no make-up, no paint.

Goodness does not the result from artifice, invention, any mixture. Goodness is purity and nothing added to it will make it better.

So, the Young Man as the Neoplatonic avatar needs no colour, no painting, nothing added or subtracted from his being. He is beyond praise. He needs no poems or portraits while he still lives. 

However, after he dies (note the tension in the reversal), then the Muse must do her work and grant him immortality through art, though making, through an inspired creation of seeming, so he will endure beyond even the gilded (arti-ficial) tomb - the lasting monument that most great men wish to be remembered by.

Contingent difficulties arise from the obvious plurality and individuation which characterize world and word. Modal difficulties lie with the beholder. A third class of difficulty has its source in the writer's will or in the failure of adequacy between his intention and his performative means. I propose to designate this class as tactical. The poet may choose to be obscure in order to achieve certain specific stylistic effects. He may find himself compelled towards obliquity and cloture by political circumstances: there is a very long history of Aesopian language, of 'encoding' and allegoric indirection in poetry written under pressure of totalitarian censorship (oppression, says Borges, is the mother of metaphor). The constraints may be of a purely personal nature. The lover will conceal the identity of the beloved or the true condition of his passion. The epigram, be it Martial's or Mandelstam's, will be couched in terms translucent to the few, but initially closed to the public eye. But there is also, and often decisively, an entire poetic of tactical difficulty. It is the poet's aim to charge with supreme intensity and genuineness of feeling a body of language, to 'make new' his text in the most durable sense of illuminative, penetrative insight. But the language at his disposal is, by definition, general, common in use. Its similes are stock, its metaphors worn down to cliche. How can this soiled organon serve the most individual and innovative of needs? - Steiner 32

What can be said about the Tactical Difficulties of Sonnet 101? I often consider the "shadow narrative" of a sonnet. This is a more subtle subtext, a secondary narrative - sometimes, even counter-narrative. For the idiosyncratic purposes of memorization, these shadow narratives are occasionally quiet fanciful. I am certain many shadows I perceive were not intended by Shakespeare. However, some seem close to the mark.

For example, in Sonnet 4:

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thy self thy beauty's legacy?

The most immediate narrative is the wealthy Young Man is spending his his fortune and physical beauty unwisely, not making any fruitful, long term investments that will pay rich dividend and return. The implication is that having a child would be a wise and thrifty investment of his beauty.

The shadow narrative is the beautiful and erotic Young Man is masturbating and ejaculating upon himself; literally spending his seed, semen, beauty's legacy, upon himself.

This is amplified further down in Q3,

For having traffic with thy self alone,
Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive:

that is, masturbating by himself, and not having sex, traffic, with anyone else.

This shadow narrative, a tactical difficulty, once seen, haunts the sonnet. I think of it every time I recite it and it animates the interior of the poem with a hot fire.

The tactical difficulties in Sonnet 101 are more subtle. The relationship between the Young Man and the Poet is much different that it was in the early sonnets. Those early dewy dawning days of poetic flirtation and first love have suffered through trials and tribulations until, after 100 sonnets, there is a more mature, resigned and consciously spiritual quality to the poetry it has inspired.

Recall that it was not too long ago (sonnet-wise) the Rival Poet had the Young Man's ear and after came a mounting series of abject sonnets, reflecting none too well on the Young Man's character:

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing, (S87)

Then hate me when thou wilt; if ever, now; (S90)

So shall I live, supposing thou art true,
Like a deceived husband; (S93)

How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame
Which, like a canker in the fragrant rose,
Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name!
O! in what sweets dost thou thy sins enclose. (95)

Some say thy fault is youth, some wantonness; (96)

So now some time has passed (cf.  S100) and The Poet has initiated a new phase in the sonnets, of which the first six, 100 to 105, invoke and rebuke the Muse, rationalize his silence, and restore the Young Man to the mystical embodiment of the Neoplatonic One. There are those commentators (Paterson) who write off the Muse sonnets as "poems-about-being-unable-to-write" but there is more to it than that. They are about the inadequacy of language to contain and express the superabundant being of the Young Man, what Auden calls the Vision of Eros. In the Muse sonnets, this Vision is attempting to supplant or even erase the unfaithful, wanton, cankerous, spoiled beauty of the actual Young Man. These first few sonnets of the new phase are Shakespeare's attempt to recover the "primary experience" (Auden) of the Young Man's beauty and justify these rarefied "spiritual" aesthetic qualities for "eternizing" (Vendler) by the Muse.

Though the primary experience from which they started was, I believe, the Vision of Eros, that is, of course, not all they are about. For the vision to remain undimmed, it is probably necessary that the lover have very little contact with the beloved, however nice a person he (or she) may be. Dante, after all, only saw Beatrice once or twice, and she probably knew little about him. The story of the sonnets seems to me to be the story of an agonized struggle by Shakespeare to preserve the glory of the vision he had been granted in the relationship, lasting at least three years, with a person who seemed intent by his actions upon covering the vision with dirt. - W. H. Auden, Introduction to the Sonnets.

With this subtext, shadow text, in mind, the tactical difficulties become more apparent. Booth here is supreme and I can do no better than to quote this outstanding passage from his commentary on Sonnet 101:

 for't lies in thee    for it depends on you (note line 3) - it rests with you, is in your power. This phrase is a central point in a network if incidental and variously established relationships which conveys no substance but joins with the similarly uncommunicative network of echoed proverbs to give the poem quasi-organic density and the undeniability a natural organism has in being so complexly and variously organized that its identity supersedes and overwhelms the identities of the elements. A sense of felt but unidentified system makes the poem's assertions and their logical interrelation feel certain, obvious, self-evidently true. Lies and lay have perfectly different functions and significances here, but the two verbs are related phonetically and in the likeness of their often confused root senses. Similarly, lies is not, but could be,  a form or the verb "to lie" meaning "to speak falsely"; it thus pertains to the idea expressed in colour; and the theme of falsehood can evoke a suggestion - distant but syntactically sustained by the availability of silence as antecedent for "it" in for't lies - of the meaning "to be silent is to lie" in this line (where Excuse also echoes an idea invoked in line 6 [see the foregoing note on colour, sense 2]. Another potential sense that lies in does not convey in line 10 relates to a potential sense that lay did not convey in line 7; in suitable syntaxes "to lie" can mean "to be in a recumbent position," or "to lie dead" (OED, 1d), and "to lay" can mean "to lay in the grave," or "to bury" (as in R&J V.iii.73); line 11 activates this unrealized and previously irrelevant potential (and sharpens the mortal implications of line 3) in outlive a gilded tomb, in which gilded ("beautified by application of artificial colour") pertains to dyed in line 2 and to "laying" colours in line 7, and in which tomb pertains to dyed through the intermediary of a pun on die that is never called into a reader's consciousness at all. - Booth p 328.

I am paraphrasing Booth for emphasis here. Tactical difficulties defy elucidation and strain the limits of language, working as they do through quiet echo and evocation, with a sense of felt but unidentified assertions and interrelations. Meaning is not directly conveyed and deep phonetic elements within word can trigger or activate unrealized and previously irrelevant potentials. The deeper meaning of the sonnet may never be directly called into the reader's consciousness at all.

Here is the sonnet with Booth's words highlighted. Immediately upon rereading in the light of Booth's commentary, the sonnet lives and breathes as a different beast. The language becomes multidimensional. It is the difference between hearing a solo piano and a piano with symphony.

O truant Muse what shall be thy amends
For thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed?
Both truth and beauty on my love depends;
So dost thou too, and therein dignified.
Make answer Muse: wilt thou not haply say,
'Truth needs no colour, with his colour fixed;
Beauty no pencil, beauty's truth to lay;
But best is best, if never intermixed'?
Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
Excuse not silence so, for't lies in thee
To make him much outlive a gilded tomb
And to be praised of ages yet to be.
   Then do thy office, Muse; I teach thee how
   To make him seem, long hence, as he shows now.

If the question is whether or not to grant Shakespeare intentional credit for these tactical subtleties, I choose to err in favor of Shakespeare. Ross MacDonald once wrote that he was able to "get around" other writers after a time, as if they were mountains in his path; but he was never able to "get around" Shakespeare. There is a modality of genius about him that seems inhuman, something akin to Mozart, Beethoven, and Goethe - perhaps even surpassing. For myself, the baseline assumption is that every element in the sonnets was intentional.

Rereading the sonnet in light of these intentional tactical difficulties conjures up a web of gossamer connection which is charged with an ur-meaning, corpusants, St. Elmo's fire pulsing along buried root networks just under the ground of the knowable, effable, narrative of the sonnet.

Contingent difficulties aim to be looked up; modal difficulties challenge the inevitable parochialism of honest empathy; tactical difficulties endeavour to deepen our apprehension by dislocating and goading to new life the supine energies of word and grammar. Each of these three classes of difficulty is a part of the contract of ultimate or preponderant intelligibility between poet and reader, between text and meaning. There is a fourth order of difficulty which occurs where this contract is itself wholly or in part broken. 

Because this type of difficulty implicates the functions of language and of the poem as a communicative performance, because it puts in question the existential suppositions that lie behind poetry as we have known it, I propose to call it ontological. Difficulties of this category cannot be looked up; they cannot be resolved by genuine readjustment or artifice of sensibility; they are not an intentional technique of retardation and creative uncertainty (though these may be their immediate effect). Ontological difficulties confront us with blank questions about the nature of human speech, about the status of significance, about the necessity and purpose of the construct which we have, with more or less rough and ready consensus, come to perceive as a poem. - Steiner, p 41. 

Ontological Difficulties, by their nature, defeat direct explanation. Of course, there is no authoritative or defintive answer as to why Shakespeare created Sonnet 101 or any of the Sonnets. There is only inference and conjecture. However, as I work my way through memorizing the sonnets, especially after a particular series forms a pattern of connection, extending and interpenetrating through each other, echoing theme, evoking consistent imagery, I am grateful to feel an aura of invention rise within me, a sympathy with Shakespeare, a privileged glimpse through a crack in the door into the Sorcerer's lab. I hasten to add this is all highly imaginative and self-serving. But in those moments when I have "mastered" a sonnet and can recite it entire from memory, when the next word in the line is born out of my own heart, as if it were of my own making, then I have this sense of tuning into, harmonizing with Shakespeare's mind. It is one of the many joys of my memory work, as illusory as it may actually by.

Even so, I gain only a vague notion of the Ontological Difficulties. I am reminded of the Hitchcock's explanation of the MacGuffin, the plot device that motivates the narrative in many novels and films:

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, "What's that package up there in the baggage rack?" And the other answers, "Oh, that's a MacGuffin". The first one asks, "What's a MacGuffin?" "Well," the other man says, "it's an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands." The first man says, "But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands," and the other one answers, "Well then, that's no MacGuffin!" So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.

Ontological difficulties are similar to MacGuffins. They are resistant to questioning - regardless of their function as narrative motivators, i.e. the reason we all got into this mess. The tools of language and logic find scant opening wherein to operate upon the ontological. (Where it does, as in Heidegger, it seems as best poetic, at worst, tortured and gnomic.) The question, by its very nature as a question, shapes the figure of the answer, no matter if it is unknown, transforming ontology - as a magician changes a dove to a flower - into epistemology.

 It is as if you are dreaming, aware you are dreaming and want to escape the dream, wake up. In the dream you find a hammer to break through the walls of the dream. But the more you use this "dream hammer," this epistemological tool, the more you affirm the "reality" of the dream. There's a Zen Koan quality to it all. Dragons breathe this atmosphere where logic and language evaporate. Questions of ontology stand at the very limits of language. So I proceed poetically.

Auden believed Shakespeare never intended the Sonnets as a whole to ever be published.

It is impossible to believe either that Shakespeare wished them to be published or that he can have shown most of them to the young man and woman, whoever they were, to whom they are addressed. [...]

Though Shakespeare may have shown the sonnets to one or two intimate literary friends - it would appear that he must have - he wrote them, I am quite certain, as one writes a diary, for himself alone, with no thought of a public.

If this is the case, then the sonnets become charged with something much more lyric and closer to contemplative exercises or expressions of private prayer. Their reason for being takes on a distinctly spiritual quality. I often have imagined the sonnets in a "social matrix," like the plays, moving immediately from Shakespeare's desk into immediate circulation amongst his friends who would get all the coded language, in-jokes, allusions and bawdy puns, laughing and clapping acknowledgement upon Shakespeare's back, eventually reaching the one to whom it was written with the momentum of a parade of gossip and common knowledge. Then all reactions, flutterings of heart, swoons, shouts of indignation, imprecation and love would be duly noted and delivered salaciously back to Shakespeare. But what a different scene if the Sonnets were an entirely solitary and private pursuit?

Contemporary emphasis on the participation of literature in a social matrix balks at acknowledging at how lyric, though it may refer to the social, remains the genre that directs its mimesis toward the performance of the mind in solitary speech. Vendler, p 2

The more accessible ontological difficulties of this sonnet, indeed of this immediate series from 100 to 105, are found in the Poet's calling upon the Muse, upbraiding, criticizing, imploring, commanding her to attend to the numinous presence of the Young Man, but, crucially, not allowing her to energize the inventing language of the poem. The Muse is outside of these sonnets. Deliberately so.

What does this mean? How can a poet write inspired poetry without the Muse? What of Plato's furor poeticus and his assertion that,

the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses, and the mind is no longer in him: when he has not attained to this state, he is powerless and is unable to utter his oracles.

Shakespeare treats the Muse as if he does not need her to utter his oracles. Traditional functions of the muse to facilitate true memory of events, of how it actually was, accurate mimesis, as in Homer and Vergil, are not needed here. The Young Man in his superabundant living presence overflows the capacities of memory and language. The Muse is also not needed to inspire, enthuse or adorn ("add lustre to")  the language, which is a simple invention to show the truth of the Original. The language-invention is an Icon (Vendler) whose function is as a sign that points to the Living Presence of the Young Man, but does not substantially represent it. Finally, the "soiled organon" of cosmetic praise which so many other poets / muses (S21) invoke the Muse is entirely inadequate to apply, lay upon, the Young Man. I imagine a cartoon world where the Muse appears before a 1950s farm boy who can only say, "Golly Jeepers! You're prettier than anything I've ever seen here on the ranch!"

(It is instructive to note the radical development from S21 to the current sonnet, from his love not being as bright As those gold candles fixed in heaven's air to becoming the source of Illumination, from cosmetic praise to cosmic worship.)

I am following Vender through all of this. So if the duty, office, of the Muse is not to authorize the mimetic representation of the Young Man, nor to inspire or adorn, cover with praise, then why is she called to the outer boundaries of the poem? To ensure the futurity of the poem. The purpose and meaning of the Muse is to charge / energize the language of the poem so that it might contain as much of the Living Presence of the Young Man as possible for the future.

The ontological difficulty here is in the paradox of the sonnet's invention. For the Poet is not constructing the language through any authority of the Muse. He is instead channeling it directly from the Numinous Presence of the Young Man. The implication is that this is an Ur-Language, Delphic, emanating unfiltered out of the Original Source, here invented as a sacred vessel to contain the Transcendental Essence of the One, which will be delivered to the Muse after the death of the Young Man. But if the Young Man is the embodied avatar of the One, how can he / it die? This is beyond poetic hyperbole, more akin to a Platonic Heresy, a defiance of the very nature of Being. How can Being itself die? Language shatters apart. Thought disintegrates.

Why is this so?

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event - in the living act, the undoubted deed - there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike though the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who's over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends' glarings is a doltish stare!  - Herman Melville Moby-Dick, Chapter 36, The Quarter-Deck. Ahab and All

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SONNET INDEX

On Memory Strategies in the Sonnets

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In memory practice, there is always a persistent tension between those aspects of the sonnet that facilitate memorization and the actual meaning of the sonnet itself. Of course, if the only interest in is memorizing a sonnet regardless of what the sonnet actually means, any manner of extreme phantasm can be imagined to invent highly memorable narratives. But to what end? Memory masters are able to memorize the sequence of a shuffled deck of cards in this way. But the memory narrative has no meaning and certainly no beauty - beyond the, admittedly delightful, surreal. The other end of the spectrum is rote memorization, where the sonnet is robotically repeated until it is imprinted deeply into the brain and can be mechanically recalled for recitation with little understanding. It is not, as the saying goes, ever "known by heart." While both of these memory strategies are helpful in finding your way over rough passages, neither allows for a deep appreciation of the meaning of the sonnet itself.

The meaning of poetry is beyond the scope of this piece, but the experience of the transcendent beauty of poetry calls out to and resonates with the basic sense of what it means to be human. Coleridge famously defined poetry as,

"I wish our clever young poets would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry; that is, prose,—words in their best order; poetry,—the best words in their best order."

It follows naturally that the best words should generate the best images. This is most often the case with the Sonnets. To have a Sonnet in your heart, memorized, woven into the fabric of your being, is like having a secret gift that can be opened again and again. Imagine a film loop of a rose from bud to bloom that becomes more beautiful and entrancing with each new viewing, resonating with your own life experiences, reflecting your own memories in its unfolding: this is what it means to know a sonnet by heart, to have become intoxicated by it's imagery.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? 
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date: 
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; 
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd;

In Sonnet 18, it is easy to imagine a perfect summer's day in its lovely temperance. To remind one's self how much sweeter it is than those days in May when rough winds shook the buds. And to sadly know those perfect days never last, sometimes they are too hot or covered with clouds. And so on. To construct a counter series of images to lay over those which Shakespeare has already invented is a fool's endeavor. There is much to recommend as corollary to Coleridge's homely definition that the best poems are also the most memorable, composed as they are of the best images.

Still, most often with Shakespeare in the Sonnets, there is a "felt presence" of a deeper meaning, a shadow narrative, dwelling within the individual sonnets and resonating with other sonnets in the series. Sonnet 18 signals the shift away from the previous seventeen Procreation Sonnets, where the Young Man was urged to create a child so his beauty might endure, and promises the vessel of the poem itself that will contain and preserve the Young Man's beauty for future ages to experience. Four hundred years later, there is an undeniable measure of truth to this claim.

There are two Suns here: the one illuminates the summer's day, but suffers inconstancy, change and will someday fade; the other one is the Young Man whose radiant presence, constant and eternal, never fades. What authorizes this claim in a profound manner, rooted as it is in the ontological soil of art, is the continued performance, reading, by future beings - so much so that the Young Man's beauty not only endures but grows. The truth of the Poet's claim is underwritten by every reading of the poem itself. The "felt presence" of an eternal and transcendental light illuminates the interior architecture of the sonnet. There is the tantalizing intuition that what we believe we know is merely shadow cast onto the walls of our skulls from this interior fire inside the prison of the poem's language.

But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st; 
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. 

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The mysterious process of memorization is greatly facilitated by mnemonic devices such as meter and rhyme. In the first stages of memorization, these are like lanterns glimpsed distantly in the darkness. After repetition, the other word-images begin to glow individually and in concert with each other, showing connection and netted reticulation. Gossamer strands shiver with taught meaning between the words assembled on each line, between the lines themselves, and around the entirety of the sonnet. Previously memorized sonnets also show illuminated connection until a pulsing hieroglyphic network emerges from the whole, an overarching structure that defies articulate expression. This is similar to expressing what music means. Chopin, when asked the meaning of a particular Nocturne, simply performed it again.

William Burroughs spoke of the "Third Mind" when referring to the mysterious presence that arises when two separate entities work together. Two artists collaborate and the resulting work will have a "life of it's own". Or, take two photos and montage them together and the resulting image has a resonance never dreamed of. Eisenstein wrote:

"The combination of two hieroglyphs of the simplest series is regarded not as their sum total but as their product, i.e. as a value of another dimension, another degree: each taken separately corresponds to an object but their combination corresponds to a concept. The combination of two ‘representable’ object achieves the representation of something that cannot be graphically represented."

To paraphrase and extend: something that cannot be graphically represented but which has a felt presence is an enigma.

In Booth's commentary on Sonnet 8, he writes:

"Often Shakespeare's use of language is such that a reader can make no paraphrase that both follows the syntax of the lines and says what he knows the lines to mean. One can almost make the general paraphrase of a Shakespeare sonnet and give a satisfactory gloss for any particular word in it, but if one puts together a new sentence replacing Shakespeare's words with their glosses, one will often get a sentence that makes no sense at all - even where readers actually understand them perfectly."

In the Sonnets, Shakespeare employs this "third mind" effect as a tactical strategy, creating a polysemic montage which adumbrates the expressed theme at an almost unconscious or preconscious level. In the blazon of Sonnet 1, which is remarkably freighted with resonate imagery, the sequential elements can be partially listed as such: eugenic imperative, Beauty's Rose, ripening death, tender heirs, memory, contracts and contracting, bright fevered eyes, Narcissistic self-consumption, self-cannibalism, candlelight burning itself out, famine, abundance, self-foes, self-cruelty, the World's fresh ornament, ornamentation, heralds, gaudy Spring, flower bud, burials, contents, contentment, cunts, more tender, churls, waste, niggarding, hoarding, pity, gluttony, eating, due, duty, grave, grave eaters, a sarcophagus. And the obvious external puns: tender as delicate / currency, contracted as reduced / married, buriest as hiding / digging a grave, content as what you contain / happiness. Over-arching themes of social eugenics, hoarding and waste, gluttony and starvation, self-reflection, self-love, recursive desire, morality of duty, responsibilities of memory, abundance, sexual repression, allegories of seed, plant, bloom and bud, Death as the eater, devourer, glutton. All in fourteen lines composed of the best words in the best order. And yet, even with more than adequate comprehension of all of these elements and their inter-relations, you are still left with a sense of incompleteness, as if there is still this deeper meaning of which you have only a vague, but nagging, sense of.


In The Value of the Sonnets, Stephen Booth writes:

"What we ask of art is that it allow the mind to comprehend - know, grasp, embrace - more of experience than the mind can comprehend. In that case, art must fail because the impossibility of its task is one of its defining factors. To state it simplemindedly, we demand that the impossible be done and still remain an impossibility. When an artist focuses his audience's mind and distorts what is true into a recognizable, graspable shape to fit that mind, he not only does what his audience asks but what cannot long satisfy audience or artist just because the desired distortion is a distortion. Art must distort; if it is to justify its existence, it must be other than the reality whose difficulty necessitates artistic mediation. It must seem as little a distortion as possible, because its audience wants comprehension of incomprehensible prehensible reality itself. We do not want so much to live in a world organized on human principles as to live in the world so organized. Art must seem to reveal a humanly ordered reality rather than replace a random one."

[...] "If a work of art ever succeeded perfectly, it would presumably be the last of its kind; it would do what the artist as theologian describes as showing the face of God. All works have failed because the experience they are asked for and give is unlike nonartistic experience. Neither reality nor anything less than reality will satisfy the ambitions of the human mind. Of all literary artists, Shakespeare has been most admired. The reason may be that he comes closest to success in giving us the sense both that we know what cannot be known and that what we know is the unknowable thing we want to know and not something else."

Lady From Shanghai - Orson Welles - Source

The Sonnets are a notorious carnival fun-house full of mirrors. Everyone who enters into them sees  reflections, often distorted and warped, of their self and they age in which they live. It is always a delightful revelation to see what a brilliant mind discovers in the mirrors of the Sonnets. Even the most bizarre explorations have value as mnemonic insights, oftentimes granting a previously dull sonnet a new luster of far-fetched wonder.

Sonnet 32 might not be particularly striking in the overall scheme, but upon reading in Scarry's Naming Thy Name, that the line,

WHEN that chuRl death mY BoNEs with duST shALl COver,

contains the name of Henry Constable, I was happy to have another memory mechanism to further buttress the sonnet in my mind. Similarly, whenever I work on Sonnet 35, I am reminded of Hank Whittemore's eccentric Monument theory that Edward de Vere actually wrote the Sonnets to his purported "son," Henry Wriosthesley, conceived with Queen Elizabeth, and this particular sonnet, with it's telling line, "Thy adverse party is thy Advocate," reflects his self-division at having had to publicly condemn Southampton to the Tower and then privately arrange for his release. And so on, ad infinitum.

In Reading New Life into Shakespeare's Sonnets: A Survey of Criticism, James Schiffer writes of the past difficulties of daring to comment upon the Sonnets:

"W. H. Auden, for example, begins his 1964 introduction to the Signet edition of the Sonnets by stating, “Probably, more nonsense has been talked and written, more intellectual and emotional energy expended in vain, on the Sonnets of Shakespeare than on any other literary work in the world” (xvii). In his survey of criticism for the Penguin edition in 1986, John Kerrigan notes that Herbert S. Donow's “admirable but inevitably incomplete” bibliography of the sonnet in England and America, published in 1982 and covering criticism through 1981, lists 1, 898 items on Shakespeare's Sonnets alone, but, Kerrigan adds, “much of the literature tends to lunacy and is dispensable” (65). 2 More recently, Helen Vendler has written of “the highly diverting, if appalling, history of the reception of the Sonnets” (“ Reading” 29). She recalls the first time she realized “with trepidation, that the Sonnets are a lightning rod for nuttiness. There is even a man in the Variorum who thinks the Dark Lady was a wine bottle, and that the later sonnets record Shakespeare's struggles with alcoholism” (“ Reading” 24). Vendler alludes here to J. F. Forbis's The Shakespearean Enigma and an Elizabethan Mania (1924), a work worthy to succeed German scholar D. Barnstorff's A Key to Shakespeare's Sonnets (1860), which argues that Master W. H., to whom Thomas Thorpe dedicated the 1609 Quarto volume, stands for “William Himself.” Father to a line of esoteric/ allegorical interpretations, Barnstorff himself is worthy successor to George Chalmers, who argued in 1797 that all the Sonnets, even those directed to “a lovely boy,” are in fact addressed to Queen Elizabeth."

Again, in memorization there is always the struggle to find those handles in the sonnets that allow it to be held more tightly in the memory. The concern is to not allow those handles to obscure the meaning / suitcase of the sonnet itself. When I first entered into the Sonnet's mirrored interior spaces, I was searching for anything to help me find my way through, to fix a path in my memory. As might be suspected from the above, Sonnet 1 is one of the more difficult sonnets to start with. The memory strategy I used was to read the sonnet in a profoundly sexual manner: creature's increase was an erection,  thou contracted to thine own bright eyes was the Young Man masturbating, Making a famine where abundance lies was the waste of abundant semen on the Young Man's stomach, within thine own bud buriest thy content was a reference to anal sex. And so on. Now there is a splinter of truth to this interpretation. There is ample sexual innuendo in many sonnets. However, after years of working with these sonnets, the sexual quibbles and winks, fade into a richer, less profane, meaning, of which have generated much richer and more rewarding memory strategies.

Setting aside questions of authorial intent with regard to the Sonnet sequencing, there are recognizable and undeniable narratives that are essential for memorization. Sonnets 1 through 17 are known as the Procreation Sonnets. They are all concerned in varying degrees of poetic persuasion and injunction with urging the Young Man to breed and produce a child. Knowing this is tremendously helpful for memorization.

Regardless of the details of its veracity, the story I tell myself here is that the Young Man's wealthy aristocratic parents (for purposes of expediency, I am content to place Southampton here) were concerned that he seemed to have no interest in marrying a woman and producing an heir. The mother, knowing the Young Man, loved poetry and was enamored with the sonnets in particular, that he also had expressed admiration for Shakespeare's poetry, commissioned Shakespeare to write 17 sonnets to persuade the Young Man to marry and breed. (Perhaps the YM was 17 years old.) Shakespeare, in a characteristic move, goes to Erasmus' Encomium matrimonii and Ovid's Metamorphoses for source material and starts rewriting many of those themes in sonnet form. However, over the course of his composition, during which he and the Young Man are introduced and encouraged in conversation, Shakespeare falls in love with the Young Man, remarked initially in the couplet of Sonnet 10 and then in full force in Sonnet 18.

It's a good story, makes for good drama, and informs the memorization of the first 17 sonnets. You can picture Shakespeare and the Young Man in a room and each of these sonnets as a conversation between them. But then, at Sonnet 18, as mentioned above, everything changes. The message consistent throughout the Procreation sonnets to get married and have a child to pass on the Young Man's beauty is now set aside and forgotten. Instead of a beautiful child, the Poet makes the bold (and outrageous for anyone other than Shakespeare) claim that it is his poetry, these sonnets, will now be the vessels of his Beauty. That as long as there are beings to see and breathe / read the lines of the poem, the Young Man's Beauty shall never die. Much less trouble than children and effectively establishing the Poet as the womb, fertilized by the Young Man's beauty, out of which these sonnet-children will be born.

The remainder of the sonnets tell a different story or set of stories, episodes in a tumultuous love affair, reflecting ecstatic highs and terrible lows, all the multi-faceted thoughts and emotions of love. I choose, as a memory strategy, to see the entire sequence from 1 to 126 as the chronological story of a relationship between the Young Man and the Poet. But it gets complicated. The Dark Lady sequence from 127 to 152 often seems to overlap events and intrudes itself into the chronology of the Young Man and Poet's relationship.

When I first thought about memorizing the Sonnets, I knew little about them. I knew there was an odd relationship with a beautiful Young Man. Mostly, I knew there was a Dark Lady who had inspired striking sonnets about the horrors of love and desire. Sonnets 129 and 147 were two of my early favorites in this vein. As I began the project of memorizing all 154 Sonnets, I started reading commentary almost as one would read a guide book while traveling. When I got to, say, Sonnet 12 it was like arriving in a new town. I would get out my Booth or Kerrigan or Vendler or Paterson in the way you would with a Lonely Planet or Fodor's Guide and read about the sights and notable curiosities for the poetic traveler. And while there was a general agreement over the main sights to see, there was considerable variation over what they meant. I quickly realized I had to cobble together my own sort of make-shift interpretation if I was going make any headway. One of the most mysterious and delightful aspects of the Sonnets (and, again, Shakespeare in a more general sense) is how malleable they are to a wide variety of interpretation. The roomful of mirrors again. Much of this is due to the odd fact that Shakespeare never reveals the identity of the Young Man or the Rival Poet(s) or the Dark Lady. The great joke of the Sonnets is their justified claim of granting the Young Man immortality and yet never saying who the Young Man actually is.

All of this creates anxiety around inventing memory strategies. And a certain point, when you begin to wrestle with sonnets such as 35, No more be griev’d at that which thou hast done and 36, Let me confess that we two must be twain, you know something unusual has happened. But you are somewhat at sea to figure out what is going on. However, when you arrive at sonnets 40, Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all and 41, Those pretty wrongs that liberty commits, you understand, perhaps, there has been a betrayal, an infidelity. The plot thickens, these new sonnets shed light on those previously in darkened reference. Many commentators assume the Dark Lady seduced the Young Man. Or it was a mutual seduction. The narrative becomes something of a soap opera. As for as memory strategies are concerned, this salacious, all too human story, makes for easier memorization. The Young Man, the Poet and the Dark Lady become characters in the drama of the Sonnets. Each new sonnet is like a new episode, furthering the plot and enriching memorable context.

However, after a while I began to suspect the soap opera drama, while helpful, was an intentional distraction. I felt as if I were missing something. I felt like Claudius watching the dumb show of the Mousetrap, that there was another larger, more encompassing drama going on behind the scenes, off-stage, involving the audience itself. Indeed, involving me.

In Scorn Not the Sonnet; Critic, You Have Frowned, Wordsworth famously wrote "with this key Shakespeare unlocked his heart." And ever since, great crowds of critics, commentators and cranks have attempted to discover precisely what sort of lock that key fit into, what sort of door it opened and into what manner of room. I am not attempting to join the vulgar ranks, nor am I suggesting I have uncovered anything novel or extraordinary. However, I have found a mnemonic strategy in the sonnets that while it is not The Key does manage to open more than a few puzzling sonnets. I am sure many Shakespearean scholars take this for granted. It most likely reflects the deficits of my being more of an autodidact and less of a disciplined academic. In short, I wished I had known about the pervasive influence of Neoplatonic philosophy in the Elizabethan Age. Because with this key, I have - at least for my own purposes - unlocked many obscurities in the particular sonnets and in the series as a whole.

source

Illustrations

"Shakespeare's sonnet cycle begins in a fairly conventional way, since it is a rewriting, in fact a translation, of a well-known Renaissance treatise on procreation in beauty. That treatise was included on Thomas Wilson's Arte of Rhetoric (1553) under the title Epistle to Persuade a Young Gentleman to Marriage. It was, in fact. a translation of Erasmus' Encomium matrimonii [In Praise of Marriage] which, in turn, was a free translation or rewording of Plato's Symposium: "There is a certain age at which human nature is desirous of procreation - procreation which must be in beauty and not in deformity, and this procreation is the union of man and woman, and it is a divine thing," says Plato in the translation by Benjamin Jowet. Since Shakespeare was as familiar with Wilson's rhetorical manual as he was with Ovid's Metamorphoses in the Golding translation, it is more than likely he know Erasmus' Encomium from that source. His sonnet is, therefore, not only a translation but a translation of a translation, and his text is at least three times removed from its original source text."  - Four Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, edited by Angel-Luis Pujante, A. J. Hoenselaars

SONNET 7 SUN: Lo! in the orient when the gracious light

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 climbed 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 highmost pitch, with weary car,
Like feeble age, he reeleth from the day,
The eyes, 'fore duteous, now converted are
From his low tract, and look another way:
   So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon
   Unlooked on diest unless thou get a son.


SONNET INDEX

Mnemonic Image: The SUN

Memory Passage: Beauty's ROSE in a World War I TRENCH is reflected in a GLASS also showing the face of the EXECUTOR, Death, who admires the FRAME of Bone which holds the mirror, adjusting it to catch the SUN


Idiosyncratic Abstract: A cartoon SUN awakens in the morning, chugs his chariot up the Heavenly Hill and then at Highmost Pitch, like a Windhover, falls down with a beautiful fire while his idiot worshipers avert their eyes as Emily Dickinson walks quietly amongst them in the evening light, slicing out their eyeballs with a straight razor.


Couplet Imagery: As you are like a sun, you will soon die, forgotten in your night, unless you breed and create a son.

  So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon
   Unlooked on diest unless thou get a son.

The Sun's daily journey across the heavens as an extended metaphor / conceit of the life of the Young Man. As the sun sets into night, no more to be gazed upon, in effect dying to be reborn again the next morning, so the Young Man, whose life is over at end of day, will no more be seen, unless he reproduces a son in his image.

Phoebus Apollo in his Chariot - source

As far as memorization goes, the vehicle narrative of the metaphor is a great help. Q1 the sun rises from the east, Q2 the sun climbs to mid-day, noon, Q3 the sun begin to fall into the west, setting. Other mnemonic aides are related to Vendler's Key Word theory: the word look appears in each of the quatrains and the couplet: looks, looks, look, unlooked. I'm not entirely in the boat with her about the Key Words, but in this particular sonnet, it works perfectly.

Vendler: Sonnet 7 has little to recommend it, imaginatively; both the conceit of the sun's predictable day-long-jour-ney (another French pun) and the conceit of the fall of favorites from public respect are well-worn topics. It was perhaps because his topics were so entirely conventional that Shakespeare looked to word-games to put him on his mettle on composing the poems. He certainly enjoyed the obstacle of shaping his four parts around a single Key Word enough to propose it to himself many later times. 

The Sun in his Chariot - source

I fancifully imagine Vendler's Shakespeare composing the sonnet, knowing he wants to employ Pythagoras' metaphor of change from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book XV (see below) and reference Erasmus' adage:

Plures adorant solem orientem quam occidentem.
More men adore the rising than the setting sun. 

He chooses to set the Key Word in the later half of each quatrain and the couplet. The sun acts in the first half, the lowly human servants / worshipers react: look in the second half. He also wants to use words that contain the letters age, old and, perhaps, or (French "gold" :: golden sun)

homage / age / pilgrimage
golden
orient / adore / mortal / fore

He thinks it would be clever and slightly devious if the entire sonnet could build tension by not using the word sun until the last moment, where it sounds as a ringing pun of relief.

Also, it would be amusing to also begin with a pun: the sun rising from low in the east, announcing the sonnet with Lo, as in Behold!

And for the first quatrain, before everything gets set in stone and restrictive, the ending rhymes will be a little play in themselves: light >> eye >> sight >> majesty. The sun's dawning light gives energy to the Elizabethan eyebeams which shoot out like Superman's heat ray to perceive the majesty of the sun.

Finally (Booth), he wants there to be a subversive shadow analogy of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection. I also enjoy entertaining the idea of Shakespeare addressing the sonnet to the Old Testament Yahweh, blasphemously urging him to bring about the events of Jesus's birth or end up as a nonsensical Nietzsche quote. Towards this end, he'll slip in a handful religious words: gracious, homage, sacred, heavenly, adore, pilgrimage, converted.

There you go: the sonnet pretty much will write itself now! Just fill in the blanks. Reminded here of the spurious Debussy / Mozart / Miles Davis quote:

The music is not in the notes, but in the silence between them.

Oh and it would be nifty to begin with a trochee iamb with an unusual caesura that breaks after orient. Begin the second quatrain with the same trochee iamb but with a usual caesura. And emphasize the uphill climb in line by slowing the line with a triple beat of a medial iamb-spondee. Then speed up the sun's decline with two unstressed beats following the double stress in the medial iamb-trochee. Otherwise, iambic pentameter all the way through. (See Shakespeare's Sonnets: With Three Hundred Years of Commentary)


1 Lo!                              light
2                                     eye
3                                    sight                     ]  SUN RISING
4              looks              majesty

5
6
7             looks                                           ] SUN AT NOON
8

9
10
11                                                               ] SUN SETTING
12                        look

13
14 Unlooked                            SON

Angry Jesus - Sun God - source

Flipped Flammarion, 1888 - source

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; 

So we begin low and behold. Imagine that Lucky Old Sun got nothing to do but roll around heaven all day. The archetypal image of the sun with a human face. A cartoon sun maybe, waking up from the good night's sleep, yawing and stretching out his rays in the east / orient. Lifts up his burning head smiling down on his grateful subjects as the King of the World, the Great Bringer of Light. (Shadow: Lucifer) The Sun's eyes are bright rays of fiery light. His subjects / servants eyes are under, paying homage (the original use of the word denoted the ceremony by which a vassal declared himself to be his lord's “man”) by looking, gazing upon, the sacred godlike and royal majesty. (Compare with S2 L3 and S5 L2.)

And having climbed the steep-up heavenly hill,
Resembling strong youth in his middle age,
Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,
Attending on his golden pilgrimage:

The Sun now in his fiery golden chariot making his golden pilgrimage. Note the old age hiding in there. Also the rhymes of Q2 thudding in the ear: hill / still || age / pilgrimage. Still age, still age, the relentless train chugging along with the chariot huffing and puffing up the hill. I think I can. I think I can. Still age still age still age. I love how the tongue has to hoist itself up over the metrical steps of steep-up heavenly hill. There's that sweet triple beat of the medial iamb-spondee. Also note the internal rhyme of mortal and adore, sounding out that golden or that makes Helen Vendler so ingeniously happy.

Some illogic is starting to present itself. It's in the Yet. Here's the Great Sun God / King resembling not a middle aged man, but a strong youth. Yet... the lowly mortals still adore him. Why wouldn't they? There is a note of subtext perhaps addressed to the Young Man: you've got a few years before you are middle aged, and even then you will be adored - but only because you will still resemble a strong youth, even though you are past your prime.

But when from highmost pitch, with weary car,
Like feeble age, he reeleth from the day,
The eyes, 'fore duteous, now converted are
From his low tract, and look another way:

The first two lines of this sonnet always make me smile. I always enjoy arriving here in the recitation. Kerrigan gives the optimal image: "a pitch is the height to which a falcon flies before it stops". Mnemonic resonance with Hopkin's Windhover:

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
    Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

Helios in his chariot car, after having chugged like a roller coaster train up to the utmost point, weary and haggard with exhaustion, like feeble age, reeleth from the day. How many rough long endless days have I recalled that phrase, hoping to have a billion times lovlier, more dangerous fire break from me then! Here is where the sun is most beautiful in my mind. It is in the declining moments of the day when most people gather to watch the sun. So the next two line just don't make sense. I figure Shakespeare is trying to make the conceit work towards his purposes, taking heart in Erasmus. So I always silently curse the fools who were once duteous and convert from the sun's beautiful lovelier more dangerous falling low tract and look another way. Perhaps, they are gazing into the black mirrors of their phones. But I never identify with them. And here is where the sonnet loses me and any force of argument. Emily Dickson is my anodyne to Sonnet 7 - Those Evenings of the Brain:

We grow accustomed to the Dark -
When light is put away -
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye -

A Moment - We uncertain step
For newness of the night -
Then - fit our Vision to the Dark -
And meet the Road - erect -

And so of larger - Darknesses -
Those Evenings of the Brain -
When not a Moon disclose a sign -
Or Star - come out - within -

The Bravest - grope a little -
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead -
But as they learn to see -

Either the Darkness alters -
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight -
And Life steps almost straight.

***

   So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon
   Unlooked on diest unless thou get a son.

It isn't until the couplet that the Young Man is brought into the sonnet. Indicative perhaps that this sonnet is more of a mechanical conceit, not so much from the heart here. So thou... you my close Young Friend are at your own private High Noon, your highmost pitch. The Poet knows how to hook his Narcissistic attention by telling him he will be Unlooked on. That self-defining gaze of the other will be gone and the Young Man will die, unless he gets a son. There's a loony scifi image of the Young Man flying off into space and using an alien mega-structure that can harness a star and thereby getting a sun. Or something Hindu perhaps.

Chariot of the Sun God - source

Euripides: Old age: a voice, a shadow, and no more. 


Per Booth and Kerrigan, I have added the long passage from Ovid's Metamorphoses XV:

Al things doo chaunge. But nothing sure dooth perrish. This same spright
Dooth fleete, and fisking heere and there dooth swiftly take his flyght
From one place to another place, and entreth every wyght, 
Removing out of man to beast, and out of beast to man.
But yit it never perrisheth nor never perrish can.
And even as supple wax with ease receyveth fygures straunge,
And keepes not ay one shape, ne bydes assured ay from chaunge,
And yit continueth alwayes wax in substaunce: so I say 
The soule is ay the selfsame thing it was and yit astray
It fleeteth into sundry shapes. Therfore lest Godlynesse
Bee vanquisht by outragious lust of belly beastlynesse,
Forbeare (I speake by prophesie) your kinsfolkes ghostes to chace
By slaughter: neyther nourish blood with blood in any cace. 
And sith on open sea the wynds doo blow my sayles apace,
In all the world there is not that that standeth at a stay.
Things eb and flow: and every shape is made to passe away.
The tyme itself continually is fleeting like a brooke.
For neyther brooke nor lyghtsomme tyme can tarrye still. But looke 
As every wave dryves other foorth, and that that commes behynd
Bothe thrusteth and is thrust itself: even so the tymes by kynd
Doo fly and follow bothe at once, and evermore renew.
For that that was before is left, and streyght there dooth ensew
Anoother that was never erst. Eche twincling of an eye 
Dooth chaunge. Wee see that after day commes nyght and darks the sky,
And after nyght the lyghtsum Sunne succeedeth orderly.
Like colour is not in the heaven when all things weery lye
At midnyght sound asleepe, as when the daystarre cleere and bryght
Commes foorth uppon his milkwhyght steede. Ageine in other plyght 
The Morning, Pallants daughter fayre, the messenger of lyght
Delivereth into Phebus handes the world of cleerer hew.
The circle also of the sonne what tyme it ryseth new
And when it setteth, looketh red, but when it mounts most hye,
Then lookes it whyght, bycause that there the nature of the skye 
Is better, and from filthye drosse of earth dooth further flye.
The image also of the Moone that shyneth ay by nyght,
Is never of one quantitie. For that that giveth lyght
Today, is lesser than the next that followeth, till the full.
And then contrarywyse eche day her lyght away dooth pull. 
What? Seest thou not how that the yeere as representing playne
The age of man, departes itself in quarters fowre? First bayne
And tender in the spring it is, even like a sucking babe.
Then greene, and voyd of strength, and lush, and foggye, is the blade,
And cheeres the husbandman with hope. Then all things florish gay. 
The earth with flowres of sundry hew then seemeth for to play,
And vertue small or none to herbes there dooth as yit belong.
The yeere from springtyde passing foorth to sommer, wexeth strong,
Becommeth lyke a lusty youth. For in our lyfe through out
There is no tyme more plentifull, more lusty, hote and stout. 
Then followeth Harvest when the heate of youth growes sumwhat cold,
Rype, meeld, disposed meane betwixt a yoongman and an old,
And sumwhat sprent with grayish heare. Then ugly winter last
Like age steales on with trembling steppes, all bald, or overcast
With shirle thinne heare as whyght as snowe. Our bodies also ay 
Doo alter still from tyme to tyme, and never stand at stay.
Wee shall not bee the same wee were today or yisterday.
The day hath beene wee were but seede and only hope of men,
And in our moothers womb wee had our dwelling place as then:
Dame Nature put to conning hand and suffred not that wee 
Within our moothers streyned womb should ay distressed bee,
But brought us out to aire, and from our prison set us free.
The chyld newborne lyes voyd of strength. Within a season tho
He wexing fowerfooted lernes like savage beastes to go.
Then sumwhat foltring, and as yit not firme of foote, he standes 
By getting sumwhat for to helpe his sinewes in his handes.
From that tyme growing strong and swift, he passeth foorth the space
Of youth: and also wearing out his middle age apace,
Through drooping ages steepye path he ronneth out his race.
This age dooth undermyne the strength of former yeares, and throwes 
It downe. Which thing old Milo by example playnely showes.
For when he sawe those armes of his (which heeretofore had beene
As strong as ever Hercules in woorking deadly teene
Of biggest beastes) hang flapping downe, and nought but empty skin,
He wept. And Helen when shee saw her aged wrincles in 
A glasse wept also: musing in herself what men had seene,
That by two noble princes sonnes shee twyce had ravisht beene.
Thou tyme the eater up of things, and age of spyghtfull teene,
Destroy all things. And when that long continuance hath them bit,
You leysurely by lingring death consume them every whit. 
(Golding's Translation)


SONNET INDEX