Language and Imagery in the Sonnets
Wit was expected in the sonnet. Shakespeare displays it in paradox and in wordplay, brilliantly discussed by M. M. Mahood (Shakespeare's Wordplay, 1957). His wit transcends mere verbal ingenuity when he explores 'the paradox of words to convey the unsolvable paradox of life': he is 'not concerned with abstractions but personal relationships' and their ambiguities (J. Bunselmeyer, 'Appearance and verbal paradox: Sonnets 129 and 138', Shakespeare Quarterly 25, 1974, pp. 103-8). Verbal ambiguity, however, should not be exaggerated. The kind of equivocation the age delighted in, to be witty, had to be obtrusive: something to be understood, but not to be sought for as in Finnegans Wake. The 'dark conceit' of allegory was another matter. In his impressive edition of the Sonnets Stephen Booth ignored L. C. Knights's early warning to post-Empsonian commentators: his multiple meanings are too often obtained by focusing upon a part, almost forgetting the whole poem.
 | | The British Library | | The puzzling dedication from the preface to the 1609 quarto edition of the Sonnets, prepared by Thomas Thorpe. |
Close reading is beneficial when it alerts the reader to the real complexities of the poet's art. This essay cannot show how structural modulations are introduced within the almost unchanging pattern of the Shakespearian sonnet, how delicately or forcefully alliterations, assonances, and cadence combine in beautiful or vehement utterance, how images are extended (as in the early plays), arrayed in stately and almost Spenserian procession, or how they come 'one on another's neck' (Sonnet 131) with dizzying speed, producing the mixed metaphors that characterize the dramatist's mature style. All this the reader well knows and may turn to Leishman and C. S. Lewis, Melchiori and Muir, Rosalie Colie and Winifred Nowottny, among other critics, for penetrating analysis. What may call for further comment is the evolution of the style within the sequence itself.
'Golden' poetry
The contrast between the sterile imagery of the Dark Lady sonnets and the emphasis on fertility and increase in the Young Man sonnets has been noted. This contrast, however, is almost limited to the first half of the former group, where all living things are described as fighting against the destructive forces in Nature. Sonnet 65 acknowledges that beauty, 'whose action is no stronger than a flower', and 'summer's honey breath' cannot 'hold out / Against the wrackful siege of battering days'. As long as the poet holds a plea with this rage the poetry remains 'golden' in all senses of the word. The 'gold complexion' (18) and 'golden face' (33) of the orient sun, the 'sparkling stars' that gild 'the swart-complexion'd night' (28; cf. 14, 15, 26), 'earth and sea's rich gems' (21), a 'jewel' which 'Makes black night beauteous' (27), 'time's best jewel' (65) or 'captain jewels in the carcanet' (52), 'pearl which thy love sheds' (34) and images of nature evocative of the 'gaudy spring' (1) and 'summer's green' (12; cf. 5, 6, 18, 54, 56), 'April's first-born flowers' (21) and 'darling buds of May' (18) are so insistently presented to the imagination that the sense of their precariousness only enhances our aesthetic and natural delight. In their richness, their sensuous appeal and artful melodiousness such sonnets are, indeed, 'the very heart of the Golden Age', as C. S. Lewis claimed.
The following sonnets are not 'drab', yet the poet departs from 'the Golden way of writing'. The poetry takes on the pale cast of thought; turning inward or to the world of 'policy' and corruption, it turns away from the world of natural beauty threatened only with natural decay. 'I would not dull you with my song' the poet seems to tell us as well as his friend and, pace C. S. Lewis, he now often talks, not sings. When the formal constraints of the sonnet and the rhyme scheme do not impose inversions, the verse becomes truly colloquial and in the absence of images may be prosy: 'Hearing you prais'd I say, " 'Tis so, 'tis true" ' (85). Proverbial phrases intrude: 'The hardest knife ill us'd doth lose his edge' (95, cf. 96.9-10). When the language is metaphorical it is often deprived of sensuousness and mainly suggestive through compression, violence, and the fusion of abstract and concrete: 'I will acquaintance strangle' (89), 'Come in the rearward of a conquered woe' (90). Praise is now declared 'rich' enough when saying only 'you alone are you' (84): the difference with Sonnets 18 and 21 is that the earlier poems, though rejecting 'proud compare', did evoke images of sensuous loveliness transcended by the friend's beauty while the later poem is utterly bare of such images. Hyperbole becomes abstract and 'beauty's rose' is no longer surrounded with fresh images of spring (1) but a superlative symbol: 'thy sum of good', 'my all' (109). Despite all abiding differences Shakespeare is moving nearer to Donne than to Spenser.
Dating the Sonnets
The date of the Sonnets is uncertain but the span of three years for their composition (implied by Sonnet 104 if it was not inspired by Horace's Epode XI) would have allowed this stylistic evolution, particularly if it extended from 1594-5 to 1597-8 or later. The 1592-5 period, favoured by the Southamptonians, seems less probable on stylistic grounds. As to parallels with the plays, Akrigg rightly observes that they are 'inconclusive when the sonnets are lumped together' but a predominance of parallels in a block of sonnets may prove significant. He finds no discernible pattern for Sonnets 53-126 and 142-54 while parallels for 1-52 and 127-41 are predominantly with works written in 1593-6. This is reconcilable with an assumption of chronological order in the Young Man sequence. The first block could be contemporary with Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, and Richard II (1594-6): the parallels in themes and imagery and the use of the sonnet form in the first two are striking.he second block (beginning with Sonnet 66) reflect a new trend, discernible in later plays and in the outburst of satires, epigrams, and verse letters at the end of the century. It becomes the dominant trend in the sonnets to the mistress, which is consistent with the feelings expressed. There is, though, a wide range of tone, from the playful Berowne-like witticisms on black beauty (127, 130, 132) to sarcastic or bitter acquiescence in the slavery of the senses and conscious self-deception (133-6, 138-40) and Hamlet-like disgust with sex (129, 141-2, 147, 152). No clear chronological pattern can be traced in these sonnets but the playful ones were probably the earliest and there is ample precedent for their anti-Petrarchanism within the sonnet convention itself. Though the friend's sweetness was still said to be 'ne'er cloying', the language shows the poet did frame his feeding 'to bitter sauces' (118). Along with the new generation of epigrammatists he may have found that 'sugared' sonnets without salt palled upon the taste.
Shakespeare, of course, could recapture the Golden style when he wished and there are splendid examples of it in the later sonnets to the Friend, yet with a difference: as in Samson's riddle the honey, the sweetness now came 'out of the strong', out of a firmer grasp, a maturer experience. The 'teeming autumn' succeeds the freshness of spring (97) and spring is more intense in retrospection: 'Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd' (104). The rebirth of love (102) cannot efface the suffering endured: 'What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!' (97)--words and cadence anticipatory of Hopkins's terrible sonnet: 'What hours, O what black hours we have spent'. The greater sonnets are those which enclose the whole world of experience within the well-wrought urn--'the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here' as Virginia Woolf's Mrs Ramsay thought while reading Sonnet 98 in To the Lighthouse, a sonnet in which 'the lily's white' and 'the deep vermilion in the rose' are 'but sweet, but figures of delight', waived aside for 'the pattern of all those', the fair youth or rather the Beauty with whose 'shadow' poets have ever played. |
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