SONNET 11 SEAL: As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow'st

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As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow'st
In one of thine, from that which thou departest;
And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow'st,
Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest.
Herein lives wisdom, beauty, and increase;
Without this folly, age, and cold decay:
If all were minded so, the times should cease
And threescore year would make the world away.
Let those whom nature hath not made for store,
Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish:
Look whom she best endowed, she gave the more;
Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish:
   She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby,
   Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.


SONNET INDEX

Mnemonic Image 

SEAL


Memory Passage 

Beauty's ROSE solitary in a muddy World War I TRENCH. Reflecting in a GLASS (mirror) the face of the EXECUTOR, Death, who admires the FRAME of bone, adjusts it with his HAND to catch the SUN. Suddenly, the world is full of MUSIC (infinite octave) that fills Death with SHAME and then  HATE.

Death places his SEAL upon time...

source

Alexander the Great  - source

The Great Seal of the United States - source

Idiosyncratic Imagery

The Young Man and the Poet are at the Wedding Party, the sorrow inducing music of Sonnet 8 is heard off in the distance. The Poet has just requested in Sonnet 10 that if the Young Man wishes to continue his decadent lifestyle, (causing hatred, Sonnet 9, and shame, Sonnet 10); if he has no willingness to get married and produce a "tender heir," then perhaps he give, bestow, to the Poet the right to "an-other self," an idealized, Platonic, form which the Poet may immortalize in the language of the sonnets.

The Poet continues in Sonnet 11 to seduce and persuade the Young Man towards this immortalizing transaction. Per the Young Man's inclinations, and perhaps as a slight jab, he tells him: the duty you have to honor your beauty is related to your lust for sex. Through promoting and displaying your beauty, you draw the attentions of the world around you. Your charisma and charm seduces others to surrender to you, to offer themselves up to you for your pleasure. Thus you find your self, resplendent and full of pride, before the entrance to the Temple, doors spread open, inviting you deeper. You enter within and experience the Mystery, the transitory ecstasy, a oneness and completeness of being glimpsed in an tumescent ejaculation of pleasure. But immediately after, there is always the imminent sorrow of your separation, leaving, your departing, as you grow hollow, empty, flaccid - as you wane, slip and fall out of the interior of the temple / womb and reluctantly withdraw back into your self

The Poet continues: but that fresh blood, that distillation of your self, the essence of your self which you gave within, now grows as quickly, quickens, as an intaken breath, inspiration, finding a new life in poetic language. Hopefully, someday when you have exchanged, converted, the superficial pleasures of your youth for the more enduring endeavors of maturity, you will know the inspiration, the seed, as your own, recognizing the your own face, the semblance of your beauty, still radiant, within the temple of the language. You will recognize the more enduring substance behind the fleeting shadows you are so enchanted with now.

You should seek to cultivate within you and pass on to future generations the ideals of Truth, Beauty and Goodness which you unconsciously embody now in your radiant youth. Nature has given you a gift, an overabundance of being, store, which you should recognize and honor, cherish.

You have been carved out of the harsh, featureless and rude matter of being as a seal. And in the same way as the acorn should grown into the oak tree, you should use the seal of your beauty to print more reproductions of your self, to bring more beauty into the world.

White Rose, Dore. - source

Couplet Imagery

 She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby,
   Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.

It is the sculptor’s power, so often alluded to, of finding the perfect form and features of a goddess, in the shapeless block of marble; and his ability to chip off all extraneous matter, and let the divine excellence stand forth for itself. Thus, in every incident of business, in every accident of life, the poet sees something divine, and carefully scales off all that encumbers that divinity, and permits it to be revealed in all its transcendent loveliness. - “The Methodist Quarterly Review," 1858 from https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/22/chip-away/

Finally, I asked him: “Mr. M., what are you going to make out of that?” Looking up kindly into my face, he said: “My boy, I am not going to make anything out of it. I am going to find something in it.” I did not quite comprehend, but said: “Why, what are you going to find in it?” He replied: “There is a beautiful angel in that block of marble, and I am going to find it. All I have to do is to knock off the outside pieces of marble, and be very careful not to cut into the angel with my chisel. In a month or so you will see how beautiful it is.” - George F. Pentecost,  “The Angel in the Marble” from https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/22/chip-away/ 

It's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play. - Miles Davis

Prisoners, Michelangelo. - source

Christ and Mary Magdalene, Rodin. - source

The couplet contains twinned allegorical imagery:

(1) Nature has carved "the extraneous matter" from the raw block of being to create (creation as revelation) the "transcendent loveliness" that is the Young Man; and

(2) the duty, responsibility (scared duty), of this carved seal of beauty is to reproduce itself, print more.

An amoral aura of Beauty as a sort of eugenic virus lurks between the lines of this sonnet. Encoded into essence of beauty is the necessity for it to reproduce itself - endlessly. Spheres of reproduction, replication, reflection, representation intersect, overlap and crowd tightly against each other. Narcissus in a room full of mirrors, tirelessly rearranging reflections of self to approximate the oncness of infinity, a calculus of differential annihilation.

An ambiguity cleaves to the figures of Nature carving the Young Man as a seal of beauty and Time carving its lines over the Young Man's face (S2, S19, S22, S100), undoing Nature's artistry. Nature carves away to reveal beauty, Time carves into to destroy this revelation. Beauty is that, "the something divine," which is envisioned within the uncarved, unordered, chaos of "raw reality." The creation of beauty, the vision of the angel in the stone, is conceived from the Transcendental Ideal. It is a Noetic Intelligence, the highest order of understanding. These are the archetypal patterns, axioms of order, that warp and weave to form our utmost conception of what is beautiful.

Note the teleology and implicit morality in the uncovering of what is latent within, as the oak tree unfolds from the acorn, the the truth is unconcealed from its hidden-ness.

"Aletheia (Ancient Greek: ἀλήθεια) is truth or disclosure in philosophy. It was used in Ancient Greek philosophy and revived in the 20th century by Martin Heidegger. 

"It is a Greek word variously translated as "unclosedness", "unconcealedness", "disclosure" or "truth". The literal meaning of the word ἀ–λήθεια is "the state of not being hidden; the state of being evident." It also means factuality or reality. It is the opposite of lethe, which literally means "oblivion", "forgetfulness", or "concealment". According to Pindar's Olympian Ode, Aletheia is the daughter of Zeus, while Aesop in his Fables said that she was crafted by Prometheus." - Wikipedia

Nature creates these patterns by exclusion, by removing that which is not beautiful from that which is. The beautiful is what is rare, separated from what is common, vulgar.

"All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare." - Baruch Spinoza

Nature has carved, unconcealed, un-hidden, the Beauty of the Young Man. As such, he stands forth, self-evident, true, as a pattern (S19: For beauty's pattern to succeeding men) to be reproduced or which should reproduce itself. And whereas previously in the sonnets, the injunction has been towards a genetic procreation, here the the metaphor of printing introduces the possibility that his beauty can be reproduced through the written word. The Logos as a living and breathing spirit in the eyes and breaths of men. The Flesh is made Word.

Printing more copies, the child is no longer the vessel, the printed word is.  The bequeathed transcendental self from Sonnet 10 is granted the power of infinite reproduction.


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.

"It is typical of Shakespeare's constantly analytical mind that he would press into use so many different inorganic as well as organic categories by which one thing "begets" another, and the he would discriminate tonally among (a) those happy instances which produce the new without themselves being diminished (e.g., the happy strings in their married concord); (b) the happier instances where the original is augmented (as in the loan repayment by which ten of thine ten times refigured thee, in sonnet 6); and (c) those elegiac instances which introduce nostalgia (as the mother's glass in 3 calls back the lovely April of her prime). "Vendler

Boulder with Daoist paradise, Qing dynasty (1644–1911) - source

Introductory

Perhaps it is folly to attempt to make a Shakespearian sonnet more memorable. But these poems are distant for many, museum pieces set under glass, ornate objects d'art in a curio cabinet. Most hear the name Shakespeare and either position themselves to listen to sacred scripture or to endure a pompous parade of elitist high culture. Few friends or family will happily assent to audience the recitation of a sonnet.

The sonnets are like those desiccated and dried roses found in a wooden box under old letters in a Grandmother's keepsake chest. There is a staleness, a closeness, an faint odor of decay and death. They are haunted by the dust of times long past. But there was once blood in those roses, beauty, radiance, love, fevered whispers and intoxicating kisses. Each of them perhaps had a story replete with scandal and betrayal and unrequited love. If they could only speak....

Of course, the sonnets still do. To those that are willing to listen, they sing, they are alive and pulsing with blood. The "hits" still have relevance, S18, S55, S105, even misconstrued and misunderstood, as touchstones of love. But there are 154 or them. Many sonnets seem in comparison to the "hits" to be filler or B-side. It is only later, in the larger scope of the overall series that they reveal a startling connectivity and currency.

If the intent is to memorize them - even in the most cursory manner - then it is easy to become exhausted. The sheer over-abundance of the Shakespearian language overwhelms. Many of the sonnets seem occluded, with intensely private centers, offering no easy handles. Others are deceptively forthright but upon closer readings resonate with ambiguity whose meaning suddenly multiplies.

In order to memorize this often kaleidoscopic array, there is a natural and necessary tendency to invent "ghost narratives," idiosyncratic stories, perhaps not entirely accessible on the conscious level.  These ghost narratives call upon personal biography, history, imagined and not necessarily true internal narratives within the sonnets themselves, "made-up" back-stories about the principal figures or the Young Man, the Poet and the Dark Woman. Balance is needed here between our own private mythologies and the consensually agreed upon intent of the sonnets. But one of the most wonderful and terrible qualities of the sonnets is they are so maddeningly ambiguous, offering themselves up to an extraordinary multiplicity of interpretations. As in the anachronism often believed to have designated the unknown on most old maps, the warning stands: "Here be Dragons." There is no limit to the number of brilliant lies and "perfectly reasonable" rationalizations that are propped up to stand in place of the truth, especially when the truth has been concealed.

This being stated, the contention here is that ANY method you might use to memorize a sonnet is acceptable. If at first, you refashion each sonnet to be about yourself, that's fine as long as it fixes the sonnet in the memory. Over time and with each newly memorized sonnet, there is a subtle transformation in mnemonic strategy. The plot of the sonnets thickens, the narrative reinforces particular themes, certain words and phrases echo, antagonists and protagonists emerge and the submerged structure of a vast and comprehensive philosophy seems to shimmer in the depths, just beyond the grasp of comprehension. Those sonnets that were initially invested with your own idiosyncratic mnemonics metamorphosize in the ever enriching web of the whole, the chrysalis of self-containment splitting apart to reveal an unsuspected beauty and meaning.

Obviously, that which has the most meaning for us is the most memorable. Why not suppose every sonnet is meaningful, that there is no filler, no b-sides, no tired repetitions? Of course, even Homer nods. But  instead of discounting a great number of sonnets, what if you were to imagine they were each written in a white hot paroxysm of blood and passion, packed full of philosophical meaning? Even it you were to err upon the side of insanity, the sonnet itself would become much more memorable. Certainly, it is easier to memorize 154 sonnets that cut and bleed, shed tears, shudder in ecstasy, joyfully ejaculate, burn with rage and hate and regret, and may be as insane as a red rose the size of the sun bleeding evening into the skies , than it is to remember the dead, dried petals of a once living thing on the verge of collapsing into dust. And the irony that is no irony here is that this is not an insane interpretation: the Sonnets are filled with this vital, overflowing, abundance of life and deep philosophical structure.

At the end of Sonnet 10, the Poet implored the Young Man,


    Make thee another self, for love of me,
    That beauty still may live in thine or thee.


The mnemonic strategy here to suppose that what the Poet was asking for was poetic permission to use the Ideal Self of the Young Man as a muse around which to build the monument of the Series. Shakespeare is writing these sonnets years after sonnet sequences were in vogue. You can imagine his overreaching mind dissatisfied with merely writing another typical sequence. Better to turn it inside out and animate it with a sophisticated and clever philosophical machine. Instead of writing to praise and "immortalize" a name - Laura, Phoebe, Delia, Shakespeare uses poetic language itself as a vessel to contain and transcendentalize beauty. In order to do this, there must be a radiant figure upon which the Poet can project his eternalizing language. The initial ten sonnets of the procreation series set the stage upon which the Young Man is unsuccessfully urged to reproduce in the form of a child. Sonnet 10  is a zero point, a re-turning, with the Poet introducing himself in order to midwife a new conception of the Young Man, no longer the petulant and tired rake, but an idealized conception.

Throughout the sonnets, Shakespeare wrestles with the physical presence, the sweating tangible beauty of the Young Man and the Idealized Self that he is celebrating in the language. As Auden remarked, there was the Poet's "glory of the vision" struggling with a person determined in "covering the vision with dirt." But is is precisely this tension, between the squalid aging beauty and the pure ageless ideal that give the sonnets their enduring Pulse.

Persistence of Memory, Dali. - source

Q1:

As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow'st
In one of thine, from that which thou departest;
And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow'st,
Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest.

After Sonnet 10, with it's injunctive tone of making another self for the Poet to use for his own purposes, Sonnet 11 begins at a seminal moment. The Young Man has just ejaculated his semen, his essence, into a new creative womb, the creative crucible of the Poet's imagination. After the tumescent posturing of the previous narrative, the Young Man is here figured waning, being emptied out, in a post coital refractory haze. His fresh blood - the Elizabethans believed semen was a distillation of blood - more, his essence, this seed of a new Neoplantonic Ideal Self, has been given fertile ground within the mind of the poet and endurance in language.

As quickly as the Young Man's erection fades, this new Ideal Neoplatonic Self grows "in one of thine," the womb that his flaccid, emptied, cock is now slipping sadly out of. That moment of blissful union, of oneness, has passed in a paroxysm of self-transcended ecstasy, and the self now gazes back into its own mirror, enfolding once again into a Narcissistic inward regression. This new seed is received by the poet - note the feminine rhymes - who is now tasked with giving birth through language to this Neoplatonic Child.

The Poet tells the Young Man, this fresh blood, this seminal essence of your beauty, you will know as your own only when you have converted from the profligate ways of youth and gained maturity and wisdom. In a sense, the Young Man is unable to comprehend the significance of the gift he has given. And he will not comprehend it until he changes the nature of his mind, until he grasps the stark fact that he is living in a world of shadows. Only when he turns away from the shadowplay of his nightly carousings and sees things in the true light of day, will he understand that he has sold his soul, his beauty,  to the Poet in exchange for an enduring and lasting fame.

Note the converest. Not grow out of youth, but to convert out of youth. It is not a matter that concerns time so much as a willingness to change, transform. Modern connotations of converting one currency into another - often with usurious with interest.


Q2:

Herein lives wisdom, beauty, and increase;
Without this folly, age, and cold decay:
If all were minded so, the times should cease
And threescore year would make the world away.

Herein... in these words, within the womb of language, the Neoplatonic Triad is elucidated. Wisdom is Truth, Beauty is Beauty and Increase is Goodness. Aristotle provides additional animating insight as Truth becomes Theoretical, Beauty is Productive and Increase is the Practical. If the Young Man had not impregnated the mind of the Poet with the essence of his beauty, his life would be absent of the aspects of the Triad: one of folly, foolishness, tired and fruitless aging, and cold - almost inanimate - decay.

The moral imperative rings true for the necessity of human procreation and for poetic invention.


Q3:

Let those whom nature hath not made for store,
Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish:
Look whom she best endowed, she gave the more;
Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish:

Nature's "store" here is that which is uncommon, rare and most beautiful - Miles Davis' "unplayed notes," the silence that adumbrates the meaning of the melody. The "store" is not an encompassing totality of goods, as you might imagine in a mercantile setting or a room full of supplies. Rather, is the selection from that totality of that which is best, most. Here is the Shakespearian sense. Nature gave the Young Man more, not in quantity, but in quality. Beauty is the essence refined from the crude, raw stuff of life. Beauty is like a Tibetan mandala which serves as a image pattern, (harmonizing mnemonic?), vessel for the Truth, a repository for meaning. Beauty is a mystical mnemonic for the meaning of life.


Couplet:

She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby,
   Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.

"Printed copies do not die. "Copy" in this sense forcibly recalls its etymological root, copia, and thus puns on the semantic import of increase and bounty, those signs of nature's cornucopia." Vendler 

"With the introduction of the word print, we begin to approach the emphasis on the eternizing power of art which will, after sonnet 17, supplant breeding altogether." Vendler 

"There is also a play on the meaning of copy that has since become its only common one, "reproduction," and on copy in the equally common Renaissance sense of "abundance," the sense closest to the Latin root (copia: "abundance," "riches," "store," "ability," "power," "means"). (In context of seal, print and copy, a modern reader may hear a  logically casual pun on a "die," an engraved stamp for impressing a design upon metal; the pun is particularly inviting in this context of procreation since a die is often used in conjunction with a "matrix." However, OED gives no example of this sense of "die" before 1699 and none for the relevant sense of "matrix" before 1626.)" Booth

There is a mystery in the final phrase, "not let that copy die." If the Young Man is the carved seal of beauty, then the substance which this seal is made to print with is the copy, copia, abundance, semen. To let the copy die is to ooze an ink over the seal and not imprint it upon any matter that will receive its impression. There is a semantic tension, ambiguity, here in locating the precise matter of / for the copy. There is a potential resolution in understanding the copy as a reflection. It is this Ideal Reflection, this Representation of Beauty in the mind of the Young Man (perhaps) and the Poet (mostly) that is the copy that should not die. Here the process of printing is literally the creation of a language that will hold the impression of the Young Man's beauty; it is the monument of the sonnets themselves that the copies, the copia, abundance, that shall live on as enduring representations / reproductions of the Young Man's beauty.

Kerrigan (see below) attempts to un-puzzle some of the ambiguity. The crux resides in the distinction between physical reproduction and intellectual mimesis. See Plato.

"The trouble is, we have lost touch with the ideal of copiousness so dear to the Elizabethans. For is, the word 'copy', like 'reproduction' in art, implies debasement; but when Shakespeare says of Nature, elsewhere in the 'breeding group', 'She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby | Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die', the 'seal" which prints is a 'copy' because, in sixteenth century English, a 'copy' was something from which copies were produced. No original need be inferred, as it is with us, even when describing the printer's copy from which copies of this book are printed. A 'copy' was that wich might produce 'semblances' which could reproduce that 'copy'; so, in copying, 'identity' did, and yet did not, push 'resemblance' to Steven's 'vanishing point'. In other words, couplets on breeding like 'This were to be made new when thou are old, | And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold' or 'Make thee another self for love of me, | That beauty still may live in thine or thee' advocate in life a plentitude, a copiousness, resembling that copia which renaissance rhetoricians thought texts should aspire to through a proliferation of eloquent 'ficgures'. Think of De Copia itself, where Erasmus writes, 'By your letter was I mightily pleased' one hundred and forty-six times, yet never quite repeats himself. Breeding promises an infinite extension of such 'increase', a proliferation of 'figures' in a human sense, where each is its other's 'copy'. " - Kerrigan

copy (n.)
early 14c., "written account or record," from Old French copie (13c.), from Medieval Latin copia "reproduction, transcript," from Latin copia "an abundance, ample supply, profusion, plenty," from com "with" (see com-) + ops (genitive opis) "power, wealth, resources," from PIE root *op- "to work, produce in abundance." Sense extended 15c. to any specimen of writing (especially MS for a printer) and any reproduction or imitation. Related: Copyist. 

copy (v.)
late 14c., from Old French copier (14c.), from Medieval Latin copiare "to transcribe," originally "to write in plenty," from Latin copia (see copy (n.)). Hence, "to write an original text many times." Related: Copied; copying. Figurative sense of "to imitate" is attested from 1640s. - https://www.etymonline.com/word/copy

Illustrations and Drafts

Mimesis (/maɪˈmiːsəs/; Ancient Greek: μίμησις (mīmēsis), from μιμεῖσθαι (mīmeisthai), "to imitate", from μῖμος (mimos), "imitator, actor") is a critical and philosophical term that carries a wide range of meanings, which include imitation, representation, mimicry, imitatio, receptivity, nonsensuous similarity, the act of resembling, the act of expression, and the presentation of the self.[1] In contradistinction to diegesis with its requirement of detachment, all this presumes involvement on the part of the participants. 

In ancient Greece, mimesis was an idea that governed the creation of works of art, in particular, with correspondence to the physical world understood as a model for beauty, truth, and the good. Plato contrasted mimesis, or imitation, with diegesis, or narrative. After Plato, the meaning of mimesis eventually shifted toward a specifically literary function in ancient Greek society, and its use has changed and been reinterpreted many times since. - Wikipedia

Diegesis (Greek διήγησις "narration") and mimesis (Greek μίμησις "imitation") have been contrasted since Plato's and Aristotle's times. Mimesis shows rather than tells, by means of action that is enacted. Diegesis is the telling of a story by a narrator. The narrator may speak as a particular character or may be the invisible narrator or even the all-knowing narrator who speaks from "outside" in the form of commenting on the action or the characters. 

In Book III of his Republic (c. 373 BC), Plato examines the "style" of "poetry" (the term includes comedy, tragedy, epic and lyric poetry): All types narrate events, he argues, but by differing means. He distinguishes between narration or report (diegesis) and imitation or representation (mimesis). Tragedy and comedy, he goes on to explain, are wholly imitative types; the dithyramb is wholly narrative; and their combination is found in epic poetry. When reporting or narrating, "the poet is speaking in his own person; he never leads us to suppose that he is any one else"; when imitating, the poet produces an "assimilation of himself to another, either by the use of voice or gesture". In dramatic texts, the poet never speaks directly; in narrative texts, the poet speaks as him or herself.  

In his Poetics, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle argues that kinds of "poetry" (the term includes drama, flute music, and lyre music for Aristotle) may be differentiated in three ways: according to their medium, according to their objects, and according to their mode or "manner" (section I); "For the medium being the same, and the objects the same, the poet may imitate by narration — in which case he can either take another personality as Homer does, or speak in his own person, unchanged — or he may present all his characters as living and moving before us" (section III). - Wikipedia