Broken sounds that once animated words long forgotten.

Stift Altenburg Veitskapelle Ossarium - source

It's been a while since I have worked on memorizing the Sonnets. Once I reached the 100th sonnet, I jumped ahead to 127, the beginning of the Dark Lady sequence, memorized a dozen or so, then cherry-picked from 100 to 127 (The "Hits": 105, 106, 107, 116, 119, 122). I was exhausted by the Young Man narrative. After the Rival Poet sequence (78 to 86), it all seemed like so much sound and fury.

It's interesting. I am currently reading Shakespeare's Sugared Sonnets by Katharine M. Wilson. She believes the sonnets to be elaborate parody, a high literary joke. She writes:

Nothing is more difficult than to prove a joke, for the only proof is to surprised into laughter by it, since unexpectedness makes one of its essential elements. By a stroke of luck I made a chronological study of the main Elizabethan sonneteers for another purpose, and was surprised into laughter when I arrived at Shakespeare. My difficulty in showing that he wrote his sonnets as a parody is that I cannot recreate this experience for others. It seems I must give the game away first. However, as those on the Dark Lady already strike many readers as unconvincing taken seriously, they may provide a good opening. They can hardly have been written to a woman in compliment, and unless one approaches them already convinced, it is difficult to believe that they could have been written about a real woman. Indeed, nothing is easier than to show they are parodies. - Shakespeare's Sugared Sonnets. p 83

It is perhaps a faint argument to wonder why, if they are indeed parodies, Shakespeare wrote so many. The Dark Lady sequence of 25 (or so) sonnets are a reasonable number to get the point of parody across. And even then, if you grant the 17 Procreation sonnets as a sophisticated game, what are you to make of the Civil War sonnets (33 to 35, 40 to 42, 57 and 58)? There is an authentic pathos, a resounding depth of human experience, that underwrites the poetry of so many of the sonnets. Something happened there. I find it difficult to write them all off as parody. Even in the Dark Lady sequence, 129 and 147 are howling cries of despair. I can almost feel Shakespeare's breath in them, his sweat and tears; there is an all too human hammering Pulse visible under their skin.

Still, there is no denying a conversation with the other sonneteers, especially Constable. Elaine Scarry's Naming Thy Name: Cross Talk in Shakespeare's Sonnets explores this relationship with a method that borders on a beautiful insanity. Constable is the Young Man in her estimation. The sonnets are a series of "answering poems" where "the two lovers spell out in full one another's names" - at times, literally in anagrams and complicated code. For many of the sonnets, there is no doubt of Constable's influence (24, 105, 106, 107, 114, 141 and the obvious oddity of 99), but there is broader conversation taking place with the entire sonnet tradition: Daniel, Davies, Sidney and Spenser to name only a few.

Love's Labors Lost presupposes cultured young men ready for the new approach, or at least for criticism of the old. There is a climate favoring a new approach to the sonnet.

This is the context in which Shakespeare wrote his sonnet sequence.To us it may seem a strange one, but if it does, this suggests something wrong in our approach. The sonnets have been misread through being studied out of context. Lacking the background that gave them meaning, we had the problem of explaining them, and so have invented such theories as that they were autobiographical, expressions of the poet's relationship with a real man, and if not written to a real woman, were at least about her. Or we may read them as self-contained reflections whose recondite expression reflects depth of experience. But this cannot have been the approach of either Shakespeare or his contemporaries. Shakespeare must have had the cadences, imagery and ideas of his predecessors in mind as he wrote. he used the same of similar tunes and the same imagery and conceits as the other sonneteers, to pay the same flattering and devoted attention, but to a man, not a woman. Apart from this he differed from them only by beginning his sonnet sequence with a section of seventeen sonnets each coming to an identical and ridiculous climax in the couplet, begging his friend to marry and that for the most fantastic of reasons, and by reserving the more vituperative outpourings of sonnet tradition for a woman. That is to say he reduced the whole thing to the absurd. - Shakespeare's Sugared Sonnets. p 82

Wilson seems to have been particularly anxious about the possibilities of Shakespeare being a homosexual and a misogynist. Whether he actually was or not is beside the point. Her thesis that the entirety of the sonnets were parody, especially the Young Man sequence, is informed by this anxiety.

Putting Shakespeare's sonnets in their literary background leaves no chink for a real man and woman. It was not till the end of the eighteenth century, after their background had been forgotten, that this possibility was suggested, as in these circumstances was bound to happen sometime. But given that background, the idea of a real man and woman being involved, becomes ridiculous. As it is, some of the situations and suggestions provided by historians who believe they have identified Shakespeare's 'friend', add humour, making perhaps the last aspect of Shakespeare's joke. - Shakespeare's Sugared Sonnets. p 355

The question is why do I read Wilson or Scarry so closely? Two reasons. First, the sonnets are a funhouse of mirrors. It is always fascinating to see how a brilliant mind - and both Wilson and Scarry have undeniable brilliance - finds its way through the labyrinth of illusion, reflection and reality. Second, it throws a more memorable light upon the sonnets, it provides more of a "mnemonic story" to enrich the meaning. If it's not sex, via innuendo or double entendre, which burns forth from between the sweet lines of the poem (But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure), then a secret, a hidden message, a conspiracy can be just as memorable.

Even though Sonnet 18 is one of the most well-known and most easily memorized (having to due with how present it is in the poetic landscape), I was still delighted to read in Naming Thy Name:

Then comes the final couplet: 

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

The first of these two lines records the name of Henry Constable. 

So LONg as mEn CAn BReaTHe, or EYes caN see,

C  O  N  S  T  A  B  L  E     H  E  N  R  Y

The “this” in the final line—“So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”—refers to the whole sonnet, but more specifically to the antecedent line with its precious cargo. One might object that a ten-syllable line has many letters and may contain, by accident, many names. This is a reasonable objection and no doubt accidental names do reside in the line. But there are fewer names than one might suppose: Philip Sidney is not in the line, nor Edmund Spenser, nor Christopher Marlowe, nor John Donne; nor, alas, has Shakespeare accidentally recorded my own name in the line, nor the name of the first five friends who come to mind, and many of us have fewer letters in our names than Henry Constable. Furthermore, put forward here is not any line but one that announces that the beloved is, at that very moment, inside our eyes, inside our breath, and that we are, by lending the line our live percipience, keeping the beloved alive." - Naming Thy Name. loc. 113

I found this absolutely delightful - if a little wacky. But it added a depth of memorability to the line. I love the realization that whenever I recite this line - which I've recited a hundreds of times - I now hear the little whisper of "Henry Constable" inside of it.

(See Solving Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Elaine Scarry’s “Naming Thy Name” by Matthew Harrison for a nice critique.)

Helen Vendler is more problematic. Her anagramatic exposures are rooted deeper in the language. She is more of a poetic anatomist, confining her explorations to the realm of the poem, and not inclined to reach into the more nebulous realms of over-arching theory. Referring to her notions of the Key Word, she writes:

Absurd though such principles of composition may seem to nonpoetic eyes, poets find them appealing (as such forms as sestinas and pantoums bear witness). The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. p 75

And, regarding Sonnet 7:

There are some odd words in the poem - among them fore duteous and tract - which beg for explanation. It becomes evident, as one reads the sonnets, that as Shakespeare begins to follow out a given verbal scheme, the constraints on language grow as the sonnet in question progresses to its end. Nothing in the requirements of meaning or sound alone would have prevented Shakespeare from writing:

The eyes [once] duteous now converted are
From his low [path] and look another way.

Neither fore nor tract can be explained by semantic, alliterative, or phonetic needs. At the risk of seeming overingenious, I can only suggest that the golden sun generates through the sonnet, French puns on or: orient, adore, mortal, and - our point of origin - fore; and that the central image of the sun's car generates anagrammatically scrambled cars elsewhere: in gracious, sacred, and - our point of origin - tract. The aging of the sun in the poems seems to generate homage, age, golden pilgrimmage, and (once again) age; and the long (to the reader, intolerable) suppression of the word sun of course makes the word son, when it finally leaps off the page as the closing word, entirely inevitable.  - The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. p 76


Now this is also insanely brilliant - no less so than Scarry. With Vendler's analysis, I often get a sense of being in the proto-linguistic cauldron of Shakespeare's mind. She probes into the morpheme and phonemes of his language in a way that I cannot imagine he was conscious of. Who knows? Perhaps he was. This is Shakespeare after all: he practically invented the English Language. As Bloom would have it: he invented us.

Nevertheless, Vendler's anatomizing is not as helpful to me mnemonically. If the sonnet is the forest and each word are the trees, I find it distracting to examine each leaf, turning them over and inside-out. However, it is fascinating to follow her down into the basements of the sonnets: roots and fertile unconscious earth, half-formed creations in mason jars and piles of broken sounds that once animated words long forgotten.

All of this as preface to my returning to the Memory Work.