—William Shakespeare
Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets. The one quoted above, called sonnet 18 and about the fair youth, is often called his best. It may or may not be the best but it is definitely the most famous, with even David Gilmour of Pink Floyd setting it to song. While reading these sonnets one of the things to be
kept in mind is that Shakespeare probably wrote them thinking of them as his legacy to posterity, his contribution to English literature, whereas his plays were meant to be performed and the rough & tumble of his earning bread and butter. Here he has put in his best, according to him, yet in other words, I know that in a world after Roland Barthes and Michael Foucault, we cannot really know such things for certain and what we do and can know is that the above sonnet was written by him. I do not want to talk of the poem thus in a biographical analysis but in a 'presentist' one and what appeals to me there is that the poem could be about a lover but is more about literature and poetry and 'sonnetry' (if I may be permitted to coin such a word) if one will and how the art of the reader can make something immortal and eternal. This is startling, of the two things here that are: one, that Shakespeare is sure his sonnet or writing will not die and the other that he depends on the readers to keep it alive through their imagination and love for the poet and what he is talking of.
The sonnet starts with a dismissal of a literary trope, that of the simile. Shakespeare says that the simile falls short in describing someone who will live forever, unlike a summer's day or summer or the sun or summer's flowers, or summer's length, or summer's heat, or summer's loveliness. It all waxes and wanes sometimes, and even the fair declines, and is not temperate or equable enough, balanced enough. And here Shakespeare makes the leap that shows why he can be considered great, the leap of a real poet when he says all are subject to chance and nature's changing course, using a rare word that makes the poem leap into realms we would not go usually, the word "untrimmed"!
But let us briefly imagine this sonnet is about Marilyn Monroe who had golden hair and so fits the comparison to the golden sun and being written by Arthur Miller before the break up of "All That Fall." Marilyn's photographs and movies would easily fit the description of eternal and infinite but Shakespeare uses another phrase that tantalizes us "in eternal lines to time thou grow'st." Here we have the lodestone, the philosopher's stone, the Holy Grail, the poet's claim to be inspired by his muse and being spoken through which ensures half the work is done, the anti-Platonic note that love makes the loved one breathe and draws to itself men who will in their turn see the sonnet as their own and use it to extol their lovers or wish someone else would see it as theirs and use it to extol them. This is Shakespeare's old fashioned mastery, he believes in the power of the written word, of poetry, of the beauty of its being read aloud or again and again and kept alive, in the power of love, literature, life, and art and in the power of defeating death through all this. His sonnet is an invocation and a chant as well as an evocation and not what people praise now, which is a description, but indirect and that is why it leaves us longing to read it over and over as the job of filling in the blanks is left to us, half the world is left to us but only after half is done. The image that the lover cannot be compared to is described painstakingly as one that has to be discarded, even if the best, the sun in all its glory in the brightest season and the day in all its finery and finesse, but it stretches our imagination thereby to where only one person can fit in into such comparison, not Shakespeare's fair youth but whoever it is that we love most. I could talk of how he creates this effect or 'affect' in the reader, of love, precious love, that it is by using the measure of the iambic pentametre, that the rhyme helps, that the volta is used impeccably as are the stanzas and the couplet and that what seems an egotistic boast at the end regarding one's own prowess as a writer turns out not to be as it is canceled out previously by investing in the power of the reader and handing over the task to him/her, humbly, of keeping the sonnet alive. Even Shakespeare is not God, he needs the help of the human race who can read and appreciate his poem to keep it going.
Be that as it may, the sonnet, whether stripped of our knowledge of its author or not, never fails to be loved by those sensitive to art, love poetry, literature, life, and death, as well as to the beauty of nature, human and natural.
126 of his sonnets are to the fair youth, as all know, and some to a dark lady. The conjecture as to whether he was bisexual apart, the more interesting one to me is whether this sonnet is an answer to the first seventeen that ask the young man to have children by saying that whether he does or not his likeness will be preserved and carried on through the generations by the sonnets themselves, asserting art over nature as the way to overcoming death.
Shakespeare wrote another six and a half sonnets found in his plays. That takes the total tally to 160 and a half. And one was found recently that may or may not be his. However, only one thing is sure, whoever WH or the dark lady is or his patron, Shakespeare "in eternal lines to time ...growest" and to all who loves sonnets and want to write them, is a master who can teach well that what matters is not only form and structure but content and felicity of expression as much as any Petrarch or Cavalcanti or Dante or Thomas Wyatt or Henry Howard or more.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonnet_18 (Used for the sonnet) Note- M Padma Shri was a good poet I met on FB who died of cancer and once sent me her photograph of herself with her head shaved as she had to for chemo and I wrote a poem on it that she liked a lot. This sonnet by Shakespeare could very well be about her as she was a lovely, sensitive human being and a wonderful person in all her dealings with me. I am dedicating today's chapter to her as I just got to know of her death. My poem was a roseate sonnet and not a Shakespearean one, or I'd include that too here.
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