100 Best-Loved Poems: William Shakespeare, Sonnet CXVI

William Shakespeare
SONNET CXVI

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
     If this be error and upon me proved,
     I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

It's difficult for any intelligent person not to hate Sonnet 116 on account of all the damage it has done in the service of dull wedding ceremonies ... difficult, but not impossible. Underneath all the historical crust of accrued schmaltz, there is a respectable, functional sonnet.

The first line alone is a masterpiece of metrical license taken just to its limits:

let me | NOT to | the MAR- | riage of | TRUE MINDS

What have we got there? The way I've scanned it, which is by no means definitive, but seems reasonable to me, we've got a pyrrhic foot (two unstressed syllables) at the outset. If you like, it's a garden-variety initial inversion--a trochee (stressed, unstressed) for an iamb (unstressed, stressed)--but I have to strain to perceive any appreciable syllabic emphasis at all. Then, directly following that, we've got a trochee. So whether other readers agree with me about the pyrrhic opening or not, we've at least got solid trochaic meter for the first two feet. In the third foot, we get our first iamb--and our last, if you'll grant me another pyrrhic foot in the fourth slot. Finally, we close with a spondee (two stressed syllables). One unequivocal iamb in the whole line.

No big deal by itself, perhaps, but then in the second line we've got that strong caesura (effected by the period) after the first two words, another pyrrhic foot in the third foot, and a trochee in the fourth foot. For the first half of the first quatrain, the sonnet is basically indistinguishable from prose. The second half of the stanza (indeed, most of the rest of the poem) is in mechanically regular iambics, and we have to project this regularity backwards to hear how the rhythms of the first two lines accommodate the pentameter structure as a whole.

This almost anti-metrical beginning suggests that Shakespeare is intentionally drawing on the prose cadences of the Book of Common Prayer, from which he draws much of his vocabulary for the sonnet ("impediment," etc.). In a way, you could say that it is his fault the poem has become a wedding cliche.

Helping to counter this is the suitably grim third quatrain, which treats the mutability topos (all things decay in time, etc.) like an extreme sport. Check the "compass" of Time's sickle: that bitch is swinging his blade like a movie serial killer. Those "rosy lips and cheeks" just got a whole lot rosier, yo, lying there in a big dismembered heap. English Literature is not pretty.

(I omit commentary on the second quatrain for the sake of space, and because I have nothing terribly original to say about it, other than that I can't help but hear "every wandering bark" as an unintentional index of Love's indiscriminate nature: like, "any port in a storm" or something.)

The couplet is about as unstable a proposition as one could hope to find. Someone please tell me how the "if/then" logic is supposed to work in it. Why would the demonstration of the untruth of the proposition that true love is eminently constant enforce the conclusion that the author had never written, or that no one in history had ever been in love (or, depending on how you construe the grammar, that the author had never loved any man)? Am I missing something obvious, or is this just desperately giddy rhetoric?

100 Best-Loved Poems: William Shakespeare, Sonnet XCIV

Again, this is part of my ongoing poem-by-poem commentary on the Dover Thrift Editions paperback 100 Best-Loved Poems, edited by Philip Smith (Dover Publications, Inc., 1995). "Edited" is a bit grandiose a term to describe the hasty hack-and-paste job Smith has done (if Smith isn't in fact an exec of some sort at Dover and the task wasn't just commissioned to a team of hirelings), but the whole thing costs like a couple of dollars, so hey.

William Shakespeare
SONNET XCIV

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow;
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
     For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
     Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

My insight on this poem is functionally worthless compared to that contained in a privately published (now apparently out of print), 87-page, 2001 monograph by J.H. Prynne, They That Haue Powre to Hurt; A Specimen of a Commentary on Shake-speares Sonnets, 94. Prynne goes through the sonnet word by word, phrase by phrase, supplying the most exhaustive and informative explication one could wish of what is essentially fourteen lines saying "You're hot, and that's all the more reason not to be slutty."



J.H. Prynne

Prynne devotes, for example, nearly three pages (in pretty small, densely-set type) to "They," the first word of the poem. "'They': we do not know who they are," he begins. Prynne in fact knows that we do know, upon reading the sonnet in its entirety, who they are, in the loose sense that they are a general class of beings who have learned to self-regulate their "power" (in this case, the power of beauty) responsibly. His point is that the pronoun is deployed, as it and others so often are throughout the Sonnets, in a way that keeps us guessing and second-guessing our way through the grammar and context until we feel relatively sure of the web of relationships we have been drawn into--and then guessing again, as we deal with the sub-web of connotations and ghost meanings produced by such vague "shifters" (as Roman Jakobson called deictic pronouns like "they," "she," "it," etc.). As Prynne observes:

It is not that the human figures here are presumably dark within the inner world of the poem, since to each other they must at least have been extremely close; rather just that to the outside view they present as anonymous, beyond any reckonable perspective.

It is this anonymity that generates so many technically erroneous readings, or partial readings, of the Sonnets: the type of reading a reader may arrive at upon a careless or incomplete perusal, satisfied to have landed upon an explanatory apparatus that makes at least provisional sense, and temporarily blinded to the other pieces of context in the poem that would render this reading unworkable. I call such readings "technically" erroneous because although they cannot, as I've just said, be maintained upon a more complete engagement with the total syntactical and grammatical framework of the poem, the evocative textual details that inspire them sometimes appear to have been intentionally "planted" in order to generate shadow meanings that fall outside the major focus of the poem's "plot." Thus, Prynne remarks, almost as an aside:

If there were any prospect that these others might be political enemies (which the context mostly excludes), this power-holding anonymity could be very sinister.

I am certain that Prynne is not the first reader to whom the "prospect" in question has occurred (it has occurred to me, for instance, and more than one of my students). And if the context of the poem as a whole "mostly excludes" this prospect, it does so only in the logical, grammatical, and narrative senses. Words like "power," "lords," "owners," etc. can't help but conjure the register of aristocracy and governmental control, nor would Shakespeare have been oblivious to this fact.

Prynne's study explores these connotative dimensions of the sonnet in near-exhaustive depth, drawing along the way on both well-known and obscure early modern texts to provide analogues and precedents. It offers the same variety of hyper-detailed glossatory pleasure as Stephen Booth's commentaries in his Yale edition of the Sonnets, only even more rich in historical and linguistic nuance. It's a resource that no university library should be without.

100 Best-Loved Poems: William Shakespeare, Sonnet LXXIII

I totally forgot about this project of mine, which suddenly seems really dull compared to Gary Sullivan's 101 Poets mini-essay series, which starts with this post. So go read that, and then if you still have a bunch of spare time and are willing to fill it with something less interesting, come back here.

William Shakespeare
SONNET LXXIII

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourish'd by.
     This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
     To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

Shakespeare's 73rd sonnet is the first poem I ever wrote a college essay on (not counting junior college). I felt very proud of myself for figuring out the telescoping movement of the poem, the way the metaphors for the speaker's advanced age start broad in the first quatrain, with the idea of a time of year; then get narrower in the second, diminishing to a single day; then focus in on a dying fire in the third. I also felt proud of figuring out that each of the three main metaphors was accompanied by a secondary metaphor: the season by the boughs which "shake against the cold" as though they were animate; the evening by night who is "Death's second self"; and the fire whose ashes are a "death-bed." Later I would discover that every other halfway observant reader of the sonnet in history had commented on the telescoping thing, and at least half of them had noted the secondary metaphor thing as well. But I felt proudest of all of my theory that there was yet another layer of what I referred to as "tertiary metaphors."

I was reaching like crazy. The idea is only really applicable to the first quatrain, in which the boughs are first compared to shaking human limbs, and then to "choirs" where the little bird choristers used to sit and sing. I tried to argue that the night in quatrain 2, in addition to being "Death's second self," was also an undertaker who "seals up" the bodies of the dead as in a crypt, and the fire ... well, I spun some B.S. about the ashes (and the logs they once were) being not only a deathbed but nourishing food that morphs into a devouring mouth (which would, I suppose, imply still a fourth level of metaphor). I think I also tried to show how somewhere across or between or around the second and third metaphoric levels, the metaphor undoes itself and reverts to the literal meaning of a man growing old. Hell, I probably tried to argue that Jimmy Hoffa was hidden somewhere in the couplet.

And as for that couplet, what always gets remarked on is the ambiguity of its grammar, especially the way that "This" can point in different directions, etc. etc.: I thought this was all very impressive when I first read the close readings that argued in this way, but looking back on it now, the only truly strong paraphrase is "You perceive all this (that I have just said), and it makes your love stronger, so that you are better able to love things, like me, that won't be around forever." I won't rehearse the other possible readings, except to note that they're not all that different anyway, and they don't change the basic sense of the poem much.

There's one other thing that commentators always love to point out: the strange ordering in line 2, where one might expect the logical progression of "yellow leaves, or few, or none," but instead we get "yellow," then "none," then "few." Various claims are made for Shakespeare's psychological subtlety in staggering the sequence thusly, such as that the speaker is portrayed as making a vain qualification, and so forth. I think he just knew it sounded better this way: the right notes in the right order.

More on Poetry and Technology (Sort of)

Some stimulating commentary by Stan Apps on the poetry/technology question I raised here. I'm generally persuaded that what he says about the shift from "pedagogical intervention" to "immersion and engagement" as strategies in recent poetry is accurate--though I'm not certain I'm as ready to find this a uniformly good thing as he is (if I read him correctly). I'm still holding out for the virtues of "critical distance" in the long run ... not as an alternative or corrective to emotional immediacy and all that, but to a blind participatory fervor.

And yet, I think Stan is also mostly right about how Flarf and other new tendencies adopt this stance of "immersion and engagement," even to the extent of throwing the pedagogical impulse into a hastily etched set of ironic brackets. But if there's a key phrase in his post that arouses my skepticism, it's "Poetry is now learning...." I understand that this is a metaphor, a convenient way of talking about patterns of adaptation and accommodation among communities of writers. At the same time, I want to resist any model of poetry as a single sentient organism that has its own agenda. I can't help seeing poetry as a function of surplus intellectual and imaginative energy: not a technology, that is, that operates either in direct sync with the machinations of any hallucination of human "progress," or with any critical apparatus designed to make intelligible--or remediable--the exact physical and psych(ot)ic coordinates of that hallucination.

Why make a case for critical distance, then, you might ask? Why not just a liberatory bacchanal of prosodic impulses, a shooting up of desperately ecstatic flares in the dark space of an ahistorical twilight? Maybe it's a demand I make on nothing more than principle. Maybe I just want my irrational excrescences to come with the added glaze of ideational exertion: the visible traces that one, as the Language poets used to like to say, has "done one's homework," because, like the base of the statue says in Animal House, "Knowledge Is Good." And maybe, even as I say that, I doubt my own convictions, and am ready to embrace this as the epicenter of resonant poetic tremors that actually manage to work up my spine, if not all the way to the brain, to some occluded organ that prefigures cerebrality's special capacity for gratification.

Is Poetry a Technology?

In Heidegger's 1958 essay "The Question Concerning Technology," as in other writings of his, he rehearses the old relation between poiesis and techne--"making" and "know-how," in the most simplistic translation I can render. Without getting too far yet into Heidegger's notion of "enframing" (Gestell), the phenomenon he points to as the result of modern technology, that is, the "challenging-forth" of resources (including human beings) as a "standing reserve," I want to stop and mull over the poiesis/techne nexus, in ways that run the risk of stating the obvious, and/or simply reworking the gist of Plato's Ion.

Poiesis is making; techne is knowing how to do things, including making. When the making in question is of an explicitly material nature, as in sculpture, architecture, carpentry, etc., the role of techne is relatively unproblematic. It involves a knowledge of materials, tools, and, physical techniques (hence the word techniques). The techne of the builder, the craftsperson, the designer, is measurable and finite, at least at a certain basic level that defines minimal competence.

At some point poiesis develops the specific sense of having-to-do-with-poetry, that is verbal poetry, that is an activity for which "making" starts to assume the status of a metaphor, something performed intellectually and/or emotionally that results in a physical artifact, but does not actually involve the manipulation of solid materials, other than a pen and paper (or keyboard, etc.). I say "other than" in order to point out that these materials, unlike, say, the marble used by a sculptor, do not inhere in the finished product--not that particular paper and ink, touched by the hands of the artist. The making performed by the poet is at a remove. It is a making that, for one thing, requires very little bodily exertion, things like repetitive-stress-syndrome aside. Most of it happens in the mind.

So poiesis eventually assumes this specialized sense. Or is this sense there from the beginning? That is, does poiesis from the very start stand in a relation of resistance to techne?

By invoking "resistance," I mean to ask whether there is some implied distinction between the practical functionality of techne and a dreamier, more perverse aspect of poiesis. And if there is, is it there from the beginning, or does it emerge only at a certain time, under certain circumstances?

I want to ask if there's a way of thinking about all this in which it becomes clear that poetry absolutely cannot be a technology, almost by definition. And at the same time, I wonder whether poetry assumes an ironic relation to technology, in which it exploits technological resources, explores technological themes, and generally behaves as though it were a member of the set "things that are intelligible under the rubric of technology," precisely in order to burlesque that relationship, to flaunt its total resistance to any subsumption by (modern) technology.

In looking at the tendencies of the past century or so that involve heavy interaction between poetry and technology, one observes a fairly constant perversity quotient. Almost never is the interaction one of straightforward cooperation or mutual embrace, and even when it sets out to be, as in the case of the Futurists, the results are hardly coherent as a smooth symbiosis of industrial efficiency and artistic epideixis or supplication (let alone the inverse). Rather, one is always aware of the absurdity of the union, as though vandals had broken into a factory and readjusted the machinery so that its gears ran in useless circles, or so that its mechanized arms produced frivolous and obscene objects. This, in fact, is almost the entire program of 'pataphysics: an indulgence in the rote motions of "scientific" procedure, but with the prior knowledge and intention that any equations or formulae thereby derived will be fit for nothing more creditable than the outfitting of ducklings with bullet-proof vests.

Now, it is true, we live in a time when poets use technology constantly as a convenience and an aid to composition. Certain poetic works are designed expressly to be viewed/heard/experienced via technological media. Their very existence, in fact, would be unimaginable in the absence of technologies like Boolean generators, Flash animation, and so on. Is there a fundamental difference between these apparent alliances and say, Bob Brown's "readie" machine, a little wooden contraption with rollers that allowed a spool of text to unravel its message in an anticipation of digital advertising marquees and cable news networks' "crawls"?

I suggest that when poetry puts on technological goggles and overalls, it does so ultimately to highlight its intrinsic incompatibility with the overarching agenda of modern technology--its capacity, perhaps, for "enframing" us all as a standing reserve of resources. This is in a sense yet another variation on the old "poetry makes nothing happen, and that's what's good about it" position. I'm tempted to push back further into history and suggest that poetry has also always had this relationship to philosophy, albeit in a necessarily subtler form.

Part of what led me to write all this was the idea that the writing of poetry is most "successful" when one knows least what one is doing: when the poet's claim to techne is least sustainable. It almost seems, however, as though there has to be some claim to techne in place, just so that claim can be travestied, either overtly or in some secret laughing chamber of the poet's mind. Therefore, poetry written by persons without any literary or craft sensibility whatsoever will almost always be negligible, because the poet therefore has nothing to misapply or subvert. But poetry written under the misconception that there is a reliable set of techniques one can use in some "correct" way will be sterile, inert. If there is a technology of poetry, it is a technology of failure--a technology of the failure of technology, except so far as technology can be made to succeed in assisting its own failure as a measure of poiesis.