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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."
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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.
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
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