Last week, we discussed the paired sonnets constituting Edmund Bolton's brilliant study in recantation, "A Palinode". The discussion veered at times into those jungles that surround the Elizabethan rose-garden. Could Shakespeare have written the Bolton? Was Boulton a metaphysical poet avant la lettre? Did John Donne and Bolton ever swap poem drafts? When does Elizabethan poetry end and Metaphysical poetry begin?
The discussion proved a fine excuse, if any were needed, to feature a Shakespeare sonnet this week. Posters nominated various favourites: 121, 142, 119, 85, 73, 116, 97, 98, 104, 110. Thanks @ Anytimefrances, JingleheimerFinn, deadgod and Parisa for some fine suggestions. All the sonnets are here:
The sonnet I finally picked was the relatively unfamiliar No 119, one of the three suggested by Anytimefrances, who also advocated featuring two poems by different poets. Although initially I felt that one sonnet by the bard would be ample food for thought, I noticed that sonnet 119 developed themes from 118, and I decided it would be interesting to indulge in two after all.
Shakespeare is thought to have written the sonnets between 1595-99.We don't know their exact order of composition; the usual sequence in which they're printed was not necessarily Shakespeare's. However, 118 and 119 certainly seem a natural pair.
Love as a form of sickness is a favourite trope of courtly love. But Shakespeare in 118 conjures flights of new metaphors and psychological subtleties from the stereotype. The process his sonnet describes is a common one: lovers, bored or in search of extra kicks, challenge the "ne'er-cloying sweetness" of a perfectly good relationship by anticipating "ills that were not", and generally behaving badly. The speaker takes a sanguine view, comparing the self-induced quarrels and infidelities to the purgatives and emetics that promote sickness only to restore health. The analogy is deftly sustained, but then recanted in the fine epigrammatic stroke of the couplet: "But thence I learn and find the lesson true,// Drugs poison him that fell so sick of you". "Him that fell so sick of you" alludes to the speaker, clearly, but is "to fall sick of" someone to fall desperately in love with them, or to become bored with them, "sick of" them, in the modern idiom? I favour the first interpretation, which makes more sense, then, of the moral (lurking all along) – that the love was a state of perfect health, and those metaphorical drugs intended to ginger up the love affair were not cures at all, but poisons.
Shakespeare begins the sonnet with an extended comparison, grammatically similar to that of Bolton's first sonnet. But I still think Bolton's is a very different poem – a cooler and more objective performance altogether.
Sonnet 119 is different in tone again. The speaker seems to admit he has been unfaithful. He thought it was fun at the time ("still losing when I saw myself to win") but he realises now he has been seduced, and self-deceived.
This sonnet has a confessional urgency about it. The tone of the rhetorical question of line seven seems aghast: "How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted?" The verb "fitted" suggests more than "fixed": it reminds us of fits of madness and, for the modern reader, it reverberates with sounds of carpentry and engineering (a horrible thought when connected to vulnerable eyes). In looking elsewhere, the eyes have been displaced. Medicine so extreme is not curative. The limbeck (limbeck being an informal term for alembic, the vessel used by the alchemists for purposes of distillation) is a cauldron not of magical transformation but of corruption.
But, again, Shakespeare pulls in the central idea of 118: that good can come out of wrongdoing. "O benefit of ill!" he exclaims, as if to convince himself. And he pursues his earlier case with vigour, if not a great deal of verbal invention: "…ruined love, when it is built anew/ Grows fairer …" Still the tone seems anxiously assertive, and the technique is less playfully confident than in the previous sonnet. The metaphorical shift – from medicine and alchemy to building – suggests the drive to evoke solidity. The relationship, wilfully ravaged, has had to be rebuilt.
Sonnet 120 will continue the theme, with, this time, the focus on the speaker as the victim, rather than the perpetrator, of betrayal. These are among the less-anthologised, less loved and praised of the sonnets, but one of the reasons they are interesting is that they seem embedded in a dialogue (though we hear only half of it, of course). No love-poem is entirely monologic, perhaps, but some emerge from a resolved and autonomous psychological state. Others are part of a process of exchange with the beloved: they are unresolved, a little raw.
These sonnets remind me of Shakespeare the dramatist. There's a vocal quality to 119 in particular. As for 118, it demonstrates that Shakespeare was adept at the metaphorical flights which were later to be dubbed "metaphysical". Poetic movements do not have clear "start" or "sell-by" dates printed on them. They are often identified retrospectively. It was Samuel Johnson who first used the term Metaphysical, intending to disparage an unnecessary display of learning. In Johnson's sense, Shakespeare hardly qualifies as Metaphysical at all: the learning that provides such a stunning array of vehicles for his metaphors is always a means rather than an end.
118
Like as, to make our appetite more keen,
With eager compounds we our palate urge;
As, to prevent our maladies unseen,
We sicken to shun sickness when we purge;
Even so, being full of your ne'er-cloying sweetness,
To bitter sauces did I frame my feeding,
And, sick of welfare, found a kind of meetness
To be diseased, ere that there was true needing.
Thus policy in love, t'anticipate
The ills that were not, grew to faults assur'd,
And brought to medicine a healthful state
Which rank of goodness would by ill be cured;
But thence I learn and find the lesson true,
Drugs poison him that fell so sick of you.
119
What potions have I drunk of Siren tears
Distilled from limbecks foul as hell within,
Applying fears to hopes, and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw myself to win?
What wretched errors hath my heart committed,
While it hath thought itself so blessed never?
How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted,
In the distraction of this madding fever?
O benefit of ill! Now I find true
That better is by evil still made better;
And ruined love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater:
So I return rebuked to my content,
And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent.