Following from Monday’s conversation about alliteration/assonance/consonance in Shakespeare’s sonnets, I noticed a cool effect in the first stanza of sonnet 116:

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.

There are a lot of t sounds and d sounds (bolded in the quote)—when you read them out loud, they  force your mouth to close and your tongue to press against your teeth/palate (?). What’s cool about it is that it’s mimicking the impediment itself; Shakespeare uses the diction to amplify his meaning. I find this effect to be strongest in the first line—”not to” has two ts, back to back, which slows the momentum of the line and makes it very percussive. There are t sounds and d sounds throughout the rest of the poem, but I didn’t find them to be quite as noticeable as in the first stanza. They get displaced by th sounds and tsh sounds, which mimics the poem’s movement away from the subject of impediment to the subject of harmony.

Wells talks at some length (particularly on pgs 48-50) about many of Shakespeare’s poems being personal rather than for public consumption. “Many of the sonnets, including–indeed, especially–those that seem most revelatory of sexual infatuation and self-disgust, are private poems, personal and almost confessional in nature” (Wells 50). He also speaks on page 49 about how, if Shakespeare had been writing for a public audience, he would have published them himself, etc.

I am drawn to one of his more famous sonnets, number 18, to somewhat question Wells on this point. “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” (No. 18, 12-14). This is as blatant a statement as ever: to paraphrase, Shakespeare says, “as long as you are in my poem, you will live forever.” This does not sound like a man writing into a fire, it sounds like a man who expects his poetry to last. To me, this poem is a clear indication that Shakespeare was writing his work to be read not by one but by many. That this is one of the earliest in his collection is also significant, in that it shows his early recognition that his poetry would live on through the ages.

Knowles discusses Barnfield’s defense against claims of the “dangerous and sodomitical implications” in the sonnets in Cynthia (678).  In Barnfield’s response, Knowles explains that these “implications are rejected and turned back on the reader” but at the same time, may alert the reader to the sexual implications of his poems (678). Knowles leaves it then somewhat ambiguous as to Barnfield’s ideas with respect to the homoerotic implications of the sonnet. However, I would suggest based on Sonnet XVII that Knowles’ second suggestion may be more accurate. My focus is on the last couplet of this poem, where the speaker says “Oh how can such a body sinne-producing,/Be slow to love, and quick to hate, enduring” (13-14)? This line suggests to me Barnfield’s purposefulness and full awareness in the homoerotic implications of the poem–by calling the actions “sinne-producing” this seems to be referencing relations between men which would have been viewed as sinful. If there was nothing socially questionable about this love, this line would be very out of place.

I was struck by how Knowles’ observations on sexuality related to the content and structure of the sonnets from Barnfield’s Cynthia, particularly the relationship between homoerotic relationships and masculinity. The speaker’s fascination with Ganymede reflects the old practice of pederasty as he is obsessed with his subject’s youth and beauty. Though a pederastic relationship usually involves a master-servant-like power imbalance, with the older man holding power over the younger due to age, power, and/or position, here Ganymede seems to hold the power through his ability to refuse the speaker’s advances. As the speaker becomes increasingly desperate in his professions of love, Ganymede inadvertently strips him of his power through Ganymede’s own indifference. The speaker tries to sway Ganymede with the typical masculine act of gift giving (Sonnet XVIII), but because of his blatant declarations of affection, he ends up sacrificing his self-control and thus his semblance of masculinity (Knowles 684). Barnfield’s use of the sonnet plays with this idea of self-control, for though the tight form of the sonnet requires great eloquence and restraint, it enables the speaker to unrestrictedly and immoderately express his romantic and sexual passions.

In reading Richard’s Barnfield’s sonnets for class today, I was struck by his (consistent) use of the same colors, red and white, throughout his poems as well as his classical references, both of which seem to work together in several poems of almost displacing the body of the beloved for this sort of imagery. More specifically, I was struck by how Sonnet IX is reminiscent of a creation myth, in this case the creation of the beloved. In the poem, Diana “pricke her foote against a thorne” and with the stream of bloode she “formes a shape of Snow, / And blends it with this blood,” creating Ganymede. The beloved, thus, seems to exist in this poem and others almost as the product of the Gods and nature–the poem even ends with modifying the name Ganymede with “as all divine.” To me, this way of introducing the beloved seemed detached from physical characteristics of the beloved and step away from the blazon tradition we’ve seen in other poems, yet still manages to celebrate the beloved in a more spiritual manner.

Raisa, Austin, and I chose this poem for it is seemingly unique in not directly referencing reproduction. We read the poem through Vendler’s categories of perception and philosophy. The speaker is particularly focused on “summer’s distillation” (9) and and “flower’s distilled” (13), calling to mind perfume. Yet, he seems to use sight and visualization as his main type of perception. He uses strong imagery in lines such as “sap checked with frost” (7) and “liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass” (10). This subtly forces the reader to continue think about physical beauty, even as the poem is ostensibly about essence. Similarly, Shakespeare questions the philosophy of reproduction in this poem by arguing that the poem itself is a way for this man to preserve his beauty, not reproduction. Shakespeare talks a lot in this poem of remembrance vs. forgetting, as well as preserving “substance” (14), and seems to use the poem in order to distill the man’s beauty and essence into 14 lines. Raisa and Austin, all yours!

I was interested by how each of the sonnets seemed to have a its own individual theme, a specific point of attack to convince the reader to reproduce (although in the cases of sonnets 5 & 6, 9 & 10, there were some prolonged attacks over the course of two poems). At first reading, I was particularly struck by words that I usually would not associate with a love poem — such as how in Sonnet 4, all of Shakespeare’s reproductive imagery is measured in monetary terms, or in Sonnet 1, where he uses strong metaphors about (lack of) food/eating — but he still masterfully constructed these “odder” words to suit his message. It was helpful to read Vendler’s article afterwards about how there is something “cryptographic” about a Shakespearean sonnet, particularly how there is “an oddness that catches the eye and begs explanation” (40). Vendler also talked a lot about structure’s importance within the sonnet; I began to wonder if there was any significance about the sonnets’ arrangement as a whole, although Vendler mentioned that the sonnets were probably ordered ad libitum so perhaps this is a stretch. Yet clearly, these sonnets are a set with an overarching purpose; there seems to be a sort of inwards to outwards progression throughout the ten, starting from basic human needs (like food in Sonnet 1, your own image in 2, mother in 3, money in 4) to natural joys (flowers/summer in 5 & 6, the sun in 7, music in 8) then finally ending with family and society in Sonnets 9 & 10. Perhaps Shakespeare did not intend for this arrangement to be this meaningful, but I find these sonnets all the more persuasive because of the way his argument unfolds within the set, slowly drawing in the reader and amplifying the argument; at first, it seems to be about just making sure your own beauty is preserved for yourself, but then, at the end, your choice to reproduce will affect the whole world.

Edmund Spencer’s sonnet 37 and 67 from Amoretti are interesting because they reverse the conventional gender roles often seen in poems like “The Passionate Shepherd to his Love.” In sonnet 37, the speaker mentions that women’s appearance often deceives men because of how well they are presented. One example he includes is the woman’s hair which is wrapped in a net of gold, but he does not know what is hair or what is gold. Her beauty causes him to loose his power in differentiating what is real and what is not. He states, “In which if ever ye entrapped are, Out of her bands ye by no means shall get.” The woman he describes is the one who seduces or does the wooing. Men have the weaker hearts, and are depicted to succumb to the power of women’s beauty. In sonnet 67, Spencer uses the hunting metaphor that we’ve seen in “Whoso List To Hunt” by Wyatt, but he gives the woman or the dear the power. Although he believes he is hunting the dear, he is not successful until the dear returns on her own will. The dear allows him to capture her, which could be interpreted as a man cannot get a woman unless she wants him to. Because the dear makes the decision, it shows that she controls the fate of their relationship. The dear has done the hunting, and she chose him, rather than the opposite.

I began reading Shakespeare’s sonnets with Vendler’s thoughts on voice in mind. Vender argues that “the act of the lyric is to offer its reader a script to say” (28). The sonnet becomes inhabited by the reader/speaker, not overheard. How do we interpret Shakespeare’s tone in this set of sonnets encouraging procreation and posterity, then? Throughout reading these ten sonnets, I imagined Shakespeare winking and nudging at a young man, telling him in myriad ways to get on with it and have children. Yet if we are to use the sonnet as a script, who might take on the “I” of these sonnets? A higher force? A father? Vendler states that “if we are to be made to enter the lyric script, that the voice offered for our use be ‘believable’ to us, resembling a ‘real voice’ coming from a ‘real mind’ like our own” (28). Shakespeare achieves this realness. To me, he reads like an overbearing father cracking dad jokes at an indignant son— like saying, if you don’t give me grandkids, “make worms thine heir” (6).