Chapter Six

L’Ora Beatrice

The remaining young man sonnets do not ostensibly align themselves with any of the thematic constellations thus far mapped. Shooting stars that intermittently appear and then disappear into the void, they leave readers even more lost than they thought they could have been. This culminates, of course, in the crowning oddity 126 represents. Though this last word has been called an unfinished sonnet, it is, in fact, not one at all. Conditioned by the previous 125 sonnets, we may well be forgiven the initial presumption that 126 is yet another—if one with its couplet lost or never written, especially when visually it concludes with Q’s empty double parentheses. But the poem proves instead a set of six rhyming couplets that make completed, coherent sense. Only the empty parentheses lead us to wonder whether a seventh couplet has been lost. In order to stop scratching our heads over this matter, we might presume that this final oddity is but a sign of poetic neglect or of some slippage in manuscript transmission; but it may just as likely be that this curious indication of formal incompleteness may represent a valedictory emblem of thematic incompletion, frustration, and inconsequence shadowing the sequence’s story at every turn. In other words, it may be silent testimony that the Bard’s alter-ego “cannot make an end to [his] ending in woe and desire” (Kerrigan The Motives of Woe 1) any more than can his Echo/echo in the lover’s complaint that serves as coda to the entire enterprise. The empty parentheses could be a witty Bardic wink and nod to the poetical tradition it culminates: the abruptly terminated, inconclusive tales (anticlimaxes all) of The Romance of the Rose, the Vita Nuova, Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and more contemporarily, Sidney’s “web of will whose end is never wrought,” Astrophil and Stella. When Shake-speare’s erected wit services an infected will/Will the only progeny produced is not a vita nova but disease and eventual debilitation, entropic depletion rather than revitalizing increase. Each new ejaculation reframes a Tower of Babel, every one abandoned to the wasteful consequences of a creative vanity that would displace the Creator himself—126, the foolish enterprise’s symbolic coda.

The thematic implications of 126’s abrupt truncation of the sequence can wait; for the moment, what needs noting is that if by now we have “learne(d) to read what silent love hath writ” here, then all the loose ends in the tattered fabric of the narrative reinforce and reiterate the Bard’s commitment to the “sweet love I alwaies write of” (76:9) in a “perspective” art that doubles meaning by supplementing a satirical register and rhetoric with a tender lyric affirmation and voice.

In both sub-sequences, the Bard’s persona remains trapped in the folly of his own praise. As a soul divided by its wearying oscillation between blandishment and accusation, derelict exculpation and self-righteous passive aggression (the Anatomie’s “disloyal loyalty and despairing hope”), his rhetorical palliations and veiled invective are but a “civil” war within between false good will and true ill will. Erected wit servicing an infected will/Will, his “two [truly false, narcissistic] loves” (144:1)—“comfort and despair” (144:1)—wage an unending and unacknowledged battle for his soul in which “want [both ‘selfish desire for’ and ‘lack’] of love tormenteth” (V&A 202) him with a hunger that feeds on itself. Like Antony, in all his verbal posturing Shake-speare proves but a “vagabond flag” on the battering waves of his own emotional storm, accomplishing nothing more substantial than “to rot itself with motion” (A&C 1.4.45, 47). A smiling face in tearful yearning, he remains foolishly content to “speak of love alone”—in both senses of that last word—rather than share it actively with another, his love’s labor lost in verse tributes just as scattered as the rime sparse—his sighs and cries as hapless and inconsequential as Petr-arca’s vane speranze and van dolore (Canz 1:6). His poetical avowals of faith the compromising confessions of a man who remains captivated by fair young man and dark lady alike, he is yet never satisfied with either, the gushings of the pen he toys with but premature ejaculations that never result in completed, satisfying intercourse with another. His obsession with fearful anticipations of the future and troubled suspicions about the past keep him ever waning, “that time of yee[-]are” (73:1) in which “eternall love” might be reincarnated “in loves fresh case” (108:9) wasting away unappreciated.

The mighty opposite of this false good will/Will trying to keep his head and heart above his roiling emotional seas, the Bard calmly steers by the “ever fixed marke” (116:5) of love showing the way to “get across” to others of his kind. In his purity of heart, the Bard wills one thing alone: the communication of sweet love’s riches to anyone with ears to hear and heart to act upon this jubilant revelation. He writes “still all one, ever the same” (76:5), “far from” his alter-ego’s “variation or quick change” (76:2). For him, his namesake’s story is a mock heroic exemplary narrative, a speculum morale in which readers need to see themselves clearly before they might be moved to throw over self-preoccupied illusions of love in favor of a more fruitful and sustaining thing—that “sweet love” (76:9) connecting humans to appreciation for and of our being’s divine plenitude. In writing his own redaction of The Divine Comedy’s ascent, in every poem he leads the reader through some new purgatorial delusion, example upon example of misdirected and unrequited desire, ever upward toward a lyrical appreciation of spirit suffused with regard for the ineffable. The rose pudoris whose hidden canker makes the flower of being simply wither on the vine (compare to 67’s “roses of shaddow” [8]) gives way in each sonnet to a vision of a “Rose” that “is true” (67:8), opening bud after bud on the multifoliate rose itself.1

The last word in Dante’s spiritual epic is the first word of the Bard’s lyric rosary: alpha and omega, the “Rose” of “increase” (1:1, 2) ever remains first and last and without end. No less than for a long line of literary progenitors, the holiest illumination he hopes to pass on as his living legacy is that Petrarch’s vera beatrice is no narcissistic rescue fantasy, no fictive dream of self-gratification in the arms of another, no Laura/Beatrice or fair young man/dark lady, but a vision of a more sacred consummation in which any and all may generate in joy richer progeny. In productive congress with our own time being—“that time of yee[-]-are” (73:1) lovingly shared with others—73’s autumnal melancholy over one’s declining years transfigures itself into the l’ora beatrice’s May/may time of resurrected life.

One such afflatus occurs in a most unlikely place, 62’s seemingly troubling confession of the persona’s despair regarding the possibility of escape from his “sinne of self-love.”2

Predictably, 62’s internal logic proves confoundingly ambiguous. But even before one engages its internal obstacles to sense, one faces the suspicion that the poem’s thematic focus bears no narratological relationship to the poems immediately preceding and succeeding it. Sonnets 63 and 60 are seemingly unselfconscious boasts of the poet’s hope to immortalize the young man; 61, a testimonial to his own uniquely steadfast devotion, a devotion threatened alone by his suspicions of the young man’s possible lack of a reciprocal steadfastness. There being no troubled, self-critical introspection evident in any of those poems, 62’s sudden preoccupation with sinful self-regard is a bolt out of the blue. The speaker’s eleventh hour effort in the couplet to absolve himself of the “iniquity” (12) of self-love Q1–3 expound proves at best a compromised bit of flattery, an unconvincing jest trying to pass itself off as a convincing extrication from the charges he has leveled against himself. His attempt there to conflate his own image in his mirror with the beatific image of the beloved nevertheless leaves him at poem’s end in a suspicious form of “self-regard,” rhetorically “painting” (14) himself in an enhancement that cannot help sounding superficially cosmetic and vain. The upshot may well be but a superficial makeover that simply uses the “beauty of” his beloved’s “daies” (14) to mask from himself and the world his “beated and chopt . . . antiquitie” (10). In other words, the ending’s purported self-absolution cannot completely rule out being heard as yet another confirmation of the self-damning assertion (a continuing present tense presides throughout) with which the poem began: the speaker haplessly reiterating that he is “possess[ed]” (1) by a self-love that owns “all my soule, and al my every part” (2).

Recognition of this maddening confusion of effect at poem’s end features prominently in Helen Vendler’s reading. She concludes that the finalé’s intended rhetorical reversal finds the speaker “still engaged in his own preening, . . . conflat[ing] the later [repentant] with the earlier [sinful] phase,” thus leaving the reader with a “cognitive dissonance” (292) she sees no way to resolve. Can the rhetorical gambit the couplet forges make anyone forget the unqualified dimensions of the speaker’s previous confession regarding the extent and depth of self-regarding sin “grounded inward in [his] heart” in Q1 or the self-mockery regarding his vain pretensions to superiority in Q2? Doesn’t the poem end by asserting the speaker’s confessed self-importance, however much it may try to flatter the beloved and even suggest near identity with him? Doesn’t the secondary meaning of “painting my age” (14) as “flattering oneself” (see Booth 244n4) echo Q2’s self-mocking language about the speaker’s vain peacocking before his real or imaginary glass? And don’t the generally accepted emendations of l.12—exclusion of the comma after “Selfe” and placement of end-stopping punctuation at line end—seemingly make the speaker over more definitively as a self-censuring moralist than Q presents?

In Q’s unedited indefiniteness, we cannot be sure that “so” (12) is an intensifier or that “contrary” in l.11 is adverbial (meaning “to the contrary”) and not adjectival (referring to the “I” [11] as “behaving in a willfully unreasonable manner”). The contrast at work may not be between the speaker’s vainly imagined glory in the octave and the sobering realization of his “beated and chopt antiquitie” (10), but that the definitive signs of his own aging are no match for the self-flattering delusion of near-identity with someone else’s youth—the “contrary” way in which he has imagined his actual decline as in fact no such thing at all. It would not be the speaker’s intention to alert his listeners to this interpretation of his reality, but his words may be taken to betray him unwittingly. Indeed, that reading alone accommodates the continuing present tense governing the poem from first to last, despite the couplet’s boast. The satirical point is that for the speaker “there is” indeed “no remedie” (3) because sinful self-love is “grounded inward in my heart” (4) even when he cleverly boasts of loving identification with another.

Might it not be, then, that 62’s anomalously self-critical manner is narratalogically designed, not to harmonize with, but to stand out from its surroundings, its importance not any narrative kinship with its immediate neighbors, but its discursively emblematic summation of an overarching feature of the entire sequence? Here for once would be an unwittingly true confession of the sin that everywhere else the speaker hides: the unyielding narcissism in false good will/Will’s imagining itself and himself loving others.

Nothing of the kind, however, manifests itself in the Bard’s humbly self-correcting address to readers in 62. Though in the octave he can be heard to confess to a comical self-satisfaction as ludicrous as any other man’s, in the end he has changed his tune, after acknowledging in Q3 that those (he among them) who “vaunt in their youthful sap, at height decrease” (15:7) into “beated and chopt . . . antiquitie.” This “cóntrary” (no longer “contráry”) realization does not convert vain self-satisfaction into despair and self-loathing; it awakens him to an appropriate self-love. Addressing himself at the outset of l.12, he could well be declaring in the remainder of that line that loving oneself in the manner that he has outlined (loving “so” [12]) can only condemn itself to “iniquity” (12). The couplet then would turn its address from himself (whether in ascendency or decline) to his brethren who resemble him so completely [“thee (my selfe)”]. It is every one of us as his alter egos that “for my selfe I praise” (13), not in a spirit of self-regarding appropriation, but “on his and our account identically” and “with fruitful self-determination,” in so doing “painting” or “enhancing” his “age” (14)—his “era” now, not his “personal decline”—with a “beauty” of “daies” (14) yet to be born. The limitless increase the prophet envisions in l.14 is no cosmetic enhancement designed to hide the truth from ourselves, but the infinitely expanding prospect of his own “age” being enriched by “daies” to come.

Sandwiched by sonnets testifying to the beloved’s special and enduring grace (67 and 68) and the poet-persona’s power to immortalize him in his glory (65), 66, like 62 before it, presents itself as a similar irruption of strong, desperately negative feeling. It, too, leaves no apparent narratological consequence in its wake. In a series of one-line tableaux, the speaker dramatizes a “masque-like procession of ill-doing” (Vendler 308) so unrelenting and ubiquitous that were it not a loveless sin to contemplate desertion of his beloved, he would opt for suicide as the only sensible response to such a world (13–14). But his gesture of solidarity with the beloved in the couplet must seem more paltry and pyrrhic than grand as soon as one gives it serious thought. If his analysis of his (and all good’s) powerlessness before the disabling “sway” (8) of worldly evil is as he claims it to be, what could the solidarity with the beloved he touts possibly accomplish? If things are that bad, why not argue for a suicide pact with the friend rather than haplessly join him as yet one more lamb to be led to slaughter by the forces of darkness?

Thought through, the couplet of 66 provides scant basis for the self-congratulation the speaker implicitly contemplates in his “loving” stand there. The reconsideration that the Bard’s perspective art requires of readers discloses that a wasting endurance of the world’s evil in the mere presence of another is spiritual folly. The heart’s salvation depends upon the transcendence of the otherwise pervasive sin of self-love 62 had anatomized so discomfittingly. That is why the first word in Q is not “Tired,” as in the editorial tradition, but “Tyr’d” (1), as in “attired” or “cloaked” (compare to 53’s “Grecian tires” [8]). The most interesting object of the Bard’s satire is not the world but his mouthpiece, a man who does not realize that he is a seemingly incorrigible part of the worldly corruption he loathes, someone seeking a “restfull death” (1) for himself rather than the labor of a transformative life. “Save that to dye” (14) to this narcissistic self, he will never truly communicate or share love for the friend he imagines he cares for: “leav[ing] his love alone” rather than helping his “love” grow and flourish—whether “the young man” himself or the “generous relationship between them” he can nurture.

Every description of worldly vice he uses here to indict corruption in others aptly characterizes the speaker’s behavior throughout the sequence. He, too, is a figure of “Folly . . . controuling skill” (10), a “Captaine ill” imprisoning “captive-good” (12), a “needie Nothing trimd” (3) out or “tyr’d” in a “jollitie” that is but a poor facsimile of true joy’s natural glow. In him, love’s “right perfection” (7) remains “wrongfully disgracd” (7) because he, “behold[ing] desert” (2), does not emulate it, but remains a shiftless “beggar” seeking crumbs from its feast to keep a servile body and soul in one piece. For the persona, “gilded honor shamefully misplast” refers only to the unearned tributes the powerful manage to command; but it likewise characterizes the unearned honor the speaker accords himself ever and always, no matter how self-regardingly he may behave in love, as he prostitutes or “strumpet[s]” “maiden vertues” (6) he parades as his own. Thus the “purest faith” (4) he declares of his loves for fair young man and dark lady alike are ever unknowingly “forsworne” (4), in other words, both “perjured” and “abandoned for another.” His “arte” is “made tung-tide” (9) easily as much by his own “author[-]itie” as it is by any worldly censorship controlling what he may wish to say or do. He may believe that the deserving are unjustly cast down and the worthless elevated to places of honor and privilege they do not merit; but the Bard’s wittier concern is that the speaker himself is a “needie Nothing” tricked out in all the glitter of false good will’s beggary even as he withholds the “captive good” he might bountifully liberate.

For a reader coming straight from 66, 67’s octave may seem at first blush to extend the previous poem’s logic, expressing how a vile world may take “advantage” (3) of his beloved’s purity and innocence, threatening it with its “infection” (1). Thus, the world’s “false painting” (5) conflates or displaces the substantial beauty of his “true” Rose’s “living hew” (6) with meretricious “Roses of shaddow” (8). But the sestet does not go on to explain how the speaker’s decision to forgo suicide on his beloved’s account in 66 can or will protect the young man from the dangers 66 and 67 enumerate. Instead, in a manner that badly undercuts his own hopeful rhetoric, he opts to declare Dame Nature—not himself—the young man’s savior. Q3 seems to stack the deck against the young man’s cause by describing Mother Nature as a mere shadow of her former self and vigor, more a wrinkled hag “beggerd of blood to blush through lively vaines” than Amazonian protectress, a wholly dependent pensioner who though once “proud” presently survives only by virtue of what “gaines” the young man can provide for both of them now because she is “banckrout” (9). Then, in a defiant but desperate joke, the couplet tries to turn the tables rhetorically on the pathetic lot Dame Nature and the young man share—if to no avail. The thought of a destitute hag hoarding (“O him she stores” [13]) the young man as a mummified, increasingly threadbare treasure to which she clings in order to impress a superficial world with what superior glory she once owned “in daies long since, before these last so bad” (14) ineffectively argues a continuing or worthy triumph.

Even if Nature should be thought to “store” the young man as a farmer would his prize livestock for breeding, the resulting vaunt can hardly seem a meaningful path to mutual self-preservation when Nature’s decline is so profound that the speaker concedes her haggard condition is near complete collapse and displacement by “faulse Art” (68:14). Not an image of triumph or transcendence over the world’s ways, the vain stance of Nature celebrated in the poem’s final words has already capitulated to them. These corrupted present days that “last” (1–4) so badly (or “last so[,] bad”) represent an irreversible decline from Nature’s golden age; her beloved boy, if preserved at all, endures merely as a “museum piece, a living relic” (Vendler 313).

Nor is the work of satisfying comprehension in 67 made any easier by the surprising hints in it of ambivalence about the young man’s possible “collusion with sin” (Vendler 313), thus allowing angry repudiation of the young man to contend irresolutely and incongruently with the poetics of singular praise. “With” in l.1 may not characterize solely the threats to the young man’s integrity besieging him from without; it may suggest an “infection” (1) that has already penetrated his inner being, l.2’s “impietie” referring now, not to the world’s vileness so much as to the youth’s own moral corruption obscured only by the physical beauty of his comely “presence” (2). Q2 need not excoriate the world’s cheap imitation of the youth’s natural perfection, but the youth’s gratuitous falsity, a deal with the devil the speaker would wish the young man had never made.

Thus the disillusioned speaker of the sestet may be asking once again—now with more open contempt—“why [then indeed] should he live” (9) any longer since “nature banckrout is” (9) now, not alone in Dame Nature, but in both the shameless young man and the speaker himself as well. All that’s left is a self-consoling and fading memory of “welth” (13) now dissipated in the present days of the beloved’s corrupt ways (“these last so bad”) so different from the “daies” of his purity “long since” (14) dead.

Whether one prefers to read 67 as incongruous praise of the young man’s mummified glory or as a barely veiled bitterness over his betrayals, the sonnet tastes of ashes. But it can tell a more lively story if one does not presume that the indefinite antecedent of l.1’s “he” must be the fair young man. In the Bard’s address, the couplet answers to our reflective satisfaction why life must continue to be lived with “blood . . . blush[ing]” in shame at worldly sin and with energetic vigor to redeem its ways. The indefinite “he” represents anyone and everyone’s true good will, dear love incarnate, whose “Presence” in the l’ora beatrice ever lovingly offers “impietie” the example of its redeeming grace so that “sinne by him” true “advantage should atchive [not the world’s false ‘shaddows’] / And lace [‘embellish or richly ornament’ now, not ‘implicate’] it selfe with [not ‘in collusion’ now, but ‘by means of’] his societie” (3–4). True good will, dear love, must continue to “live” (9) as a moral imperative because without it nature remains “banckrout.” Her “exchecker” can only be enriched when nature “lives upon” all generous love’s “gaines” (12). Otherwise she remains endlessly reduced to nothing more than a hellishly absurd cycle of reduplication and death. Nature’s “store” is not some relic of former glory a shrunken hag vainly hoards in order to boast of her lost glory; it is, instead, the aggregating “store” or increase that still “show[s]” the wealth of dear love incarnate in all its glory for the world’s benefit, its living legacy and continuing “presence” (2) still gracing the world’s impiety even after the “daies long since” that engendered it have themselves turned to dust. These endlessly living examples of true good will’s love in the aggregate—Civilization’s gift to needy Nature—have not only outlived and continue to “outlive” the days that brought them to birth, but they and their like daily display their “living hew” (6) presently before us, thereby offering a redeeming grace “before” the world without end should “last so bad” (14). “Why should” dear love incarnate “live” (9)? Because it is a re-deeming hope that the folly of worldliness not “last so bad” nor “last so[,] bad” but that the wealth with which nature was once graced in “daies long since” may live to multiply and not merely chase its own tail. It alone can replace worldly days that last so bad with those that last “for good.”

Sonnet 68 seems to clone 67. Here, too, Dame Nature boasts her prize—the young man now construed as a treasure “map” (1) or “paradigm” held up to show the world’s “faulse Art” what “beauty was of yore” (14) before meretricious “ornament” (10) robbed appropriate acclaim from 67’s “true” (10) Rose. (Here the degenerative figure of corruption is the beautifying wig fleeced from corpses rather than 67’s “false painting” [5] with rouge’s “Roses of shaddow” [8].) The true superiority of the nonpareil is construed as the simple beauty of the youth’s “living brow” (4) that lives and dies like the “flowers” (2) of the field naturally, arrayed so incomparably that, like the evangelist’s lilies, it outshines what even kings might fashion to bedeck themselves.

Interestingly, the near identity between 67 and 68 extends even beyond the discursive argument the speaker forwards again here. As there, here, too, the speaker’s vaunt undermines its own effectiveness in a noticeable way. The young man is not preserved as a kind of mummified museum piece; but the speaker’s description of him as a remnant of the golden age, a “map of daies out-worne,” ambiguously conflates the claim for his youthful loveliness with seemingly irrelevant associations of aging (in “out-worne”) and inutility (as in outdated or partially obliterated maps). Likewise, describing him as living and dying as flowers do now does more than establish a contrast between nature and worldly artifice; it simultaneously insinuates a dark truth about the democracy of death and the fleeting inconsequence of life and beauty. In the sestet, if one heeds Booth’s acknowledgment that in the Renaissance “antique” and “antic” were both spelled variously and enjoyed similar pronunciation (160n2), then the aural pun in “holy antique hours” (“wholly antic hours” and/or “wholly antic howers” [as in Q]) that dresses the youth in unparalleled beauty simultaneously strips him of it. The mad and absurd passage of time—ornamenting nothing (“without all ornament” [10])—makes no summer of another’s youthful green. The generalized figure the speaker uses in l.11 to designate the young man’s natural grace, robbed from no one else, can turn hologrammatically from a description of “antic hours” to “antic howers” that plow grimly, but yield no usable harvest, no “summer’s” fruit from the youthful spring’s “greene” (11).

What’s more, the couplet’s boast proves no more compelling than did 67’s. To describe the youth as a telling example of “what beauty was of yore” risks suggesting that a vain and hapless Nature is once again holding to a remnant of the past’s glory to make a flimsy boast on her own behalf more than a confident celebration of the present glory and future promise of well-being in her beloved’s person. As in 67, one may well wonder how clear of worldly vanity Dame Nature can be if instead of enjoying the good she possesses, she is intent only upon impressing a corrupt world, caught up in its “faulse Art” (14). Is she, in fact, any less a grave robber enhancing her own image with “beauty of yore” than the worldly shamelessly snipping away at the “goulden tresses of the dead”? Can the young man be anything more than a “dead fleece” (8) with which to ornament her vanity if she makes no summer of his youthful green?3

Once incongruent thoughts like these war on one another, one can no longer confidently hold to a notion of the poem as simply a poetics of praise. The Bard does not share his namesake’s invidious comparisons between nature and “faulse Art”; for him, a loving nature and true art must operate synergistically so that in “him” (9, 13), (in other words, in deare love incarnate, holy antique hours) a timeless golden age may live out unadulterated a resurrected life. False art need not vainly compete with other forms of “faulse Art” for worldly preeminence; in his new dispensation, the true art of love can “shew faulse Art” a better way, one fruitfully married to nature, not opposing it. In that brave new world order each good steward cultivating a life lived harvesting “store” (13) from “holy antique hours,” ourselves “holy antique howers” (9), tills a fruitful earth.

The indefinite “him” (9, 13) is not then the fair young man (whose excellence is nothing more than hearsay), Dame Nature, or the persona who records her vain boasting approvingly, the latter two merely ornamenting themselves self-approvingly with a beauty not their own. The Bard’s “him” is anyone and everyone whose “beauty” continues to live and die as flowers do “now” (italics mine) in l’ora beatrice, ever living so that its flowering mature in time into fruit and not simply wither and die to itself. The art of love thus cultivated never robs the dead simply to adorn the self vainly—making no summer from some other being’s green; it gaily flowers from within itself, ever making its own “beauty new” (12) from beauty that is “oulde” (12), making summer fruitfulness from its own withering green. That kind of beauty alone may lead “faulse Art” to realize the error of its ways, impressing it with true art’s accumulating “store,” each new hour and “hower” amassing an ever richer harvest. Nature need not vainly stand opposed to “faulse Art”; she may instead be transfigured by a marriage to a loving art that is true.

If 67 and 68 represent the speaker’s vain boast about the singularity of the young man’s lovely exterior, the next pair of sonnets provides suspicious and dubiously effective apology for the singular purity of “the young man’s inner world” (Hammond 119). In the couplet of 69, is the speaker blaming worldlings around him or the young man himself for the stench of corruption lingering about him? Does his “odor” not “matcheth” his “show” (13) of unparalleled beauty because the enviously wagging tongues of the worldly mean that his repute “doest common grow” (14), however blameless he himself may in fact be, or, like the lily that “fester[s]” (94:14) or the cankered Rose (70:7), does the flower of his youth’s “faire” (12) “showe” (13) mask inner putrescence because the “solye” (14) or “soil” in which he grows—human frailty and human stench itself—is one he shares in “common” (14) with other fallen human beings. (The secondary senses of “common” as “undistinguished or inferior” or “for public and, thus, profligate use” serve to reinforce this pained insinuation.) One cannot tell for certain whether the speaker has come to praise or bury his young Caesar.

Nor is it simply a question of whether the world or his young friend is at fault here: the speaker’s “odor matcheth not [his] show” either. As with the worldly with whom he thinks he shares nothing in “common,” the speaker, too, gives grudging respect to the young man whose beauty he pays but lip service to here no less suspiciously than the worldlings he berates for the same meanness of spirit; “in other accents doe” his suspicions about his friend, like theirs, “confound” (7) or “confute” his praise. Like those who “commend” (4) the friend in passive aggression he, too, “guesse[s]” (10) suspiciously at foulness within him that would compromise the “beauty of thy mind” (9) if determined with certainty. But since he remains as unable or unwilling as they to summon the courage to question the beloved directly, like them he can only mask passive aggression in a half-hearted “show” (13) of praise. The result is that he merely adds yet another wagging tongue to the whisper campaign smearing the beloved’s name. The reason the truth cannot be told about the young man is only in part because the world doesn’t care enough about finding out what that truth is and/or because the young man may indeed be hiding something, but because the speaker is doing both. What’s missing here in the speaker is dear love for his friend: like the worldlings he disdains, he too “wants nothing that the thoughts of hearts can mend” (2). If he loved the boy, getting to the bottom of the issue would be what really mattered: whether to exonerate him and subsequently defend him from the world’s insinuations or to determine that his friend had in fact sinned. If the latter, a loving friend would sympathetically realize that his friend stands in profound need of the consideration forwarded by “thoughts of hearts” concerned about him, hearts bent on “mending” both the youth’s actions and his faltering spirit. “Why thy odor matcheth not thy show, / Thy solye” (both “soil” and “explanation or answer,” as in “assoil”) is this—not now the addressee’s possible canker nor the world’s weedy stench, but “this” poem, the very verses we hear the speaker voicing as he underhandedly feeds his beloved to the worldly wolves standing ready to devour him, not realizing he himself is a leader in that pack.

The Bard’s praise of the “thou” (14) he loves is, by contrast, unqualified by the canker of suspicion. His affirmation of the worth of his dearly beloved and loving reader is based on a stark contrast between the way that “thou” functions in the couplet and the way worldlings function expounded in the quatrains (the way “the worlds eye doth view” the world). This distinction between “their” way (deictic versions of the third person plural pronoun occur six times in Q1–3) and “thy” (13) way is of the essence. The common but arbitrary emendation of l.5’s “their” to “thy” occludes this structural and thematic contrast. In Q1 the Bard notes the world’s eye looks upon everything unlovingly, “want[ing]” or “desiring” nothing and thus lacking everything that love might heal or improve (“mend” [2]). When the worldly see evidence of love, the most they can summon is grudging commendation of it (“Uttring bare truth, even so as foes Commend” [4]). The only thing they offer to love is the lip service they pay to it (they “give” [6] or “concede” love that), not realizing that merely to speak of love alone means love’s labor lost. Thus when they “give thee that end” it means only love’s “termination” not its “realized purpose.” Blinded by vanity, they want nothing that loving thoughts of hearts can “mend” or “improve.” L.5’s “thus” in this reading refers back to the gist of Q1 so construed: “outward” things love has created ceded nothing but “outward praise.” In this way they “give thee so thine owne” (6), comically granting to someone what he or she already possesses. Indeed, the worldly do not even realize that, as the loving see it, love is not intended to be the right of the possessor but a good shared; and so they insist that the offering of love, they might share as “ours,” is for them impoverishingly and standoffishly declined as “thine owne” (6) alone. Thinking they can smell quite well with worldly eyes, they “looke into the beauty of thy [deare love incarnate’s] mind” (9) and “guesse” that they can smell a rat, thus adding only the “rancke smell” (12) of their own baseless suspicions to the “faire flower” (12) of love’s “essence” when they insinuate that fair love’s gestures smell of a corruption within the lover. The only ones truly hurt by this mean-spiritedness are those thrall to it.

In the Bard’s address, the couplet does not harbor any ill will, no doubts or mean-spirited insinuations about the beloved “thou.” The discrepancy between true love’s sweet “odor” and the false “show” of it damning it with faint praise cannot foul its rich bouquet. The smell of corruption is not anything one needs to “guesse” (10) at in others; it resides in those who waste their precious time making such suspicious guesses. In the context of the poem’s contrast between the worldly and the faire—between the quatrains and the couplet—“thy show” (13) refers not to love’s generous self-display but to the distorting perceptions of those common worldlings who would present an image or “show” of love to love as a means of sullying it with negative insinuations. Real love remains undiminished by anything the worldly might do to undercut it. The reason those who love pay little regard to the cocked eye of doubt about it is that for them love’s “solye” (14) is not sullying. At once the “soil” in which it grows and the warm macaronic “sun eye” or “sun ye” that nurtures it there, love’s “solye” (14) “is this, that thou” (deare love incarnate) continues to “grow” (14) in “common” or “communally.” The “commonness” it shares is not sullying or defective, but of its glorious inclusional essence. Love grows without exclusion in this “common” solye open to every member of the human comity. Any attempt to confine or fence off its yield or appropriate to oneself what is cultivated there is a foolish waste of breath, a useless effort to diminish its solye’s fertility, a shadow that cannot blot out its sol-ye’s power to nurture.

Sonnet 70 makes a second dubious effort to defend the beloved’s inner worthiness from the “evermore inlarged” (12) calumnies of an envious world threatening it, a vile world whose target or “marke” (2) has ever been those who are most “faire” (2). As in 69, the poet as supportive apologist is ever shadowed by a troubled voice subtly disclosing doubt, mistrust, and veiled threat to an addressee he only makes pretense to defend from all comers. In l.3 the persona ambiguously declares: “the ornament of beauty is suspect.” Is that supposed to mean that “suspect” or “suspicion” directed at one is an unwitting form of embellishment or enhancement of beauty as the speaker would like the friend to believe? Is it a re-statement of the vague claim ll.1–2 make, or does it imply that his own “suspect of ill” (13) has forced out of him a veiled declaration of his mistrust of this so-called “ornament of beauty”? Such dubiety is reinforced by whether “so thou be good” (5) should be read as a present or a future subjunctive—the former communicating the speaker’s “suspect of ill” in his friend, the latter a trust in a future fall from grace’s unlikelihood. Doubts about whether the addressee’s virtue has already been compromised cloud the picture also because the speaker uses the word “canker” to describe the vileness of the world—a curious word selection since cankers eat away at beauty from within rather than assail “faire” flowers from without (as slander is reduced to doing). L.8’s “present’st,” moreover, confusingly conflates an innocent merit falsely targeted by vice in others and a hypocritical pretense of virtue that may be lurking in the young man.

Q3 argues that the young man’s past has exhibited virtue triumphant or at least “escaped with its life” from the “ambush[es]” (9–10) the world has laid; it ends, however, declaring that praiseworthy as that may be, it will not be enough to insure final victory because the world’s envy is “evermore inlarged” (12). Fair warning, perhaps, but neither ringing endorsement of virtue’s persistence nor assurance of comradeship in arms to defend it. The issue thus left to hang fire, the couplet peters out disappointingly. Idle flattery about what conquests the young man might have made over other hearts besides the speaker’s were the world’s envy not “evermore inlarged” is a poor substitute indeed for the one victory that counts—virtue properly defended and enthroned.

In all this double-speak it is clear that “suspect of ill” is not solely the provenance of a slandering world; it inheres, too, in the speaker. As 69 had shown, “slander doth but approve” (4)—that is, “pay lip-service only”—in the manner of the speaker’s approval of the beloved here, hiding a wolf’s grin in sheep’s clothing. Thus it is not, finally, the slanderous world or even the slyly hypocritical young man who might best be described as a dark “crow” (4) of ill-omen flying in “heavens sweetest ayre” (4). In symbolically veiled terms, the speaker here is the black crow shadowing his own song, heavens sweetest “air” (if only in the cawing crow’s own mind). In this “air” commending his friend, praising him “as foes commend” (69:4), he sings in accents as insinuatingly venomous as they are seemingly well intended.

The Bard’s curious perspective is another matter entirely. In Q1, addressing reader after reader as a dear love incarnate “thou” (1), the Bard affirms that any “blame” (1) directed at love is not the result of love’s “defect” (1) but a defect that exposes itself in the unwarranted slander of love directed toward it. As long as love continues to exercise itself (“So thou be good”), the world’s slanders of it can do it no essential harm, but only implicitly pay it tribute. When the “faire” (2) keep love actively flowering, “their worth” (6)—that is, the worth generated by the fair—will prove greater than that of those who have nothing but denigration to offer to the world. “Beeing woo’d of time” (6) is not—as it was for his namesake—a sign of temptation to be resisted so that slander will not gain a foothold; it is instead the opportunity love “appreciates” to generate new riches as “beeing woo’d of time” into marriage to l’ora beatrice. In this reading l.8 is not a substantiation of l.7 but a complex contrast to the diminished flowering it acknowledges possible even in the sweetest buds. The only purity the Bard argues for is not a cold virginity—a “pure [unstained] prime” (8) sealed off from slander, a purity that can only shrivel away to nothing from within as it tries to fold in on itself to prevent its shriveling. The “pure” state of “being” the Bard urges upon dear love is an “un[-]stay[-]ined prime [Q’s spelling],” (8) a prime immolated in the Phoenix fire of new births in beauty, a prime no longer clutching at its own preservation. No sterile purity, this is a “being” no longer merely “woo’d” but married to time and eager to fecundate—“prime[d]” to “present’st” (8) itself as gift and self-abandoning love partner to time in order that its own death and shriveling will not have been for naught but live to ornament the world’s beauty.

Q3 offers further argument why dear love should represent such a satisfying consummation. The past (compare to l.9) is merely prologue. That we have not yet been defeated by the evil forces of the world is no assurance that we may not yet be so. Hence “this thy praise [for having survived into the present] cannot be soe thy praise” (11) in future since that would mean resting on one’s laurels. Our own envy may be “evermore inlarged” in the future, attacking love’s burgeoning beauty from within in self-satisfied longing for the good old days or for selfish appropriation of goods that others now enjoy. Indeed, the only proper propagation of dear love incarnate is dear love incarnating: in other words, it can remain “unstained” or “pure” only in remaining “un[-]stay[-]ined.”

The couplet represents, not the persona’s idle flattery designed to encourage his addressee to content himself with myriads of empty conquests of hearts that “might have been” as the only means by which to make his life seem worthwhile. It is a claim on love’s behalf that but for “some suspect of ill” (13) love would display itself in all its glory in every kingdom the human heart inhabits. “Suspect of ill” should not be a looming threat to love’s fulfillment but an enhancement and enrichment of it (arguing that “suspect” [3] is in fact—in other words, not just figuratively—beauty’s ornament). The “suspect of ill” the Bard references here, however, is not the vile slanders his namesake would haplessly claim to contend with to little avail; it is instead conscience, Socrates’ inner voice, the sense of pious shame and humility that must remain “suspect of [our own] ill.” It may inhibit love’s show somewhat, but only to ensure its proper and continuing growth into good. Such “suspect of ill” is the antidote to human complacency: one’s living in the past and not a present where new births in beauty “still may grow” (115:14). It is what leads the Bard to examine with such loving care in these poems his namesake’s appearance of good will, satirically questioning whether his is not in fact false good will and true ill will demeaning the real thing.

The wastefulness of hoarding is a central motif in these sonnets, nowhere more dramatically rendered perhaps than in the figure of an indigent Dame Nature’s pathetic boast in 67. In 48 and 52 Shake-speare unknowingly centers his poetic argument on the self-defeating effort to keep one’s “sweet . . . treasure” (52:2) carefully preserved (52’s “up-locked” [2]). Lamenting the powerlessness of his own anxious efforts to secure possession of the young man’s love, he declares that despite his best efforts to preserve his love for safekeeping, he cannot shake the “feare” that his beloved “wilt be stolne” (13). He can protect his jewels and other valuables from theft behind “barres” (2), in “sure wards of trust” (4). But the greater treasure, his beloved, must remain at large, “prey to every vulgar theefe” (8). Because he cannot lock him safely away in a more literal way, the best he may do to protect the treasured relationship is to hold the beloved in the “gentle closure of my brest” (11), “keeping” him in his thoughts where the beloved’s image may “come and part” (12) freely. He knows, of course, that a treasure so great will tempt thieves; but that fear is redoubled by a yet more ominous thought: “Rich preys do make true men thieves” (Tilley P 570 and V&A 724). He worries that even good men committed to virtue will succumb to the temptation to steal the young man from him. In making the danger to his prize so ubiquitous (the “true” proving as dangerously thievish here as the false), the speaker rather laughably fails to realize that since he’s one of the two, he ought to be a bit more suspicious of himself. In the terms 70 just outlined, he should harbor some “suspect of ill” in himself. Instead, in an effort to control what he cannot control, he imagines that the shameless flattery of his address to the young man here, wildly exaggerating his worth in an effort to curry favor, will inoculate against possible loss. In so doing he conveniently elides two facts that qualify the import of the analogy he develops: we do not “own” our beloveds as we do other jewels, and no person can ever be stolen from us against his or her will.

He may imagine that ll.1–12 are an expression of his own magnanimity, but they tell a far creepier tale. Whose “pleasure” (12) is truly being served here? The speaker would convince his friend that it is the young man’s, but even in his seeming expression of good will there may lurk the speaker’s perverse, passive aggressive pleasure in suggesting under his breath that the young man may enjoy leaving the speaker’s company for that of others as much or more as he enjoys having it. Snide insinuations of this sort may give him mean comfort in his despair; but for the detached observer they present alarming signs of pathology. Should alarm bells not be clanging loudly when we hear a person hint that in his relationship to another the sick soul hopes to restrict the love object “to my use” (3) alone so that in so doing it “might un-used stay” (3)? Is this not a sign of a dangerously possessive preemption? Moreover, is it not also a sign of a wasteful logic that would find the only “use” another can serve his being “un-used”? What wretched vacuity for both lover and beloved.

The sonnet discloses a discomfitting spectacle for the speaker and for us: a man who desires to keep his beloved “lockt up in any chest” (9) but who is clever enough to know that such an incarceration would not be greeted with approval and so he tries the next best thing. He attempts to lock him away figuratively by a flattering (and self-flattering) pretense of devotion and forbearance—his assurance to the addressee that he is keeping him in the “gentle closure of my brest” (11), not clarifying “at” whose “pleasure” he would have the beloved “come and part” (12) there. He may actually be imagining that all his intentions are blameless and “true,” but the Bard knows that he is already half way down the road in fearful flight from his beloved, having already robbed himself (and the beloved) of the treasure they might have shared. When he “tooke my way” (1)—not “journeyed” now, but “started down a selfish path”—he abandoned all loving care for the friend. Instead he has pillaged and abandoned the “sure wards” of a genuine “trust” (4), choosing instead his own fearful anxieties and suspicions of the worst in others, including the beloved (though not, unsurprisingly, himself). That is why Q1 in Q ends in a question mark that at first makes no sense in context. To emend the question into a declaration or exclamation is to second the speaker’s self-pitying fears and suspicions. To retain it is to interrogate the speaker’s course of action in the harsh glare of reality. How “care[-]full” (1) of love was he when he neglected to place his beloved in “sure wards of trust”? Not “care[-]full” at all. He himself unknowingly speaks the damning truth about himself: “within the gentle closure of my brest” (11) “thou art not, though I feele thou art” (10). Fidelity to true love has been displaced by 144’s “comfort and despair.” The “most worthy comfort” (6) for himself he yearns for (keeping the youth “un-used,” for himself) wars within with “my greatest griefe” (6)—his despair at his lack of power to keep him to himself—all to no avail. Thus does a seemingly well-intentioned “truth proove thievish for a prize so deare” (14)—a prize that is not so much “precious” (no pearls of great price here) as it is costly.

The Bard tells a far different kind of story, one “suspect of [the] ill” in others and in himself that fails to do justice to the sweet love he would celebrate. Interrogating his own conscience, he begins the poem by wondering how “carefull” or “loving” it could have been for him to have taken his own way, keeping anything of material worth he might have possessed under wraps, “un-used.” But a greater worry surfaces in Q2. About the pearl of great price, dear love itself incarnate, “most worthy comfort” (6) itself—to which any mineral jewels are but “trifles” (5)—he has even a greater scruple. His “greatest griefe” (6) is not his possible loss of a prized trinket; his “onely care” (7) is that the “best of dearest” (7), Love itself, be something he and others may prove less than “carefull” of, having not done enough to protect it from “every vulgar theefe” (8) whose preemptive threat robs it of its full efficacy and life. The Bard knows there is no way to lock love away safely (“Love locks no cupboards” [Tilley L520] and “laughs at locksmiths” [compare to Booth 211]); but that does not alleviate a conscientious worry on its account, a worry that perhaps the services rendered to her may yet not have been as “carefull” as they should have been. Like other humans, he has “lockt up” love in his own “chest” (9) to “come and part” (12), dependent completely for its well-being upon the speaker’s “pleasure” (12) or “discretion.” And even when he does choose Love’s service, the Bard concedes that “thence” (13)—that is, in our good intentions toward love—he or we might still betray it, stealing from its full efficacy in our lives, all of us (though generally “true” men) proving “thievish for a prize so deare” (14). When we are committed to the “sure wards of trust” (4) in love, the only fear we need have is that we have not done enough to insure the fullness of its flowering. That alone “now” remains the Bard’s “greatest griefe . . . and onely care” (6–7) in sharing these loving thoughts with his readers.

The persona unwittingly confesses again to miserly hoarding four poems later in 52. The only thing that keeps this ode to the speaker’s own wealth from an insufferably smug self-satisfaction is the anxiety he expresses because the mean-spirited hoarding he preaches is not working. As Hammond notes, the experience of the poem is a decline from “security of wealth and possession to insecurity and poverty” (34). Hoarding food will not keep it from rotting away. The “gradual feeling of the original rush of joy” moves toward increasingly fearful possibilities: from the speaker’s seeing the beloved at will (Q1) to seeing “sildom” (6) on a schedule he does not set, to seeing only for “instant[s]” (11) at the whim of time, until in the couplet, without speaking the horrifying possibility directly, the speaker insinuates the chance of “never seeing again at all” (Vendler 256).

By his own admission in Q1, the only reason he does not spend every waking moment counting and recounting his lucre is the Epicurean dream of employing a calculus of deprivation to heighten the “seldome pleasure” (4) when he gets back to the gleefully pointless task again. Then in Q2, he reveals both his ignorance of the liturgical calendar and the sacred communal purpose of festival itself. He imagines “holy days” as few and far between, their purpose seemingly no communal sharing in joy but a “sollemne” (5) effort to restrict joy’s communality in favor of artfully bedecking the privileged in order to make their “Sunday best” parade before others on such occasions an even more impressive spectacle. Q3 attests that for the miser Time is but a safekeeping “chest, / Or . . . ward-robe” (10) from which he but occasionally unfolds his royal vesture to impress those who see him in his glory’s otherwise “imprison’d pride” (12). The ambiguity in “imprison’d pride” makes it impossible to say whether he bears a healthy pride in his friend’s merits or only holds to a vainly exaggerated sense of a worth in himself that he finds it difficult to keep under wraps. This is not unfolding glory, but a sinful “unfoulding” (as Q spells it). No “Beatitude” nor even a prayer to the fecundating Virgin, l.13’s “Blessed are you” address seemingly celebrates the self-satisfied pride the speaker takes in his relationship to his beloved, however increasingly intermittent and threatened by further loss the contact between them. Though it does explicitly pay tribute to the friend, its true object of admiration, given the logic of the quatrain leading up to it, is himself thought of indefinitely as the “you” whose “worthinesse gives skope” (13) to nothing more than present hoarding and the future “hope” (14) of continuing to do so, a paltry “skope” relieved only periodically by ostentation’s peacocking. He “gives” (13) nothing else—nothing substantial—to anyone, orchestrating his own triumphal procession before others as he would wish—“being [itself] had” (14) only for this purpose or the “hope” (14) of doing so again on some later occasion.

Thus l.9 might not mean that time exists, like the “sildom coming” (6) feast days, to manifest the speaker’s treasure hoard for a yet greater glory, “making some speciall instant speciall blest” (11) to him alone. It may mean that in lording it over others he reduces being itself (Time as the seedbed of creation) to silly parades of self-display that make those in whom “being” is similarly “lackt” (14) enviously hope for such a day in the sun themselves. Either way the speaker feeds his vanity while ostensibly flattering the young man. Only the insecure anxiety at something perhaps slipping away from him in all this keeps him from sounding utterly fatuous.

For his part the Bard does not similarly preen or peacock. No gleeful miser, he claims to be “rich” (1) as a being blessed with sufficient wealth to go around. The “blessed key” (1) he would employ is not one meant to hide his light under a bushel or keep things locked up solely for his own delectation or vain self-display. His blessed key is a commitment to a true good will that unlocks the treasure he possesses for beneficial use. Nor will he “ev’ry hower survey” (3) his accomplishments since he knows that could only blunt the “fine point” of “pleasure” more “sildom” (4) enjoyed when periodically contemplating the surprising size of the harvest that over time grows from negligible grains of wheat, a harvest whose “ev’ry hower survayed,” hour by hour and “hower” by “hower,” may not seem to be amounting to much. For him, celebratory feasts that but periodically punctuate the work of planting, cultivation, and harvest are not so “sollemne and so rare” (5) as to call attention to themselves or distinguish their glory from any other day’s glory (all days in this sense being “feast days” of note, not just those officially set aside from the labor of love in favor of reflective “appreciation” for our blessings). The major feasts of the year are only “captaine Jewells” (8) among other jewels of less conspicuous worth that nonetheless likewise bedeck the “carconet” (8) of the year’s triumphant progress in our midst.

When the Bard declares “So is the time that keeps you [the object of his devotion, the multiplication of being] as my chest is” (9), he is not making a concession to the “sad Intrim[s]” (56:9) between feasts as chest or wardrobe from which only imprisoned pride can be freed. Following up on the re-deemed logic he revealed in Q1–Q2, he declares in the volta that every moment of time “keeps” or “preserves” the object of his true good will “as,” or “just to the extent that” his own human “chest” (9) does and may. In other words, time and the human heart can be empty cavities in which to imprison good or they can aid and enrich. His is no praise of dearth; he thinks every “speciall instant speciall blest” (11). The couplet is no idle flattery of another that revels in its disguised cleverness; it is a version of the beatitude he would forward for “solemne” and “rare” (5) contemplation. “Blessed are you [the ‘blessed key,’ syntactically; figuratively ‘dear generous love’ beating in the human ‘chest’] whose worthinesse gives skope” (13) to human(-)kind’s essence and only glory. For his persona, “being” in the last line is but a participle referring back to “you,” the youth; for the Bard it is a noun. The wondrous “skope” of love is to see in every instant “being had to triumph.” The scope of love is to realize that our very being is truly possessed only in triumph, a triumph not in but over our self-regarding parades of vanity, favoring instead a more enduring and fruitful accomplishment. Whenever the “being” of love (or “desire’s worthiness”) is “lackt” (14) in us there remains “hope” (14) for greater access to it. The blessed key unlocking the treasure lies within us, a worthiness that gives scope to our triumph and our hope, true good will’s fruitful engagement with our time “being” and future times awaited in joyful expectancy. Blessed is the fruit of that womb.

Comprehension of 75 is made easier now that 48 and 52 are under our belts. The slavish flattery the poem delivers overtly to the young man as the speaker’s “all”—indeed, his very “food” and drink (1, 2)—hides a passive aggressive sotto voce complaint that so “starved” (10) does the young man make the speaker for even a “looke” (10) at him that any nurture he gains from him is not given freely but must “be tooke” (12) or “stolen.” His life remains a vicious cycle of feast and famine, the speaker so “starved for a looke” (10) at him most of the time (the youth’s being “all away” [14]) that when the rare chance occurs to “feast on your sight” (9) he can’t help but “glutton on” (14) him rather than share politely in the feast he purportedly would sit down to with him.

It is difficult to improve upon Hammond’s depiction of the ambiguous effect the quatrain development creates here.

“Peace of you” in line 3 presents insuperable difficulties. . . . It might be possible to find some paraphrase which sums up all of its connotations, but in the process of reading the sonnet the reader mainly perceives the contrast between “peace” and “strife” together with the pun on “piece” which anticipates the money image of line 4, and secondarily, perhaps, a general sense of “peace” summing up the opening image of providential succor. Certainly the contrast in the quatrain between the first two lines and the fourth is immense. Sublime is hardly too strong a word to describe the complete dependence of the poet upon the young man in the image of food and rain, but the sublimity evaporates after “peace” and “strive” with the image of the miser and his wealth. The degradation of that metaphor spreads through the second quatrain: “proud,” “enjoyer,” “treasure,” “counting best,” “bettered,” and “see my pleasure” all take on the taint of the miser, where they might otherwise have been used to sustain the grandeur of food to life and showers to the ground. When the sestet returns to the initial image, . . . it does so only to revise it radically downwards by carrying into it the values of the miser. . . . A sonnet which opens in the high metaphorical fashion enacts the degradation of its subject by allowing one metaphor to contaminate another. (37)

The degradation the speaker confesses here shows no sign of any contrition. When he confesses to gluttony and avarice, he does so only for effect—the desire to flatter and reprimand the addressee at once in that he would have the boy imagine that his allure is so great that he has driven the speaker to this humiliating plight. Nothing of the sort need in fact be true. “Suspect of ill,” the satirical Bard knows better. The speaker may say he is concerned about the “peace of you” (3)—perhaps the “peace” in himself that the young man could bring him, but also and necessarily “your peace” as well; but in fact the poem shows the speaker hell-bent alone on disturbing the addressee’s peace. Fed by the images of gluttonous feeding and miserly accounting, peace cannot help but enact an aural pun on the “piece of” or “portion of” the young man the speaker “tooke” (11) from him. Regard for the whole man, his purported friend, has been displaced by a piece of him the speaker uses for his short-sighted benefit. The purported “strife” he acknowledges holding within himself is but the brave show of a smugly self-satisfied rhetorician hoping to maneuver his “mark.” He may claim a strife within himself like that “twixt a miser and wealth” (4), but this miser has, in fact, no quarrel at all with the “wealth” he presumes to own, alternately “counting best to be with you alone” (7)—an image of intimacy with the beloved that laughably summons up the spectacle of the miser “counting best” when undisturbed by others—and then “betterd” (8) yet, realizing an added fillip of “pleasure” (8) in parading his smug ownership of wealth to the world. What’s not to like here. Where’s the “strife”?

In this putative love feast, where is any human consideration shown the young man? The speaker freely admits that in feeding on the young man he possess[es] or pursue[s] “no delight / Save what is had, or must from you he tooke” (11). Whether “all ful with feasting” (9) or “cleane starved for a looke” (10), everything is always about his pining and “surfet” (13). When the speaker declares, “So are you to my thoughts as food to life, / Or as the sweet season’d shewers are to the ground” (1, 2), he must imagine that what he is saying will be flattering to the friend. But that depends. He would affirm the high importance of the beloved to him as the very sustenance that keeps him alive and nurtured; but if he is so only in order to devour the beloved’s resources without generating new life through them, the only result can be the sense of depletion the poem’s undersong records. Sweet seasoned showers may fall on the speaker’s “ground” of being and yet produce nothing of consequence without seeds of new life planted there. The speaker may imagine the beloved nurtures him as food does, but for him the “you” (1) or person of the beloved is to the speaker’s “thoughts” of you chiasmically as “food” is to his own perverse “life” alternately yearning to devour or in fact gluttonously devouring the goods placed before him. He cannot convincingly lay these sins at anyone’s door but his own.

No confession of starved hunger gluttonously satisfied whenever the opportunity should present itself, the Bard’s address is a testimonial to love’s steadying and grand centrality in his life. The “you” (1) he nominates, dear sweet love or “the thoughts of hearts that can mend” (69:2), are to his “thoughts” (1) as “food” is to “life” (1), a nurturing necessity and staple without whose “sweet season’d showers” (2) the poetic seeds he’s planting in the sonnets will prove barren. In Q2 he then dramatizes proof that he is unlike misers who war perpetually between obsessing over what they have and fearing to lose it. He is, by contrast, always at peace: not “now” (5) this and “anon” (5) that, but ever himself in the “now,” ever “proud as an injoyer” (5)—note the suggestion of sexual tumescence—of that now and then “anon” “proud as an injoyer” in the “nows” to follow, “Doubting the filching age will steale his treasure” (6) because he knows no miser’s spirit. The filching age can only steal its (in other words, “its own”) treasure just as he alone might rob himself of his own capacities for creative good. The Bard’s better self remains wholeheartedly concentrated on peaceful attentiveness to his beloved: “possessing or pursuing no delight / Save what is had or must from you be tooke” (11–12) in love. His is a spirit that “gives itself away” constantly (in both senses of that phrase), whether counting it best to be contemplating the wealth of his thoughts to himself or bettered that the world may see or “share” his pleasure he takes in love. Whether he is “all ful” (9) with feasting on the sight of love or “cleane starved” (10) to see yet more, his hope is alone for being had to triumph or being “lackt” to hope. Thus at every moment of every day, always at peace with himself, the Bard’s better self both “surfets” and “pines” (13) whether “gluttoning on all” his sight of love or “cleane starved” for yet more of it when the sight of love is “all away” (14). The purity of a heart at peace is to will this one thing alone.

In a surprising way, the same paradox in the poet’s persona—miserly swings between feasting on famine and yet remaining famished when feasting—reprises itself in 29. We are unlikely to recognize here the clarifying allusion to the Earl of Oxford’s lyric, “The lively larcke stretcht forthe her winge,” in which ll.20–24 directly anticipate the central tensions of 29 in an openly satirical key—

Desyre can have no greater payne

Then for to see on other mann

The thinge desyred to obtayne

Nor greater joy can be than this

That to enjoy that others mysse.

Even if we do not, however, Q’s punctuation of 29 and the competing syntaxes that it sets at odds confirm that this sonnet must not be construed as a simple account of an abrupt reversal of spirits in a speaker much down on his luck overheard experiencing a stunning spiritual “ascension” at the sudden thought of the “welth” (13) his beloved represents to him. The unchallenged history of emendations of the poem’s punctuation testifies to the unfortunate effectiveness of the trompe d’l’oeil effect the Bard employed in it. He knows how his readers will most naturally construe the situation presented to them here. Indeed the witty practical joke the poem plays on us depends upon the likelihood that in our rush to construe a sense that satisfies the naive heart’s desires, readers will overlook the tell-tale curiosities in the poem’s punctuation and syntax that, once noted, completely subvert those first impressions. Only when (and if) we do a double take do the inconsistencies and moral problematics of our initial reading begin to emerge and short-circuit its premature sense of interpretive closure. As in the Renaissance painting Feste refers to in Twelfth Night, picturing two fools facing the viewer, but entitled “Three Fools” (2.3.174), the reader of this sonnet requires more than one “looke” to take in its import properly. Sadly, the Bard could not foresee that our common desire to ignore or elide what does not fit our comfortable and comforting preconceptions would urge editors through the centuries to paint in a third fool in the canvas before them rather than scrupulously attend to a subsequent sense communicated by what initially merely confounds.

We and the poem’s editors may look to see only what we wish to see, but Q’s punctuation summons these tendencies toward comfortable self-delusion to account for themselves. The period at the end of l.4 radically challenges the sympathetic “perspective” from which we are likely to have viewed the speaker’s situation in the poem initially. The period converts the speaker’s wailing description of his woes into unwitting self-indictment, converting our sympathy for him into a judgment upon him already reached. No longer asked to contemplate unmerited misfortune, ostracism, alienation from human and divine favor, and the despair that follows upon those woes, we are urged to consider a speaker whose response to his bad fortunes renders him disgraceful in that he sulks “all alone” (2) in self-preoccupation, feasting on his famine in weak relief. His ostracism is not the result of the unique depths of his miseries since many others share or even exceed them. Self-alienated, he wastes his time “beweep[ing] his out-cast state” in a shameless display of self-pity, which we, in our own lives, prefer to hide (against the grain of our inclinations) because of our awareness that it is indeed shameful to display such “woe-is-me” self-regard openly before other “men’s eyes.”

The end-stopped fourth line likewise detaches Q2 from the first’s syntax and attaches it instead to the sentence that forms the remainder of the poem as an introductory participial construction modifying “I” in l.10 (something the comma at the close of l.8, rather than some alternative end-stopped emendation, would seemingly confirm). In this reconfigured syntax, the “welth” now locked away in the speaker’s miserly thought of the beloved is no longer a clear and complete transcendence or reversal of the “sullen” condition in which the speaker had earlier labored, but a confession that even the happy thought of his beloved, itself, may be compromised by the vengeful envy of and yearning to overreach others (recall the satirical lines of the Earl of Oxford and Dame Nature in 67 and 68) that previously poisoned what contentment the speaker might have enjoyed (“with what I most enjoy contented least”). The modifier “Yet in these thoughts my selfe almost despising” is no longer a logically contrastive summation of the feelings that have gone before the impending reversal of fortune, but a confession that the speaker is “yet”—that is, “still”—making a famine where abundance lies even when “haplye” he thinks upon his beloved’s graces as riches that are his alone to flaunt. When he thinks of the beloved, he may be doing so more to lord it over those before whom he had previously imagined himself contemned than to offer generous and appropriate appreciation for the beloved’s sweet otherness and benefice. The speaker remains at risk of “enjoy(ing)” the bloodless satisfaction of a fantasy triumph over his rivals in fortune’s favors even more than a richer, more full-bodied engagement with the man himself.

That this satirical salvo is intended is aided by two other examples of syntactic magic employed in the poem’s resolution. If we attend to the parenthesis in l.11 of Q rather than to the editorial tradition omitting it in deference to the facile assumption that surely it is the lark and not the speaker whose home is “sullen earth,” then another ironic barb may dawn. Even when his spirit nimbly soars in his thinking about his beloved, the speaker may have remained morally mired on “sullen earth” as he hymns but a song of himself “at Heavens gate.” Even more churlish now than when Fortune had turned on him, the beneficiary of this windfall now risks smugly singing hymns of thanksgiving “at Heavens gate” for this new-found wealth he clutches in miserly delight to himself—his sudden wealth distinguishing him from and “elevating” him in his own mind above all other human beings, even kings. His resemblance to the musical lark largely self-flattering, the ludicrous possibility looms that the speaker is so enamored with his sudden good fortune that the only thing he can think to do with it is to crow about it openly. Now suddenly in a self-satisfied isolation from every other human being (even the beloved), and thus in a standoffish sullenness masked even from himself, he caws his smug hymns of thanksgiving for the unique treasure it is now his alone to feast upon.

This troubling reading is reinforced by one other note in the couplet. “That” in l.14 need not be a relative completing the sense of the previous line; it may be demonstrative, referring back to “thy sweet love” that “such welth brings” in the penultimate line, a thought encouraged perhaps by the seemingly unnecessary comma at the end of l.13. In self-implicating irony, the speaker’s parting words may dramatize his folly before all “men’s eyes.” Even when he remembers his beloved, his may be a sullenness that scorns sweet love’s greater wealth to opt instead for his private version of the worldly power kings wield, a changeable estate ever fluctuating between taxing labors and tormenting anxieties about conquest, acquisition, and loss rather than feeding on an ever richer share in sweet love’s readily available harmonies and shared delights.

Sonnet 29’s bipolar shift from grim woe to giddy delight, from self-pity to self-congratulation, and from public failure to private glory recalls Antony’s abrupt fluctuation between mawkishness and giddy self-intoxication in his reconciliation with Cleopatra just after Actium. The true voice and spirit of good Will/will is not to be found in giddy intoxication enjoyed in overcompensation for frustrated worldly ambitions. It is not to be found in the hint of Satanic isolation and pride one may well hear in anyone’s saying, “I skorne to change my state with Kings.” The Bard knows that no human being—king or beggar—merits scorn; what does, however, is an incessant quest for worldly dominance and advantage over others into which kingship has often been known to degenerate. Himself recalling and fully realizing the riches “sweet love” (13) provides him, the Bard rests easy and confidently in it, “scorn[ing]” only to change that rich “state” of contentment and well-being for the volatile tyrannies and terror upon which the kings of this world dissipate their energies instead.

Paired with 29, 30 traces the same dramatic arc, moving, like it, from a relentless litany of melancholic “mone[s]” (8) in Q1–3 to the interjection of a thought of the beloved that transforms accumulating miseries heaped on one another to rhapsodic joy in the twinkling of an eye. One of the richest and most searching poems in either sequence, 30 recounts an internal drama in which the speaker’s meditative “sessions” (1) of his own devising, sessions of sweet silent thought, “sommon up” (2) for his judicial examination “past” (2) loves and desires once taken from him and subsequently grieved in days themselves now long since lost. Emotional scar tissue has since formed over these aching wounds, hardening his whimpering heart to stoical endurance. Prior to this moment (and others like it the speaker has periodically experienced) his eye had eventually formed an “eye (un-used to flow)” (5) in tears “for precious friends hid in deaths dateless night” (6), his “fore-gon” grievances (of l.9) themselves “foregone” from consciousness. But his summoning of these remembrances of things past at moments such as this unexpectedly open those old wounds again before our very eyes. They make him “weepe a fresh [‘afresh’] loves long since canceld woe” (7) and “mone th’ expense [both ‘grief’s initial cost’ and ‘the uselessness of its being paid again’] of many a vannisht sight” (8) of and “sigh” for lost beloveds (see Booth 183, citing “sight” as variant spelling of “sigh” as late as 1584).

Q3 records the hapless existential consequence: accounting to himself for his energies expended in this fashion adds pointless inconsequence to pointless inconsequence, wasted and wasting “mones” wailing over wasted mones as he redundantly “tell[s] ore,” (10) woe upon woe, the “sad account of fore-bemoned mone” (11) newly paid “as if not payd before” (12). All his laboring misery and concern with nothing to show for it: not then, not now—not ever—because all the grief he tallies cannot balance his books or prove enriching in any way. All’s for naught. Hence the rueful ambiguity in “griev[ing] at grievances fore-gone” (9). That ambiguous phrase can refer to his freshly wounding new grief in tears flowing again or to the pointlessness of such a renewal of woe, making him grieve at the very idea of feeling grievances again when doing so can do no more good than it did in the first place.

Suddenly recalling the beloved seemingly lifts the speaker miraculously out of this bottomless death spiral of woes, but it also unintentionally discloses that the tribute he pays his friend is but an idle and unconvincing bit of flattery—as much self-flattery as flattery of his friend. The thought of the young man is but a momentary rescue fantasy, a distraction from, not a resolution to, his woes. It will not balance his internal accounts with a gain to offset his losses and make sorrow “end” (14), especially when we recognize that he must weep “a fresh love” (7) as much as he’s wept “afresh” his former loves, wailing over his own “deare times waste” (4) in doing so and “my deare[,] times waste” awaiting the young man. When he thinks of the addressee, “all losses” ambiguously enough “are restord” (14) or “re-stocked”—not an offsetting gain. As temporarily relieved as the speaker may be by the thought of the young man, doing so cannot put an “end” to his sorrows so much as disclose “sorrowes end” (14), or absurd entelechy, in wasted tears and years.

His books cannot be closed. Losses dwarf gains; woes, joy. In the speaker’s mind, of course, the fault is no one’s: it must be laid at entropy’s door. But isn’t there a troubling sign of sick self-regard in declaring that sorrow expressed for those one loves means only “my deare times waste,” as if one may resent the imposition even more than the burden of grief crushed? In his manner of grieving, does he “drown an eye” in tears anew “for precious friends hid in dateless night” (5–6) solely, or, in doing so, does he blindly “drown an eye-un-used-to-flow for precious friends,” an “eye . . . hid in deaths dateless night” of its own unseeing. The only thing that can keep loved ones—dead or alive—“hid in dateless night” is our failing to think of them at all, not some external threat keeping them from us.

The legal conceit underlying the poem “adds the notion of guilt and punishment to that of nostalgia” (Seymour-Smith 127). Indeed, the “atmosphere suggested by the language of the sonnet is that of an enquiry in a manorial court presided over by Thought, the Lord of the Manor, or his Steward, into the condition of the estate, its losses and resources” (Ingram and Redpath 120). Because we soon learn that the speaker is himself a defendant in the case, it is odd that his first thought is to construe himself as both judge and summoner of witnesses to determine a true accounting and assign blame for false stewardship as necessary. His verdict, of course, is for self-exoneration from responsibility for the wholesale losses occurring under his watch, though that judgment remains hopelessly compromised and prejudicial. A more dispassionately thought-full magistrate would rule out of order the testimony the speaker gives as lacking relevance. Calling his “remembrance” of his friends to the stand as “character witnesses” for himself and breaking down before the bench in wailing grief are irrelevant distractions from the case being tried: can the steward in question balance his books or “sum [his] count” (2:11), and, if not, is he to blame in any way for those same losses?

When the speaker “sigh[s] the lacke of many of the things I sought” (3)—having summoned the remembrances of things past—he symbolically bewails what he is still “missing,” not loved ones so much as the point. It is not that he lacks his loved ones’ presence, but that even when present (and now still) his desires regarding them (the things he sought) “lacked” lived substance and depth. He has no “suspect of ill” that perhaps some of his desires may have been lacking in love back then and perhaps that’s why his satisfaction in and with them, then and now, is not a meaningful counterbalance to his friends’ physical absence from his life. He thinks “deare time” has been stolen from him rather than squandered. When he declares that the present exercise makes him “with old woes new waile my deare times waste” (4), he imagines only that with “old woes” assaulting him anew, all he can do is wail the loss of his “deare times waste,” grieving once again as he had when his loss was rawer. In saying so, he secondarily lets the addressee (“my deare”) know that he bemoans “times waste” of everything he has ever cared about, including the boy.

He has no idea, however, that his own words can speak in indictment of him.

In Q either “woes” or “times” could be a possessive; taking woes as “woe’s,” wail as a noun meaning “bewailing,” new as an adjective, time’s as “times,” and waste as a verb, one gets this pertinent extra reading . . .: “and waste my precious opportunities in the new bewailing of old woes.” (Booth 182)

Were the speaker to have thought of this construction of what he’s just said, it would give him yet more reason for grief and “mones” of self-pity, “deare times” precious opportunities wasted again rather than “re-thought” and thus re-deemed. The Bard knows, however, that there is little point in crying so over spilt milk. One should clean up the mess one has made and seek a present and future of richer self-nurture, stewarding one’s “deare time” remaining rather than aping “deare times waste.” Only with a greater investment of oneself in engagement with others can one’s books be balanced.

For those living in yearning “appreciation” of love there is no “deare time” to “waste,” not because they are in some frenzied hurry to make up for lost time, but because they live in eternity’s perpetual sunrise, where in “no time at all” they are translated into the satisfactions of creation, quick now, here now, always. While grief remains to them, the kind of woe that the persona endures nearly perpetually (only occasionally surprised by joy) has long since been “canceld” (7). For them, l’ora beatrice, “deare time” itself, ever gestates love’s labor’s gain, its wails and “mones” to be delivered very different from those of the Bard’s alter ego. For the poet-persona, l.13’s “if the while” means only the happy accident of being surprised by a joy he cannot himself summon or conceive; for the re-deemers, however the “while” is “deare time” itself no longer wasted. In it, one replaces the kind of thinking the quatrains develop (wasting more time) with “the while’s” cultivating of love (“thee [deare friend]” [13]). In such love, deare times waste comes to an “end,” with “all losses . . . restored” (14) or restored by the glorious harvest. Why on earth would anyone think to do anything less, letting our dear times waste the “while,” merely standing by in hapless grief, unaware that everything is simply slipping away unembraced?

Sonnet 31 expands upon this thought. There the persona tries to explain the basis upon which his young friend can have “restord” (30:14) him to a state wherein past losses have suddenly ceased to matter. Unfortunately, however, his testimonial to the beloved’s powers of resurrection in his spirit never transcends a pervasive sense of the funereal. To be lauded as the “grave where buried love doth live” (9) is a curious form of tribute, love more buried alive than resurrected. The arid “grave” (9) of “thy bosome” (1) is merely hung with the dusty “tropheis” of the vanquished dead now ceded to a new conqueror’s prowess. What does it mean in this context that there, in that grave, “thou hast all the all of me” (14)? Doesn’t the poem’s developing context make the concluding phrase resonate oddly: less a gift given than a concession of vanquishment now made new? Does “of” in the final line mean “inherent in and offered freely” or “taken from”? In the figurative context of conquest, can “that due of many, now is thine alone” not hint of tyrannical hoarding? This figure, so reminiscent of the heartless seduction the male wooer accomplished in A Lover’s Complaint, offers nothing more to the young man than the vain notion that seduced the narrator of the complaint: how impressive he/she must be if he who had himself conquered so many, has now himself in turn been conquered. Were he to allow himself to be seduced by such empty tributes, would he not become, as the speaker presently is, the grave where buried love—love, not shared, but hoarded—lives alone among the trophies of former lovers now transferred to a new sarcophagus to gather dust?

In Q2 the speaker alludes to his devoted tears for former loved ones lost in death but now thought to live in the young friend’s “bosome” (1), his former friends (or is it his need for such tears?) “things remov’d that hidden in there lie” (8). In addition to the disconcerting fact that the subsequent allusion to “tropheis” (10) hung at a grave makes “things remov’d” seem more like inert objects transferred from one tomb to another in idle tribute than any newly living thing, yet another ambiguity in Q2 prejudices the case the speaker would like to make there. The fairly standard emendation of “there” in l.8 to “thee” for ease of comprehension occludes the possibility that the antecedent of “there” might be the “eye” of l.5, to comical effect, rather than the “bosome” of l.1. Thus, what the persona imagines as a virtuous aspect of his grief (“the holy and obsequious teare” [5] of “deare religous love” [6]), the Bard may see quite differently. For the speaker, the first half of Q2 is a confident exclamation of the depth of his commitment to lost loved ones; for the Bard it is a rhetorical question whose negative answer needs no articulation, whether those false tears now lie hidden in the speaker’s unfeeling “eye[s]” (6) or in his new love’s “bosome” (1), there to remain just as unsought for. Now that woe’s tap has dried up with such suspicious suddenness because the speaker has been surprised by love’s joy again, the speaker need make no continuing investment of devotional tears or religious interest in his dead friends. Now the only “interest” in the “dead” (7) that concerns him is the “interest of the dead” (7) he himself has “stolne” from them to gain a flattering foothold in a new relationship.

The couplet oils up the addressee by claiming that while he did love all those he loved, the young man is the only one he loves “all” (14) because his bosom has now become the graveyard of the dearly departed. To the Protestant orthodoxy of the period, the figure the speaker uses to embellish this sophistry badly undermines the glowing effect he would like to leave in it, likening the speaker’s former loves to inadequate “images” (13) of divine beneficence and the young man to the “all the all” of the godhead himself. That has the effect of making the young man but another idolatrous image worshipped. Though the speaker thinks otherwise, the final line’s syntax implies that his feelings for him need not truly worship anything external to himself at all. The young man may not represent a quasi-divine self-sufficiency to the speaker, but merely a subsidary good to his own exaltedness in that he “hast all the all of [‘derived from’] me” (14). No “deare religious love” here at all, but only a blasphemous pretense of it.

The Bard’s thankful tribute bears no resemblance to obsequy at all since in it he sings exclusively in joy of love’s appreciation. He knows that our beloved dead are not lost to those who love them even after their physical deaths (only “by [a] lacking” [2] within us could we have ever “supposed” them “dead” [2] in fact). Nor can he or anyone else who truly loves ever be distracted from that love by vain thoughts of superficial conquests—however momentarily appealing their allure. All those he has loved have been made over in the image of love’s “bosome” into which they have been gathered (“Their images I lov’d, I view in thee” [13]). For him, Love itself “indeared with all” the “hearts” (1) of those he has loved, “now” (7) “raignes” (3) unchallenged and supreme: “thou (all they) hast all the all of me” (4).

In l.7 of this reading it is not his tears so much that are “things remov’d” but those loved ones once presumed lost who “now appeare” (7) to live “indeared” in the “bosome of love.” The “bosome” of divine love is the grave where buried love—both those presumed dead and/or those that never reached full expression—may be resurrected whenever honored with renewed devotion. The poet’s last words in the couplet are not a vain attempt at manipulation of another, but a declaration of religious surrender to undistracted devotion to being’s plenitude, a devotion rooted in the bottomless and inclusive depths of love’s “bosome.”

Even in sonnets where hyperbolic compliments may seem so conventional that a reader’s attention may readily be lulled to sleep, as in 53, looks can prove quite deceiving. To appropriate the underlying Platonic figure 53 develops, perceptual appearances, or “shaddowes” (2), must not be mistaken for substantial form. The most occluded reality to be uncovered here, however, is not that the object the speaker views—his young man—may not be what he appears, but, ironically, that the speaker himself may not be. Looks may deceive in the object being viewed; but so too, and more insidiously, in the looker looking.

The tell-tale sign that this seemingly doe-eyed compliment may mask the narrowed gaze of a withering sarcasm is the word “like” in l.4. Taken as the marker of a new simile the word simply ups the ante on the quatrains’ claims of an unrivaled “externall grace” (13) in the young man by adding the unrivaled grace of his “constant heart” (14). But if “like” is taken as a verb, the last line shifts corrosively from praise to blame, from comfort taken in the youth’s fidelity to a despairing accusation of lack of constancy in him and a failure on the youth’s part to appreciate constancy in others—most notably, one presumes, in the forsaken speaker (compare to Burrow 486n13–14).

This same reversal is recorded in the body of the poem in its ingenious syntactic ambiguity and the disconcerting punctuation of the single sentence uniting the three quatrains. Conventional editorial practice converts the two colons ending Q1 and Q2 into periods or semicolons. To do so is to swallow unsuspiciously the flattering impression the speaker hopes to leave—that he, the speaker, is one of those millions of shadows who exist but to “tend” on the young man’s every move. Joining with all other human beings, the speaker is at pains to concede a “substantial” inferiority to his beloved. No matter how artfully he may attempt in his verse to “describe” his “Adonis” (5), it can be no more than a “poorely immitated . . . counterfet” (5–6) of the friend; no matter what cleverly “cosmetic art” (“Grecian tires . . . painted new” [8]) his pen may apply to the beauty of his “Hellen,” it merely gilds the lily in a foolish effort to enhance the face that unadorned launched a thousand ships. But if one retains Q’s colons and attends to the direct address of l.1, the verbal actions described in Q2 and Q3, in shifting from elliptical subjunctives to hypothetical imperatives, allude to actions the young man might take, not the poet. Then the quatrains deliver a withering sarcasm under the speaker’s breath. In the boundless egoism and smug self-satisfaction the speaker imagines in the young man, the youth outstrips even the loveless vanity of Helen and Adonis. As the embittered speaker sees it, even when the young man happens to consider the beauty and bounty of the very seasons of the year, they represent no more to him than “shadow[s]” of his own “beauty” and “bountie” (10–11). The question that begins the poem may not express nearly religious wonder at the quasi-divine truth behind the earthly veil; it may instead mockingly ask how someone who in reality is no different from everyone else (each casting but a single shadow) should vainly presume that all others should obsequiously “tend” on his highness.

The persona remains trapped between an allure the young man exerts and a resentment he cannot completely hide or purge. It could well be true that the young man’s looks belie a putrified core, but the corrupted soul who looks upon his purported lover in the compromising way he does is deceiving himself. In the poem’s perspective art, the “you” (1) addressed here is not the young man, but meta-poetically his alter ego, a figure who takes but a “part” (13) in all external grace but “like[s] none” for constancy of heart (14), a claim wholly corroborated by the complete absence of a truly generous gesture on his part anywhere in either sequence. Should the Bard “describe Adonis” (5), he laughingly concedes, it could but “poorly immitate” (6) the same vanity his poet-speaker everywhere puts on display; no matter how memorably mimetic his depiction of faithless Hellen, that portrait of female faithlessness could only be understood as a comically inadequate distaff parody of “you” (8) grotesquely imagined as “painted new” in her “Grecian tires” (8). The persona may think that the fullness of being itself (“the spring and foyzon of the yeare” [9]) is no more than a shadow of his own substantial beauty and bounty; but the truth is obviously otherwise.

The only thing that could free up the speaker’s sclerotic state of woe is the proper appreciation of love. The truest subject of the Bard’s lauding address—here and everywhere—is always sweet love itself, the boundlessly infinite “substance” of l.1 whose depths are yet to be plumbed. The only contact with this nurturing essence and salvation is what in it we “tend” (2) or “cultivate.” Adonis and Helen are pale in comparison; and even the fullness of naturalistic life (“the spring and foyzon of the yeare”) is no rival to its beauty and bounty. Everything with any “externall grace” evokes our love’s yearning, but fascination with external graces, however variously new and distracting, can never displace or rival sweet love’s constancy of heart to any one thing to which we devote ourselves, “tending” it lovingly. That conviction keeps multiplying these testimonials to sweet love over and over without variation or quick change, the verses, like the nurturing sun itself, daily new and old, still telling what is told. Should readers “tend” the seed thus incubated so diligently, new births in beauty will perpetuate themselves and sweet love shared shall never pass away from this earth.

Never one of the more highly regarded sonnets because of its befuddling syntax, narratological oddities, and a “lame conclusion” that “fails to modify, undercut or refine what has gone before” (Duncan-Jones 308), 99 forwards a conventional claim (compare to 9 in Constable’s 1594 Diana) that all the world’s flowers are but 53’s shadows tending upon the young man’s ideal substance. All enchanting floral perfumes and their arresting spectacle to the eye are but derivative facsimiles of the glory of the beloved’s breath, hair, complexion, and veining.

Oddities abound here. There is a curiously placed question mark at the end of l.4 when the direct discourse seemingly requires its delay until the end of l.5. The spelling of “died” (5) for “dyed” disconcertingly takes comprehension of the line in two different directions at once. Then there are the half-sensible misspellings and apparent misprints: “our” for “one” in “our blushing shame” (9); l.13’s “eate” that could be read as an imperative or as a misprint for the past tense form “ate”; and the serendipitously suggestive spelling “culler” (15) for “colour” in a poem whose central conceit involves flowers. There are, as well, even bigger issues: the awkward shift from the appearance of direct address to the violet to the realization that such address is but a portion of the poem’s address to the young man; the apparent break with decorum involved when the poet-speaker laces this playfully fantastic myth of origins (how the flowers got their lovely smell and visual beauty) with stark depictions of guilt, punishment, and unevenly applied vengeance. It is one thing to declare that the flowers have “stolne” (7) their beauty from the young man, “sweet thee(ves)” (2) all. It is quite another and a troubling break from decorum, however, to hear that the violet somehow “too grosely died” (5) in taking its color from the beloved’s empurpled veins or to hear that the lily’s white complexion should get “condemned for thy hand” (6) as if in need of serious reprimand or even a sentence of death. Why should the roses idiomatically need to “stand on thornes” (8) in trembling anxiety from shame and despair (compare to Booth 323n9), awaiting their sentencing; and why should such justice be so disproportionately imposed when only one of these botanical cutpurses should be put to “death” by “canker” (13), though all are guilty of similar crimes? The standard emendations this poem has endured eradicate these curiosities; the standard commentaries generally leave its indecorums unremarked or take them as a further sign that this fifteen-line sonnet is carelessly composed.

But these oddities do not represent loose ends if the speaker is heard here as an embittered figure veiling blame in hyperbolic praise. The apparent address of the violet in this scenario is the only way the speaker can think to hide his resentment of the beloved without alienating the friend whose charms still draw him to him. Under the cover of compliment, the speaker can remark the addressee’s betrayal, the boy having “stolne” his beauty from its real source, “my [the speaker’s own] loves breath” (3), giving alluring color to the youth’s “cheeke.” The unemended fourth line would appropriately conclude that claim. One need not mentally erase the question mark at the end of l.4 to integrate l.5 into the direct discourse; one can hear l.5 as a second instance in which the speaker “chide[s]” (1) the young man for a theft that has made him “too grosely die” (5) in his estimation. The beloved stands accused at the speaker’s secret tribunal for too “grosely” appropriating the beautifying dyes that the speaker has painted him in or, worse, for stealing his vigorous color from the veins of the speaker’s bleeding heart.

Despite weeping and gnashing his teeth in this hapless mortification, the speaker’s continuing attraction to the boy’s charms keeps him at his blandishments; but tormented resentment gagged cannot help but seep out of the side of his mouth. The lily he “condemned” in l.6 need not simply up the rhetorical ante initiated in his chiding the violets in Q1; it could secretly insinuate the exact manner in which, if he dared, he would bring the young man to justice for his crimes committed against him. In the surface compliment, Roses “on thornes did stand” (8) is a naturalistically descriptive loveliness; but in the speaker’s mind’s eye the rose he has embraced he now ruefully sees has thorns upon which he, the true Rose, “stands” tortured. Had he the power, he would drag the culprit before the bar to make him “stand on thornes,” awaiting sentencing—shame and despair his lot (compare to Booth 323n8).

As Q3’s allegory shows, the persona knows that will never happen and he himself, the only true rose, must stand on thorns of agony and anxiety instead, to suffer alone “our blushing shame” (9) and “white dispaire” (9). Q3’s third rose, the only one to be sentenced to “vengfull . . . death” (13) by withering disease, is thus not just another flower in a playful compliment suddenly fraught with deadly seriousness; it is the youth himself. The “both” (10) he has stolen is not, as in the flowers, red and white coloration. In betraying the speaker the youth has “stolne” from them “both,” in the process stealing away all “our blushing shame” and “white dispaire” by denying both feelings. Not only has he absconded with what is not his—the blushing shame and pale despair they should be sharing—but to add insult to injury, to this robbery of that which is sacred about sinfulness (in other words, compunction), the young man has “annexed thy breath” (11) whose falsity sticks in the speaker’s craw. No wonder then that this rose alone should hear the fulminating judgment uttered from the high bench (though never overtly spoken): let a “vengfull canker eate him up to death” (13) in the “pride of . . . his growth” (12)—that is, “at the height of his youth” or in the “indiscriminate sexual readiness” in which he seems to take shameless satisfaction, unconcerned with the hurt he imposes on others.

The couplet’s fall off in intensity is no sign of the persona’s flagging inventiveness but a hasty prudential retreat from having gotten so worked up that he suddenly realizes he has nearly ruined everything by venting rage nearly explicitly in l.13’s curse. What’s more, the couplet remains anticlimactically flat only as long as we hear in it solely the voice of the persona. It opens upon a rich new vista when in it a gently satirical voice further assesses his alter-ego’s self-defeating stance, declaring that the “sweete theefe” (2) who robs from others and himself here is most notably the speaker himself. “Yet I none could see” in l.14 need not be merely redundant filler. It may be a Bardic contrast explaining that while his alter-ego may have “note[d]” other flowers in their pride, “yet I [italics mine] none could see” as himself one. Blinded whether he sings in blandishment or malice, or both, whether “sweet[ly]” or as vengeful “culler,” he is but a “sweet theefe” robbing both from his friend and himself. As long as “want of love tormenteth” (V&A 202) in a speaker whose bile would hide itself in insincere blandishments, the person such a speaker is hurting the most is himself, suppressed rage blinding him to everything but his own foolish pride. The “third” (10) flower of Q3 is neither rose nor traitorous friend, but the shamelessly undespairing speaker whose own “breath” (11) only furthers the robbery that will “eate him up” from within even “up to death” (13) itself unless he can come to see his torturing pride for what it is. The couplet then is not what the poet-speaker would make of it: a compliment he does not truly mean. It is instead a sad but true judgment upon him. When the persona steales himself away from love in the way that he does, all the flowers he smells for their “sweet” or “culls” for himself (his blandishments and veiled blame) in stealing from l.15’s “it”—in other words, love in the world—only proves something “stolne from thee” (15), the man withering on his own vine.

Sonnet 113 is another conventional compliment that masks its true intentions. It would appear that the poem is rehashing the truism that lovers, when absent from their beloveds, find themselves obsessively preoccupied by the lover’s image, not even feeling with any presence of mind the goings-on in the world about them. The only elements here that lift the poem out of triteness are the hints of anxiety that things should be so and the couplet’s sudden self-justification, re-deeming any worries the speaker might have previously expressed about his distracted state. In the last line’s paradoxical chiasmus (“my most true mind thus maketh mine [presumably ‘mind’ and ‘m’eyne’] untrue” [14]), the speaker rhetorically transforms his discomfiture into a complacency that esteems itself “repleat, with you” (13) alone, his loving devotion to the beloved (“my most true [‘constant’] minde”) more than justifying his perceptual shortcomings (whether “mine” [14] refers to his blind eye [1] or the heartless “minde” [7]).

Aside from the cloistered virtue such a self-satisfied stance represents, the main reason one might remain suspicious that the speaker’s concluding aplomb does not tell the whole story here is Q3. How does the speaker’s conjunction there of the beloved with the “rud’st” (9) and “deformedst” (10) creatures “serve the metaphorical purpose of assimilating all that is seen to some version of that Platonic form, the friend” (Vendler 447). The fact is, it cannot. It discloses instead pathogenic suspicion of ill in the young man’s character, a suspicion as central to the speaker’s obsessions as is his need to exaggerate his praises of him without any more effort at substantiation than he brings to his surreptitious blame of him.

We need not, however, accept at face value the persona’s nonchalance in confessing to his own blindness. (It should be noted, to be sure, that the alternative “perspective” the poem forwards depends upon the poem’s not being emended such that l.6’s “lack” becomes “latched,” “sweet-favor” [10] becomes “sweet-favored,” “mine” [14] is simplified to “m’eyne” and l.13’s comma after “repleat” mistakenly removed.) The persona may construe the octave as nothing more noteworthy than a flattering compliment to a vain object. But to the Bard, Q1’s import is more serious. Since “that which” in l.2 may as easily refer to the speaker’s “mind” (1) as to his “eye” (1) and “part his function” in l.3 refer to the mind’s “deserting” its functions rather than to the eyes only “partly” or “abstractedly” seeing, then Q1 may well characterize the speaker as “out” (4) of his mind as readily as it may confess his eyes being “out” (4) or “failing to shed light” on what they still can see. In explaining in Q2 how his eyes are failing to act at full capacity, he may imagine that his confession actually furthers the flattering goal by suggesting that the image of the beloved to which he does still cling is, unlike other sights, a “forme” (5) he can still “deliver to the heart” (5), a vision to which he continues to “hould” (8) now that he has caught it, a “quick object” (7) of desire to which he remains faithfully fixed. But to the Bard, following upon the claim of Q1, Q2 anatomizes the reasons why seeing as the speaker sees in all cases means that he is comfortably domiciled in Bedlam. To the speaker “since I left you” (1) is no more than a time marker; but for the Bard “you” alludes to “love itself” rather than to the young man. As the poet sees it, the mind becomes completely deranged when, having deserted love itself, its mind’s eye delivers no “forme” to the heart nor any longer takes part in loving engagement with “quick objects” (7) but only worships lifeless images. Heartless (l.6’s “lack” may ambiguously refer to objects no longer possessed and to the heart “lacking” in its response to the world), the mind’s mad vision is but ever bent on catching as “catch” (8) can the things it pursues, not in any appreciative effort to “hould” (8) in affection what it nominally apprehends.

Q3’s varied catalogue of natural sights may be meant as but a litany of hyperbolic extremes chanted to the vain god to whom it is addressed in hapless petition. But for the Bard, Q3, like Q2, is another explanation of the speaker’s heartless seeing. To the poet-persona all’s one: “gentlest” or “rud’st” (9) sights; the heartlessly forwarded “sweet-favor” (10) of his compliments, however insincere, or the “deformedst” (10) malignities he presumes in the young man. But the Bard sees that in him the gentlest and rudest sights lie side by side, equally corrupted, within the heartless darting of his distracted mind’s eye. To most of us the difference between rudeness and gentility, between true love’s “sweet favor” and the “deformedst creature” (10) that only pretends to love (the difference between cooing “dove” and cawing “Crow” [12]) is as clear as the difference between “night” and “day” (11) or “mountaine” and “sea” (11); but to the blind and loveless speaker’s mind, which has parted its function, all is grist for the same mill, a mill that grinds exceedingly small, “shapes” everything to the “feature” (12) of the object he pursues but cares not to “hould,” hoping only to manipulate and flatter it into lifeless submission to him. His mill shapes everything to the features of love, but its facsimile of love is heartless.

As a last bit of flattery, the couplet hopes to convince the addressee that the speaker has not “left you” (1), but that all along he has remained “with you” (13) in his mind’s eye, there idling in l.13’s state of repletion. But to the poet, the couplet confesses a more critical judgment. The persona is “Incapable of more repleat” (note where the mid-line comma appears in Q) than the perpetual hunger he endures because a more replete condition that is alone possible “with you”—that is, “in concert with the heart’s love”—he thinks no great loss. He lives merely to sustain his blind mind’s eye, “heartlessly” (even his “most true mind . . . maketh mine untrue” [14])—whether “mine” most notably refers to the prejudicially libeled young man or, punningly, to the very “mind” and “m’eyne” he falsely imagines true.

When we realize the true antecedent of the second person pronoun in the poem as love itself, the injunctions speak to and for all of us. Whenever love is left behind and our mind’s eye apprehends reality without “taking it to heart,” whenever we are content to counterfeit everything we see merely in the shape of love’s features rather than expend love’s true coin in deference to its value, we sacrifice the ever richer repletion alone possible “with” (13) love to nothing more than a zero-sum game in which hunger for more always devours despite the repletion with which our self-satisfied spirits persist in a mad dash to ruin. Seconding the celebrated caution from Corinthians, the Bard would have all—himself and his alter ego included—not endlessly speak nor act as noisy gongs and clanging cymbals.

Sonnet 114 pursues further 113’s fanciful notion that “everything reminds lovers of their beloveds,” now arguing that “everything looks good to a person in love” (Booth 378). Absent from his beloved, the speaker acknowledges that he still finds himself shaping everything he sees to the beloved’s “feature” (113:12), mentally transforming even “monsters and things indigest” into “such cherubines as your sweet selfe resemble” (5–6).

It is easy to see why Booth thinks the poem precious (377). In the debate whether the “minde” (1) or “eie” (3) is more to be faulted in the mind’s playing 113’s tricks on the speaker in his love-longing, the conceit figures the “eie” as the monarchical minde’s taster viewing a confection appealing to them both. The speaker wonders whether the effects of love upon him transforming everything to good are, as ll.1–2 suggest, merely the mind flattering itself—as monarchs are wont to do—or whether, as ll.3–4 imply, an actual alchemical transformation converting base things to gold. In Q3 the speaker comes down on the side of the former, sensibly rejecting the idea that what is base can be converted into the most high (the beloved seen as “cherubines” [6]). Flattering the beloved that much more unctuously, he decides that while the wish-fulfilling illusion remains a false one, the opportunity to see the beloved in everything the speaker sees is one he will eagerly swallow anyway because the sight of the beloved, even as illusion, remains such an enticing draft to him. Thus, in the eye’s testing this concoction at the monarchical mind’s behest, it savors a delight they can both enjoy. The couplet, however, changes all the frivolity to mock heroic seriousness when suddenly the speaker entertains the possibility that the “cup” so pleasurable to contemplate for both eye and mind might be poisoned.

For Booth the couplet’s logic argues: “The eye’s guilt in offering poisoned wine (misapprehended truth) to the mind is lessened because the eye too is deceived . . . as taster, is victim too” (378). Surely he is correct to suggest that this intricately elaborated conceit makes the flattery of the beloved it forwards almost more than readers can swallow without gagging: the speaker arguing that the image of the beloved, however “false,” is a sweet poison he’s more than willing to drink, his eyes’ “sinne” in passing the cup on to the monarchical mind one less serious than that of the mind willing to quaff it, too, even though it knows the risks.

The trouble, however, is that once this poisonous pill has been introduced into this frothy brew of a poem it cannot be removed. What matters it whose “sinne” is more corrupting when both the sinners have now been brought down by the poison they have more than willingly quaffed? One looks in vain for any sign that the speaker appreciates the real danger lurking in his desire to slake a thirst for both self-intoxication and flattery.

The sonnet hides another sting in its tail. It may not require an alchemical transformation to convert “monsters, and thing indigest” (5) into mythical gold. “Monsters, and things indigest” converted to “cherubines” may instead surreptitiously allude to the speaker’s own former folly of eye and mind in which he honored the youth’s goodness when the friend’s treasons were as yet hidden from him. Now that he knows better, the speaker not only concedes that his beloved prepared a poison cup for him, but in self-laceration for the folly of his still yearning for him nonetheless, both his eye and his mind remain too besotted with the youth to hurl the cup from his lips in disgust. Thus the poisoned cup he continues to drain represents both the young man’s betrayal of him and the taste of bile he must swallow as if nothing is amiss here. In revising Booth’s assessment, Vendler argues that by poem’s end loathing directed at himself has displaced loathing for the “monstrous” young man (482).

This is almost—but only almost—accurate because the couplet is introduced by a conditional “If,” meaning “if perhaps” as readily as “even though.” That conditional returns us to the illogic of the first reading on a higher plane. If now the sinners are speaker and young man even more than eye and mind, the question then becomes what difference it makes which of the two is more to blame for the poisoning when the results prove deadly to both parties? In this reading, the speaker affirms that despite recriminating with the beloved and with himself for the crimes, neither loathing for the corruption in the addressee nor self-loathing are ultimate here. What’s at stake is the speaker’s vain need to get in the last self-justifying word before both he and the beloved’s affection are seen to die. The lesser sin he declares is that his own eye and mind saw the truth but drank the intoxicating poison anyway. The greater “sinne” (13) still belongs to the monster who would so poison his superior, the king. As the speaker’s presumptuous identification with the king in his conceit reveals, his self-loathing is neither complete nor transformational. If his love should prove consuming, he will die happy as long as he can imagine he is the better of the pair; but if perhaps the young man can be swayed by this flattery not to poison him (or stop doing so), his poetic gambit here will have succeeded in a less pyrrhic way—or so he believes.

Ill will/Will does not realize how truly he speaks here. It is not his dazzled eyes or love for or from the beloved but his half-mad thinking that, parting its function, as in 113, makes of his own monstrous and undigested thoughts about the beloved the “cherubines” (6) resembling a “sweet selfe” (6)—his image of the beloved being but a reflection of his own vain yearning for him. The “flattery” (2) in his seeing, then, is not so much that he has mistaken inferior objects of vision for his beloved (first reading) nor that he has mistaken actual monstrosity for a cherubic beauty (the second reading addressed sotto voce), but that he has convinced himself even in this that he remains morally superior to the young man. The couplet then springs the Bard’s ironic trap. The “lesser sinne” in all this does indeed belong to the physical “eye” (14) that cannot see anything else but that it sees; the greater sin belongs to the deranged mind of the speaker that persists in poisonous error when it should have known better and, realizing the destructive consequences, stopped.

Ill will/Will directed toward another simply makes a spectacle of itself here, guttering into inconsequence. The only solution to the problem the speaker represents to himself is a conversion experience: not the willful conversion of everything he sees, however monstrous, into whatever he would like it to be, but a loving conversion within. “Being” (1) is not our throne nor we “crown’d” (1) by anything we snare or usurp; it is crowned by something that we must ourselves give: royal largesse. An ill will may make monsters and things indigest of its unverified suspicions and judgment of a poisonous threat in one’s life, in so doing making a thing monstrous and indigest of a conflicted and unresolved state of being, while thinking of oneself as an angelic “sweet selfe” (6); but the Bard knows there is but one way for the speaker to heal his ills. “Thing[s] base and vile, holding no quantity, / Love [alone] can transpose to form and dignity” (MND 1.1.232–33).

Even when the speaker’s flattery is not compromised by veiled blame, as in 97 and 98, “absence” (97:1) still makes his heart grow fonder—not in richer appreciation for his beloved, but in a yet more intense delusion than that in which he lives when in his presence. His unloving and distracted mind “doth part his function” (113:3) still, seeing monsters and things indigest in the world outside rather than where they truly reside. Perpetuating nothing of substance, he reenacts the sequence’s most egregious crime: “making a famine where aboundance lies” (1:7).

The pathetic fallacy hints that the speaker may be laying it on a bit thick in 97. Since the birds singing “with so dull a cheere” (13) are but a thinly veiled surrogate for the poet himself singing here, it would appear that he is more fearful of a loss that might be made permanent than by any gains he might yet accomplish himself and celebrate. This combined with the claim that his “Lord” (8) is “away” (12) returns us to the parable of the talents at the heart of the Bard’s thinking throughout the sequence. The winter the end of the poem fears has, ironically, already overtaken the speaker’s spirit (“how like a Winter hath” his “absence beene” [1]) even before the poem began. Indeed, were he to realize that fact, he would also realize that he has nothing to fear but that fear itself. Obsessed as he is in the most narrow and hedonistically possessive way with the young man as the “pleasure of the fleeting yeare” (2), the speaker fears his joy might become lost permanently rather than merely suspended temporarily; but only fearful self-regard forbids him from taking any pleasure in the fleeting year’s “aboundant issue” (9). The very figures the persona employs, however, hint that all is not lost, even if the lord of the manor should never return. The crops he left behind, “Autumne big with ritch increase, / Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime” (6–7), await a harvester, not an idly passive hope that the lifeless image of the dearly departed landowner should return to relieve everyone of any labor at all. “Widdowed wombes” (8) impregnated by husbands who have since died or temporarily departed still cry out for help in their deliverance, not alone in self-pity for their loss. The “hope of Orphans” (10) is not a lost cause, as the speaker seems to intimate in despair, but a moral call for their adoption and nurture by those who might help when the biological father is no longer available to do so. The false steward blindly imagines that fruit can be “un-fathered” (10); but the good steward knows there is no such thing: fruit, to become fruit, must be fathered.

Even Winter itself knows as much and actively does its part to father and foster creation. Winter is no absence, as the speaker declares, but a presence fathering spring’s new life in earth’s womb where it lies gestating. The speaker is the only one here too absent-spirited to count, too absent-spirited to answer cries for deliverance from “Autumne’s” fields, “widdowes wombs,” or orphans’ “hopes.” Hence the comic ambiguity in the exclamatory questions that comprise Q1. (Emendation of the question marks to exclamation points or periods, however conventional, ruins this effect by denying the questions any real force.) To the speaker in his self-pity, the questions are no questions but cries for relief from his cares to the absent beloved—idle and pointless cries since the person to whom they are addressed is literally “away” (12). But to the Bard, they are real questions about his persona that must be answered in the negative. Unwilling to sacrifice his narrowly defined pleasures in the fleeting year to the necessary labor love requires, he is not, like Winter, a genuine steward of creation. Though he sings with but a “dull cheere” (13), it is for that pleasure alone that he sings and nothing more substantial. Even the one thing he claims to love more than anything else in the world—the youth—is not a treasure to be cultivated and enriched but a loss to be feared well before it will in fact be lost.

The Bard thinks differently. In his address to love in 97 he confesses that every moment spent in absence, “away” from love, is a wintry “time remov’d” (5) from the potential bounty of “Sommer” who waits on the labor of love to be delivered of its “aboundant issue.” Without love, even birdsong’s beauty can provide little if any solace to us who can do nothing but wait for time’s depredation in hapless dread of “Winters neere” (14).

Knowing not how truly he speaks, the persona in 98 once again compares his absence from his own love to a wintry barrenness and discontent. Mistaking shadow for substance in his art, the speaker admits never telling “any summers story” (7) of the kind of fruitful consequence 97 had depicted as perpetually ready for new birth—every moment of being, its time come, ripe for deliverance. Instead, he simply dillydallies with despair, playing with true grief’s “shaddow[s]” (14), not its substance. The tone in the speaker’s voice in l. 5 and 13’s “yet,” mirroring their equally pivotal place in ll.5 and 9 of 97, convey no indication of hopeful expectancy (as in “even more yet”), instead delivering but their adversative sense—the speaker expressing only his reluctance and hesitation to participate in the season’s burgeoning life all about him.

Two tell-tale signs in the poem, by making one question the speaker’s character and trustworthiness, produce more rhetorical impact than all the smooth talk in this “tired” compliment to his addressee. The octave conventionally records the speaker’s admission that he cannot be roused to participate in April’s new life, a communal jig so lively that even the heavy-spirited Saturn himself “laught and leapt” (4) with the best of them (Q1). In Q2, even spring’s songbirds and the “sweet smell” (5) of flowers cannot rouse the speaker to sing with anything but “so dull a cheere” (97:13) as merely to “dread Winters neere” (97:14). Rather than looking forward, like the season, to new life, he looks back, mesmerized by a fearsome lifelessness to which he still clings. Even the stock in trade of love poets, the emblems of purity and passion, the “Lillies white” (9) and the “vermillion in the Rose” (10) cannot rouse him to courtly comparisons, so deflated is he by the absence of love from his life. In an elegant variation on the standard courtly comparison invidiously comparing the colors of the Rose and Lily to the beloved’s beauty, the speaker cleverly makes the same claim (the beloved being the substantial Platonic “patterne” [12] or “form” of beauty; the rose and lily, inferior “shaddow[s]” [14] or “counterfeits” “drawne after you” [12], as if by an artist, “from life”); but in doing so he simultaneously confesses a glum state of distraction within, where, in wintry fashion, even rose and lily are “drawne after you” into absence’s recessional void, no longer available to his muse.

But the couplet contradicts the argument the quatrains developed. The speaker may want the addressee to hear it as a confession that in his absence from the speaker, the poet has nothing to work with but pale shadows of his glorious substance; but in the same breath the couplet could likewise confess that the state of woe he has been in without the beloved has been little more than exaggerated talk. He may be singing with a dull cheer, but song he has sung nonetheless. If he hasn’t the heart to join in spring’s ode to joy, he has not been mute. He has had the heart to sing and play with insubstantial shadows. The saddest truth here, then, is not that the beloved’s physical absence has condemned the speaker to contemplating mere images of him in his mind, but that in his continuing to play idly and inconsequentially with such images he is missing out on the greater and more substantial joy the dance of life all around him is presently enacting. The antecedent of “these” in l.14 may not solely be the “figures of delight” (11) poets play with; it may be the true “wonder” (9) and “praise” (10) that genuine engagement with the world can enjoy, but that in him has been made over into the trifling flattery we see displayed in the poem’s wan preoccupation with the weak relief of its lovesick gloom.

The other sign that something is amiss is even more overtly troubling: l.8. The speaker means simply to declare in l.8 that not only does his absence from the beloved preclude the urge to sing (ll.5–7), but it forestalls any desire to participate in life’s jubilee any more directly. This he tries to describe figuratively as his absence of desire to cull the season’s lovely sweet-smelling flowers. His manner of describing his melancholia, however, discloses a troubling destructiveness in it. What sensible person would “pluck” flowers from the “proud lap” of earth “where they grew” (8), uprooting them completely in order to enjoy them? The speaker may not be in the mood for merriment at the moment, but this description of what he would do if he were in a better mood does not augur well for the objects of his attention nor, in the longer view, for any multiplication in his own joys.

Such is the curious perspective from which the Bard would have us view his alter ego’s ill will. Unfortunately, that perspective has historically been lost to perusal because Q’s odd punctuation (colons at the end of l.7 and l.8) has typically been emended on the presumption that l.8 is to be read as a parallel action to l.7’s “summers story” and that Q3 is a wholly new idea from anything presented in the octave. The colons, however, keep before us the notion that l.8 may instead represent a conceptual summary of what has preceded it and an anticipatory summary of the import of Q3 as well. Utilizing those cues, we can come to a very different conclusion about the persona than would he. The real reason the speaker cannot tell summer’s stories is that he cannot “pluck” or “remove” the stories he does tell from the “proud lap . . . where they grew” (8): that barren land within him where summer’s flowers grow stuntedly and then simply wither away. The proud lap where his summer’s stories grow in this odd fashion is the spirit of the narcissist who spawned them autogenetically (note the onanistic double entendre in l.8).

Sonnets 50 and 51 are the final two poems to take absence from nurturing love as their literal subject. No mere grace notes, they serve in fact as revealing emblems of the meaning of the narratological torments the sequence endlessly restates, both for the protagonist and for the “beast that beares” (50:5) him, his beleaguered reader, metapoetically. A cautionary parable, 50 makes painfully clear that there can be no rest for the wicked. Its verses (like both sequences) “plod duly on” (6)—and “dully”—in gloom and near exhaustion, unrelieved. The only thing that interrupts the poem’s plodding grief is the occasional “grone” (11) of more intense agony forced out of the speaker by angry frustration that things should invariably seem so. In this the speaker records how his journeying both here and, allegorically, everywhere in the sequence, takes him ever further from the love that he seeks to enjoy. Knowing no less than Petr-arca that all his woes over his love’s absence from his life are nothing more than van dolore and vane speranze, our speaker can think of nothing more inventive than to “plod duly on” on the same course he has vainly set for himself, his wearisome trek in pained lament for what he’s missing interrupted periodically by cries of more acute anguish. Thus “want of love tormenteth” (V&A 202) Petr-arca and the Bard’s persona alike. In the specific context 50 delineates, the amorphous pall thrown over his spirit at missing his friend in the octave suddenly lifts in the sestet to record new and more acute grief seizing him. Having bloodily spurred his horse on in his angered frustration at his misery, his already overburdened “beast” (5) can do no more than simply “grone” in pained response, too exhausted in spirit to rouse himself to more vigorous action. His rider has suddenly stopped to think even darker thoughts: greater speed will only take him yet further from his friend. And so, like his mount, haplessly balking at putting on speed that he has no heart for, he simply groans to himself and “plods duly on” (6) himself now, at one with the beast that bears him, each dismally aggrieved.

But not everyone can or should sympathize with the speaker’s plight to the extent that he himself does. Surely his horse doesn’t. The pathetic fallacy the speaker employs to imagine even his horse sympathizing with his pain is but a comical fantasy hatched in a narcissist’s addled brain. We know, if the distracted speaker does not, that the mount’s “grone” is purely a pained cry over an unprovoked cruelty—the bloody spur—not sympathy for the brute who imposed it. Having heard the groan that his spur has caused, the speaker does not stop to think of the horse’s well-being or even that, having done him harm, he should relent. In the best face one can put on this insensitivity, the persona, lost in self-regarding thoughts of how the horse’s groan is but a lesser reflection of his own pitiable state (the groans “more sharpe to me than spurring to his side” [12]), he merely forgoes further spurring while continuing to ride his overburdened mount into the ground. Were it not clear to us that the speaker is only hurting himself (the horse being in all this nothing but a pathetic figure for the speaker’s bodily self burdened by the relentless suffering of the psyche that directs its movements), his cruelty and, even worse, his detachment from the cruelty in vain self-preoccupation would seem more despicable than tragic. As it is, it stands as fair warning that there is something drastically amiss in the speaker’s understanding of his own predicament, even though he takes pity on it mightily.

Indeed, the speaker is more like the horse he has tortured than he is like the rider of that poor beast of burden whose well-being he blithely disregards and even contemns. We are not dealing here with a Platonic paradigm: the speaker/charioteer, aided by a noble steed, attempting to control a willfully concupiscent yoke-partner. Here the rider has no designs on higher aspirations whatever, nearly fused as he is—centaur-fashion—to the lower animal’s needs and sufferings of his earth-bound mount. As l.3’s curiously clarifying syntax discloses, “my wearie travels end” (2) is not some higher purpose or “goal” the speaker serves (not even loving thoughts of the absent friend), but only his own wearie travel’s end or “termination” so that the speaker, like his horse, might return unburdened to his “ease” and “repose” (3). His desire is no higher good or richer life, but only a figurative requiescat in pacem. Even the painful spur his own thoughts make him suffer in the couplet is not one that truly distinguishes his pain as “more sharpe” than that he has already delivered to his mount. The comical truth is its near identity to it. Even horses are clever enough to realize that hard labor lies ahead as long as one cannot see the barn one’s memory yearns for. What distinguishes one hapless animal from another here is the superior intelligence of the horse. Given a choice in the matter, he would stop tormenting himself by driving himself to exhaustion. His rider is another story.

Plodding duly on, the speaker ends the poem with a rueful witticism: “my griefe lies onward and my joy behind” (14). Absent a conversion experience that would turn him back to another, what he says here will surely prove true enough. But in another sense, this “true image pictured” also “lies.” His griefe and his joy do not reside in another; they are both inner imaginings. Though in disproportionate doses inordinately privileging grief, both are alive and ill, indulging themselves in this very moment during which, solitary and idle, he gratifies himself in his self-pity, however lamely.

Sonnet 51 is a paired compliment fashioned from the same conceit (in both the literary and psychological sense of that word) that 50 had utilized. In that conceit the speaker inconspicuously manages to call more attention to himself in his pain than to anything substantial about the object of his longing. The gist of the compliment buried in the continuing figure seems as clear as the elaboration of the extended metaphor is confusing. If horse and rider drag their feet when forced to move away from the friend in 50, neither will need spurring on their way back to him in 51. Whether in the resolve the speaker gives his horse his head in carrying him home, granting his mount “leave to goe” (14) at breakneck speed, or whether, being impatient even with that speed, he forgoes riding him entirely (giving his dismounted horse “leave to goe” at whatever pace he should make) while he rejoins the beloved figuratively with “winged speed” (8) greater than that of Pegasus, all that we’re certain of is that his horse will not here come in for treatment as harsh as that he suffered in 50.

But the fact that the speaker will no longer physically mistreat the beast that bears him is not a sign that he considers it any less contemptible a mount. The “poore beast” (5) remains but a “dull bearer” (2), “dull flesh” (11), a “jade” (12), who had previously given “slow offence” (1) to him requiring justification (“excuse” [12]) even now—this from a man who had just taken a bloody spur to the animal for no good reason whatever. What’s more, in Q2 he contemplates a tribunal yet to come when his innocent horse will need to justify itself (“what excuse will my poore beast then find” [5]) on a second count of “slow offence” done in the present moment, no matter how quickly he may streak home on their return.

Though the speaker will not take a bloody spur to his mount again, it is not because he regrets as inhumane having done so in the first place or has ruled such behavior out of place even now. He will no longer spur his animal for the same reason he stopped doing so in 50—the act’s inutility to him. (“Then should I spurre . . . no motion shall I know, / Then can no horse with my desire keepe pace” [7–9].) In self-glorifying fantasy the speaker imagines his spirit’s “perfects [a variant spelling of ‘perfectest’] love” (10) making its way to his beloved at the “winged speed” (8) of Pegasus himself; by that imagined standard, spurring his horse’s “dull flesh” (11) for greater speed could only make any mount (animal or human) “naigh” (11) in hapless pain, no more able to meet the requirements asked of it now than it could before. It is for this reason alone that the speaker (delighting himself with his witty reprieve) will no longer require excuse or justification from his sorry mount, but like some all-powerful monarch “excuse my jade” (12) instead, granting him amnesty or “leave to go” from the court that might otherwise punish him for displeasing his lord.

Such pardon is no mercy. If the speaker means by “leave to goe” (14) merely that he will give his mount its head as it blindly streaks for the “ease and . . . repose” (50:3) of its barn after long journeying, loving care for a mount that doesn’t know what’s good for it should require a tighter rein for fear of driving his horse into the ground on the way back as he had on the journey out. If, more fantastically, he means by “leave to goe” his mount’s literal dismissal from his service, then care for an animal that had carried him this far should forbid his leaving the dumb beast to its own devices, now irresponsibly deserted.

Just as in 50, then, the rider’s presumed superiority to his mount discloses itself as wildly exaggerated. Indeed, the two have more in common than he thinks. The eagerness with which both horse and rider turn for home may hint that far from expressing the ethereal love for the friend he declares here, the rider’s heavy breathing (like his horse’s) may amount to nothing more than brute eagerness to find “ease” and “repose” in their exertions’ “end.” Hence, the ambiguity in l.10. Does the “desire (of perfects love being made)” refer, as he would have it, to a uniquely pure or “heavenly” desire fashioned from the most perfect love or does it, in a more earth-bound fashion, allude to the rider’s desire of the most perfect love being made when he gets there, to be followed by post-coital “ease” and “repose”?

This ambiguity is immediately reinforced in the ambiguity of the following line in the unemended Q. Does the kind of desire the speaker touts in himself here “naigh no dull flesh in its fiery race” (11) because it has no need of the body any longer or because it “nays” or “denies” “no dull flesh in its fiery race,” giving fiery flesh instead unrestrained “leave to goe” to it in auto-erotic fantasy even before he will do so in the flesh?4 Hence the ominous relevance in the shadowy allusion to Icarus or Phaeton in an enthusiasm for one’s own prospects when “winged speed” (8) “nays” no dull flesh in its fiery race toward one’s presumed delight. Perhaps the gleeful anticipation the speaker expresses for the course he has set here will not result in the satisfaction he imagines. Immoderation may instead result, as with those legendarily overeager aspirants, only in all such juvenile hopes dashed disastrously.

The Bard will not “excuse” his dull bearer—his double or his own “dull flesh” (11)—from the proper care it deserves because he’s distracted from it by his own willful purposes or because he sees doing so as a waste of precious time. He excuses his lower self’s “slow [that is, ‘dimwittted’] offence” (1), not dismissively but as a loving act of forgiveness (the “love, for love” of l.12) forwarded to those who in their sinning know not what they do to others and themselves. “Since” (13) the Bard sees that his persona’s dull flesh “went willful slow” (13) on his barren way “from thee” (13) or from “true love itself,” for his part he will “run” (14) toward a true union with love and in the process grant even his dull flesh a living example to follow, giving him “leave to goe” there as well.

Among the poems that remain are four of the most unqualified affirmations of love in the sequence: 25, 105, 116, and 123. Even in these, however, appearances can be deceiving. The speaker gives no sign in these poems of an attempt to manipulate the beloved with flattery, but that does not mean he is not instead flattering himself about the purity of his own allegiance to love. Take 25, for example, a poem whose claim of superiority to others in the uniqueness of his love relationship recalls the ending of 29. Anticipating a famous line from 116, the speaker in 25 affirms that a genuine lover “may not remove, nor be removed” (14) from a return to its embrace. Though its little drama plainly mimics the “happy” (13) reversal by which 29’s disenfranchised speaker manages to trump his seemingly more fortunate rivals for fortune’s favors in the speaker’s assessment of the contest between them, 25 recasts the situation in 29 from one of shameful despair displaced by precious little comfort into one in which the speaker claims from the start the savvy to avoid the Scylla and Charybdis of a dangerous diet of sycophantic flatteries among the high born at court, on one side, and the equally uncertain contempt opposing warriors express for one another in their battles, on the other. Resting confidently in his secure position beyond concerns for social preferment or military renown, a position seemingly “above” the need for flattery or contempt, in Q2 the speaker deftly satirizes the mutually manipulative and profiteering exchange of favors between kings and their flatterers in society’s most privileged circles. Masquerading as genuine acts of courtesy, the “faire leaves” (5) courtiers beg from their monarchs, and that kings grant to their “favorites” (5), indissolubly wed flattery-loving monarchs to their sycophants in a perverse marriage of self-seeking dependents whose “pride lies buried”—like hoarded treasure or the canker in roses—exclusively within “them-selves” (7). So enfeebled have all parties concerned become by this devouring dependence on the “suns eye” (6) of each other’s flatteries that one cannot easily determine whether the secret pride each takes only in himself is strong enough to weather so much as a “frowne” (8) from the other, let alone the tempests sweet love helps us safely navigate.

In Q3 the heroic warrior’s obsession with renown likewise proves to be acutely vulnerable to threatening forces beyond his control. One loss in battle (we have only to think of Antony after Actium) and “all the rest . . . for which he toild” (12)—not simply the fame earned in the “thousand victories” (10) he had previously won, nor even his soul’s personal “rest” or sense of accomplishment for which he had previously toiled, but also the multitudes of others besides himself (the “rest” of his countrymen) in whose name he would claim to have fought—would all be “forgot” (12) in the humiliating reversal of fortune he might suddenly find himself forced to undergo, no longer a “warrior famosed for worth” (9).

But if he rightly argues that neither court flatteries nor the heroic life of military exploits can establish genuine and steadfast security for the soul, it is difficult to credit his subsequent rhetorical tack with similar conviction. Not knowing the first thing about the quality and depth of the love relationship he boasts as his preferred alternative to “publike honour and proud titles” (2), a sensible caution should greet the couplet’s claim for the “I that love and am beloved / Where I may not remove, nor be removed” (14). How is it that he (or we) can know for certain that his or anyone’s love may enjoy such stability that it may not remove nor be removed? Isn’t he seemingly prey here to the presumption of being “certaine ore in-certainty” (115:11) itself? Extrapolating from the couplet’s surrounding context, we may well wonder whether his confidence is not perhaps simply that the “thousand victories” over threats of love that he has experienced until now have only seduced him into a fool’s paradise, setting him up for an unexpected blow from love’s subsequent betrayal or loss. When the speaker declares with some apparent haughtiness that he, a man dismissively contemptuous of “publike honour and proud titles,” “joys in that I honour most” (4), does the ambiguity of his syntax allow us to be certain of his inflection? Is he saying that his ego has been subsumed in the beloved he honors most, as he would like to think? Or is he declaring a dramatic irony in which he openly boasts that what he truly enjoys is not the beloved so much as the fact that by comparison to those who enjoy a greater social spotlight his “I” delights in the subtle superiority of his own virtue and superior good sense (even if he has to say so himself)? No less than for the kings and courtiers he satirizes, for him, too, his true “pride lies buried” in himself, like a canker in a rose. If so, this is not the “fair, kind, and true” voice of sweet good Will/will; this voice remains but a self-flattering and contemptuous one complicit in the very vanities and empty triumphs he has been at pains to deprecate in others.

The true voice of good Will/will only begins to sing out like a lark when as readers we hear the noun phrase “Unlookt for joy” in l.4 as the direct object of the verb “honour” (4) in an inverted syntactical construction. For the Bard, the only transcendence of human vanity and the selfish quest for precedence is to honor “unlookt for joy” above all: “Then happy I that love and am beloved / Where I may”—that is, at my discretion and innocently, everywhere and whenever the delightful opportunity presents itself. To live so is to transcend contentious competitions with one’s fellows for supremacy and the perpetual anxiety about self-regarding losses that are sure enough to come anyway. “Then happy I that love and am beloved / Where I may,” quick now, here now, always, among loved ones, not removing oneself from the moment nor able to be removed from it by threatening circumstances.

Sonnet 105 talks a good game in justifying the speaker’s claim that there is nothing whatever heretical or blasphemous in the nature of his devotion to the young man. But the self-contradictions in his apologia are so readily apparent that it is not difficult to see why Booth dubbed the poem a “playful experiment in perversity” (336), in that the speaker secretly admits here that the sacrilegious love he expresses for the young man is, in fact, one that rivals or displaces an orthodox love of divine being itself. Building upon Booth’s fundamental insight about the poem’s false logic, Kerrigan neatly summarizes the case the poem strives to make.

The sonnet draws its strength from the weakness of its argument. The “I” projected by my verse is read or heard defending—with such obvious sophistry that one assumes some excess is being concealed—his devotion to the youth. He tries to refute the charge of idolatry by demonstrating that his love is monotheistic—indeed trinitarian, like orthodox Christianity—and directed at someone whose unique blend of beauty, generosity, and truth is almost miraculous; but although polytheism was . . . ineluctably idolatrous, idolatry is not necessarily polytheistic, and the tone of the sestet . . . supports a suggestion that he thinks his friend a worldly god, an idol. (309–10)

Add to this the echo of the Gloria Patri (compare to Booth 337) in l.4, and the poem “sharpens the evidence . . . of active sacrilege” (337).

If meant by the speaker as jesting flattery, it is a jest that has grown tiresomely repetitive and thin by l.14. Far from justifying his claim that his love for his friend “affords” (12) him “wondrous scope” (12), the poem discloses a poet with his “invention spent” (11), simply repeating the same claim over and over here. When he declares that his beloved is “all my argument” (9) he means to emphasize the constancy in his love, but if the phrase should be taken as a characterization of the poetical means by which he expresses that love, the same words confess not love but inventive depletion. He may declare that his verse is endlessly spent in inventive “change” (11); but the triple repetition of “Faire, kinde, and true” in the sestet hints that the “change” he speaks of is no allusion to life’s infinite variety but to a figurative “change” that always cycles dancers back to the same point of departure. In ll.3–4, the speaker seemingly forwards an argument why his love should not be considered idolatrous “since all alike my songs and praises be / To one, of one, still such, and ever so” in a pure constancy to his beloved. But it is possible to read those lines as an unintended continuation of the prior indictment made against his devotion for its sinfulness. Instead of a worship of a truly divine plenitude, his art’s “songs and praises” here and everywhere in the sequence, are “all alike” (3), his “invention spent” (11) in the mindless repetition of ritualistic solicitations meant to manipulate powers that threaten the speaker rather than in appreciative regard for a divine power. “Since” in l.3 may not introduce an explanation why the speaker’s worship is not idolatrous, but one that unwittingly explains why and how it is (compare to Burrow 590n3).

Since both the speaker and the beloved are under indictment as idolater and idol sinning against the most high, the speaker says precious little to exonerate his friend from inordinate self-aggrandizement. Given the poem’s ambiguity, in fact, the speaker can be heard to say nothing at all about the beloved, every word instead but self-justification. One might think that l.5’s “kinde” characterizes the beloved’s behavior, but Q’s spelling of “to day, to morrow” insinuates that the speaker’s exclamation “my love” (5) is a self-referential characterization of the feelings he has rather than a reference to the beloved’s person, his love’s “wondrous excellence” (6) implying a comical vanity more than a generous tribute. Likewise, “faire, kinde, and true” in 9, 10, and 13 harbor the same ambiguity of reference as “kinde” did earlier. Thus, the couplet can readily be construed as a dim-wittedly profane appropriation of Trinitarian glory to his own person rather than as a generous tribute.

The Bard sings a very different song, one that effectively sidesteps any accusation of idolatry in the love it worships. His verse is to “constancie confin’de” (7), “to one, of one, still such, and ever so” (4), his “songs and praises” (3) each and “all alike” (3) in honoring a true good will, the possible human communion with the deus est caritas that multiplies good. When he “leaves out difference” (8), it is not, as in his namesake’s case, to suppress or repress uncomfortable truths about his relationship to the beloved; his commitment to the single theme pervading these poems “leaves out difference” in the way that the spring sun’s warm love does. In his spirit’s penury, Shake-speare may imagine that his efforts to manipulate the young man and dark lady afford him “wondrous scope” for his tyrannical dream; but the poet knows that the unswerving commitment he makes to love’s true good will in his verse “wondrous scope affords” to us all. Hence the point of the couplet when properly heard as an address to reflective readers. In an idolatrous act of worship in the couplet, Shake-speare’s wishful thinking may hope to enthrone (as kings keep “seate” [14]) the height of love realized in his beloved or, more laughably still, in his own verses magnifying his beloved’s name. But the Bard has placed a period at the end of l.13. That allows l.14 to be read as an imperative construction addressed to us all. In order to realize the “scope” or “range” of the wondrous fruits of our labors, we must “till now” (in other words, “cultivate and seed”) the l’ora beatrice to prepare for the glorious harvest. The glories of men “faire, kinde, and true” were “never” meant to be “kept,” seated in one to live alone there, but “kept seate” in the many united as one in love so that life and love might continue to flourish.

Sonnet 116’s strenuous “Defense of Love” in no uncertain terms has resulted in its prominence among the sonnets as an anthology piece. But isolating the poem completely from its place in the sequence makes the poem seem even more incontrovertible than does the speaker’s almost pugnaciously defensive claims on love’s behalf. In context, however, the sureness of the poem’s footing is undermined by the contradictory claims of its immediate neighbors. Sonnet 117 forwards a recantation, confessing the speaker’s sins against love’s purity (“booke[ing]” himself, his own “wilfulnesse and errors[,] downe” [117:9]) even as the peroration in the couplet of 116 dismissing any possibility of the speaker’s “error” (116:13) in these regards still rings in our ears. What’s more 116 seems quite at odds with its immediate predecessor as well, “the unwavering fixity of love here conflicting suggestively with the growing emotion described in 115” (Kerrigan 333). “Should love not accommodate itself to change, be flexible, make allowances? And should it not, in some sense (see, for example, Sonnets 45–6) bend with the remover” (333)?

Also undermining the strength of the speaker’s case for love, the couplet shifts from the beauty and mystery of the metaphors in Q1–3 to the egoistic claim that the speaker himself is love’s most compelling exemplar. Vendler merely notes in passing that there is an “indecorum” here in the poet’s “insisting entirely in the first-person singular on the exclusive worth of one’s own fashion of loving” (492). Others are harsher: of the “pure illogicality” (Hammond 212) into which the poem has developed by then, Duncan-Jones declares the couplet no more than a “piece of swaggering” since we all know the poet has indeed “writ” (343). For Kerrigan,

Shake-speare is writing about what cannot be attained. The convoluted negatives of the last line have their point: they show the poet protesting too much, losing confidence in his protestations, or at least inviting disagreement with them (by anticipating rebuttal) at their climax. (53)

For Booth, the poem’s grand testimonial to love is finally nothing more than “bombast” (387). Perhaps most interestingly, Weiser concludes: like 105,

it, too, is focused on what the speaker against his own better knowledge wants to believe. His abstract definition of love seems to be a projection of all that he is not and would like to be. . . . There is something forced, almost shrill, in its repeated assertions, as if the speaker’s real purpose . . . at this point were to convince himself. (79)

Even that gives the speaker more credit than he may deserve. He may not be trying to define himself against a better being he would like to be; he may be defining himself as already a superior being measured against a lesser one—his partner in love. If in the end the speaker himself has become the only evidence he can or does summon to justify his claims for love, then he alone must implicitly be identified as someone who has been the polestar of love, even when others may wander. He alone will “beare” up under any and every thing a faithless world may try him with “even to the edge of doome” (12). If we allow for the possibility that “me” in l.1 may have pointed rhetorical emphasis (rather than a humbler supplicational note), then the entire poem, like so many others, may insinuate a passive aggressive accusation of the friend indirectly addressed under its breath—saying, in effect, and with ill will toward its intended target, that if faithlessness is to rear its head in this relationship, it won’t be “me” that is its origin.

The allusion to the Christian marriage service as the poem opens makes it unclear whether the speaker construes himself as one of the marital partners themselves, each equally subject to the examination of impediments to union for which they may be responsible before they may be united as “true mindes” (1), or whether the speaker instead (and self-contradictorily) construes himself as the presiding priestly authority here who would heretically suppress (in other words, not “admit”) his moral obligation to hear impediments to the unions that should be “admit[ted]” (2).

As dramatic participant in the love relationship, Shake-speare is in no position to claim to stand above it in such an uninformed judgment of his partner, himself “remove[d]” (4) from love by doing so. For the Bard’s part, in Q1 love is no hidden indictment of another (or even a suppression of potentially shaming truths) but a humbly supplicational hope expressed that neither he nor any of his only begetters violate the holy spirit of love by accepting the necessity of impediments to it. In Q2 he does not boast his own preeminence by linking himself, directly or indirectly, to the polestar’s “ever fixed” state; indeed, as with us all, he is but a “wandring barke” (7). For him, love is the divine light above us that shines steadily there to redirect us, at any time our sky clears, to our higher purposes, no matter how far off course we may have strayed, tempest tossed.5 This is its “worth” (8) inestimable, no matter the extent to which, in its manifestations, we may have vainly presumed to have taken its measure. Love is not “Times foole” but his equal partner in creation and sustaining harvest. No “grim” reaper, the “compasse” of harvesting Time’s sickle may sweep away “rosie lips and cheeks” (9); but those losses are more than recompensed by the rich harvest of grain in the midst of which they lie taken. For him, time is not an empty terror of “briefe houres and weekes” (11) but a co-creator with love that “bears out” parturitional life “even to the edge of doome.” For Shake-speare the couplet is a swaggering defiance, daring anyone to prove him wrong; to the Bard, the couplet is the humblest of summations, one that declares in l.13 that should he be found wanting, or in the “error” he earlier declared we are subject to as wandering barks, that fact will not prove any impediment to the spirit of love he treasures. It only intensifies his love for love because the “error” that will have been discovered in him will not reflect badly on love but on him. It will merely show that in his error he had failed love: in his erring ways having properly “loved” neither “no man ever” nor holy “writ” (14) itself. Shake-speare’s last stand may be nothing more than a belligerently bombastic boast; the Bard’s is nothing of the sort as he resets the course of his wandering bark, confidently guided by the polestar of love.

Sonnet 123’s appearance not ten poems further along in the sequence clearly demonstrates that Shake-speare has not exhausted his reserves of defiant bombast in 116. The speaker here “boastfully brand[s] Time as a boaster” (Booth 418). His bluster in the body of the poem may deftly point out the fact that there is “nothing new under the sun”; but it fails to record any self-awareness that his own claim to monumental persistence beyond time’s reach cannot itself be distinguished from the efforts of those who build pyramids—new or old—to celebrate themselves: futile self-celebration being nothing new under the sun either.6 Nor are his own written “registers” (9) and “records” (11)—evident in the verses he has composed here—any less bound in by the limits of temporality that he dismissively imagines in the couplet’s baseless assertion, its “vow” (13), that he will have it so. No less than other failed monuments designed to celebrate and preserve what is dead rather than to foster and fortify what lives, his verse tribute to himself in the couplet serves only to separate the speaker from his shared humanity to “stand” (124:11) in false confidence, like the speaker of 124 “all alone . . . hugely pollitick” (11), a polity of one, declaring a prideful self-sufficiency no less exalted than that concluding 116.

In 116, 123, and 124 the friend has been consigned to the obscurity of the wings while the speaker now takes center stage’s spotlight alone. No longer will he boast a transcendence of mortality by immortalizing the beloved in verse. Now he simply tries to immortalize himself in it. Just as 124’s “deare love” (1) is immediately and definitively restricted in the poem’s development thereafter to the feelings of the speaker for his beloved and not to the beloved himself, so, too, in 123, were it not for the larger dramatic context out of which the poem has emerged, l.14’s “I will be true” would not even necessarily summon the thought of truth to another. Instead it might function solely as a “truthful” contrast in the speaker and his art to the way Time’s other registers and records “lye” (11).

Conflating the claims of the speaker’s myopic persona with those of the Bard himself, Vendler sums up the speaker’s final stance here as one that convincingly plumps for the absolute power of the will to defy time and its registers in its devotions (525). But if the speaker’s final stance, as she concedes, is simply born to his desire, on what grounds should we presume that the position he ultimately takes here is any less self-deceived than that he contemns in others of his kind in the poem’s body? How, in other words, are we to distinguish his self-approving state of resolved will from a blowhard’s bombast as uncompelling as the finalé of 116?

To the extent that the argument the speaker forwards in 123 is not merely chop logic (Booth’s “I will never change because nothing changes”; see his notes on ll.13–14), the claim he makes is a more modest one than has generally been thought. By acknowledging Time’s scythe in his own life and its possession even of the “pyramyds” (2)—whether ancient or more modern monuments to human ingenuity and the desire to memorialize ourselves—the speaker’s efforts to “defie” (9) Time successfully have seemingly little or nothing to do with a triumph over physical temporality (compare to Burrow 626n1). Rather his defiance has to do with one that “shall ever be” (13) as long as he should live, one that defies Time’s power to make him change—not physically, but spiritually. What will not change is his conviction that what he believes or regards as “true” (14) will remain a monument superior to anything that simply lasts longer than other things meant to honor ourselves do. New or old, it seems clear that the pyramids represent marvels of human ingenuity meant to defy destruction, marvels meant to create something impressively eternal. As the body of the poem indicates, none of them the speaker has seen with his own eyes or otherwise “heard . . . tould” (8) has impressed him very much, however, though each competes with its predecessors for preeminence. To him, plus ça change. He knows that such defiances of Time are folly: new or old, they are “nothing novell, nothing strange” (3). To him newer pyramids are but old wine in new bottles: mere “dressings of a former sight” (4), refashionings or rearrangements of the deck chairs on the Titanic. What he takes bemused pride in seeing that his fellow humans too often miss is that because our “dates are breefe” (5) we tend to overvalue what is capable of outlasting our three score and ten (“admir[ing]” [5] anything “ould” [6] that outlives our “breefe” stay). Fleeting Time takes advantage of our short-sightedness in this regard to “foyst” (6) upon us the hopeful illusion that we can defeat his predation by building such temples to ourselves as if wishes were horses. Thus we keep forgetting what we should be keeping foremost in mind: how inevitably such monuments tell the same sad story of defeat at mortality’s hand. It is a story “tould” (and “tolled”) over and over again “that we before have heard” (8) tiresomely repeated, a story that always ends in the same grim fashion. Hence his dismissiveness of all such monument-building (“not wondring at the present, nor the past” [10] since all are but “dressings of a former sight” [4]). All such monuments (like Philip Larkin’s cathedrals) are “slated for demolition.” All things fall and are built again” and those who build them again are not gay, but dead or dying. Behind the defiance of the speaker toward Time itself and all the “registers” and “records” by which humankind tries to “take the measure” of Time in stone or papyrus is the defiant pride of a man who will not be fooled as his fellows have been. He will not have Time foist on him what has been foisted on them. All monuments to ourselves would have us participate in this “lye” (11), the lie that we can outlive ourselves. This lie is not “made more or less” (12) a lie by Time’s “continual hast” (12). It is a lie that manifests itself always in what we see of our marriage without annulment to Time’s continual haste toward oblivion: whether pyramids are made “more” by our worried anticipation of our brief dates or made “les” by Time’s long attrition. As we look upon them, old or new, these pyramids in their present magnificence, paradoxically, “lye.”

“This” introducing l.13 functions in Janus-faced fashion, affirming (as it looks back toward the body of the poem) that the speaker will take back nothing of what he said there, in doing so reiterating his defiance of Time’s deceits and his own vow in l.1 that it is not he that changes, but Time itself that does. But “This” (13) also turns and looks ahead. Swearing again to what the body of the poem declared he knows about that human folly of vain commemoration of oneself, he will not be fooled into being similarly lured away from a higher good: enjoyment of the mysterious object of his “true” (14) love, despite the terror Time’s scythe inspires.

But this is not vindication of joy exactly; it is but precious little comfort in the speaker’s despair. If he sees that the efforts of his kindred are but a futile war with time, in nevertheless remaining deluded by the vain sense of superiority this insight gives him, he seemingly fails to realize that his own war on time is just as irrevocably lost. To the Bard as satirist, the speaker’s poem, no less than the material monuments that we erect to deify ourselves, proves itself, too, “no thing novell, nothing strange” (3), yet another tale vainly “born to our desire [and, paradoxically, in the process the punning ‘bourn’ or ‘limit’ to our desire]” and he blind to the fact that his vanity, too, is but a “lye” (11) we have “heard . . . tould” (8)—and “tolled”—many times before.

A portion of his lie is the half-truth that pyramids, old and new, belong to time. Though lent to Time they truly belong alone to the foolish fashioners of these graven images. Q2 corroborates this point. The speaker thinks that “thou” in l.6 refers to Time the trickster and that “make them” in l.7 means “make over in deceptive images” that are “borne to our desire” for the way we would like things to be. But to the Bard, “thou” refers to “our dates” (5) as metonym for our mortal selves that “foyst upon us” a dream illusion that urges us to “make them”—these monuments to ourselves—in the first place, lying to ourselves that they may be born to our desires for immortalization rather than what they in fact are: a tale of frustration and woe “heard . . . tould” with tedious iteration. Unlike his alter ego, the Bard is not addressing Time in Q3, but his persona’s and mankind’s seemingly endless folly. Mankind’s “registers . . . and records” and “what we see” in the persona’s verses here all “lye.” The Bard does not “wonder” (compare to l.10) in awe at these present pyramids any more than he does those of the past, all made, more or less, in the ebb and flow of Time, waxing and waning (“more” or “les” [12]) in mankind’s “continuall hast” (12) to deify the self rather than engage our brief dates more fruitfully. Defying all this, the Bard concludes his satire, vowing fidelity to what he knows to be a greater truth than folly. Despite mankind and his persona’s blind and exhausting labor to kill time/Time by one-upping one another, the truth he would espouse and serve “dispight thy syeth and thee” (14) is a joyous marriage to time in a measureless commitment to his partner in creation, rejecting all annulment. For him, l.1’s “I doe” renews itself in l.13’s “I doe vow” (its “‘I do’ vow”) into perpetuity, regardless of what destructive folly his fellows may haplessly perpetuate. That this vow does not, for his part, amount itself to a self-deifying distinction he would accord himself alone, as does his persona’s, the couplet, read as an imperative answering the folly of the poem’s body, offers a holy vow shared in love with any and all who have ears to hear. Compare this marital engagement—

This “I do” vow and this [“the good to follow”] shall ever be:

“I will be true dispight thy syeth and thee”—

with the persona’s saber-rattling bravado against time falsely conceived as a grim reaper in the love he declares for his friend in the couplet. The Bard is not finally a prophet of doom excoriating mankind for its false worship of graven images to declare his own superiority. In addressing his readers in a gently prophetic imperative at poem’s end, he instead establishes his bona fides as a loving servant of divine love who would share with us all the good news he’s “heard . . . tould” of our only salvation: marital union with l’ora beatrice we are ever free to embrace once we no longer mistake our benefactor for our enemy.

Though its afflatus has had much positive regard among critics, 124 is, in fact, another bombastic boast, not unlike 116 and 123 in this regard. In it the spear-shaker proclaims a purely self-determined preeminence as the owner of a “deare love” (1) towering above the sorry and inconstant “state” (1) of the desires dull sublunary folk exercise in their folly. We have it on no less authority than the speaker himself that the love he and the “foles of time” (13) must honor as perfection itself is him in his constancy to an ideal object. His own words, however, give him the lie even as he pronounces his boast. The lover standing “all alone” (11) and “hugely pollitick” (11), he would honor above all others cannot stand alone even long enough to finish saying so. Because his nerves fail even as he makes his “spear-shaking” vaunt, he insists that others (however unreliable their witness) corroborate his claim under penalty of death for heretical dissent. This is not the Platonic “form” of love he imagines it to be; it is instead a woeful counterfeit, a love he has simply fabricated in the temple between his ears, one “buylded far from accident,” a pyramid-like monument to himself that houses no life within (no “childe” [1] to be nurtured; no garden to “growe with heat” or “drowne with showres” [12]), only a graven image gathering dust.

The speaker’s appropriation of the debased word “pollitick” to describe his ideal of love only two lines after calling “policy” a “Hereticke” (9) is surely the most overt clue that something is amiss here in the speaker’s seemingly self-confident claim for his “deare love”; but it is not the most damaging. Much more damning is the way the woes of the world—admittedly inconstant in love—become but a forgettable backdrop completely “incidental to the huge self-containment” (Hammond 220) the speaker announces in its stead. They are nothing more to him than plucked “flowers gatherd” (4) in inconstant “times love” (3) or “weeds” uprooted, spurned and discarded when gathered in “times hate” (3). When, in his self-proclaimed regality, the speaker calls these “foles of time,” these heretics given over to policy in love, to his courtroom, it is not to reform them or show them a better way in which to share. It is instead to drag them before the bar, to torture them into a confession of their judge’s righteousness (whether they actually believe it or not) and then to execute them. The reward for their enforced “conversion” to the speaker’s true gospel of love is not a redeeming opportunity to share in it, but to “die for goodnesse” (14) in heresy admitted for which they who previously “liv’d for crime” (14) must now pay the ultimate price in stymied envy.

The cold calculation of one who can stand “all alone . . . hugely pollitick” (11) in this cruel, unloving manner, condemning all those who disagree with his sense of his own unquestioned superiority (even to those who have recanted) is front and center in the reading Vendler fairly derives from the couplet.

The fools of time who have lived for crime (expedient inconstancy in love) may serve one good purpose, if by their deaths they bear witness to the folly and criminality of infidelity and inconstancy. They die for the good (to us) of being exempla here of crime. (528)

For me it is not so much “to us,” as Vendler presumes, that the death of inconstant lovers tortured as heretics proves beneficial, but to the speaker himself. Not content with his own bombast, he must surround himself with yes-men to buttress his glory. In summoning the temporizing “foles of time” to tortured confessions of his love’s greatness, he would also have them, dying under his lash, become eye-witness of his self-conceived magnificence, in their hunger “dy[ing] for the goodness” (14) he will not grant them since they have “liv’d for crime.”

The contempt he feels for his inferiors has not lessened any at poem’s end. The speaker takes inordinate pride in the constancy of his love, a love that lives above the servility required of those who curry social favor and the painful discontent of those who do not. He is convinced that his love need not “suffer,” with servile smiles, “pomp” (6), nor break or fall “under the blow” (7) dealt to those for whom disfavor means “thralled discontent” (7). There is no comma between “smiling” and “pomp” in Q to legitimize the sense the speaker would make of the line. As we have already seen, the fatuous speaker does not “suffer” in the “smiling pomp” of the regality he parades before us here, nor does he ever feel the blows of the “thralled discontent” in which he and others live, knowing it not. His boast in Q3 is that he “feares not policy” (9), but that is not because he has transcended policy (as l.10 openly confesses) but because he lives so comfortably in a form of it so cold and calculating that neither anger (“heat”) nor pity’s tears (“showres”) ever plague it. Policy in him neither can grow or drown because it is so absolute in its constancy to its own tyrannical dream. Thus the Bard would “call the foles of time” (13), not to die, but to “witness” (13) an “I” that, in the smiling pomp and thralled discontent of its narcissism, will go to its grave dying for a goodness just beyond its reach, its half-life lived in unknowing “crime” (14).

The Bard sees lives lost in this way as a waste and pity that should be re-deemed, hence his calling us—fools of Time that we are—as eye-witnesses to the spectacle unfolding before us. The dear love Shake-speare trumpets is costly; the “deare love” the Bard whispers is precious. In his smiles, he banishes pomp; in the discontent he suffers, however repeated the blows, he is not thrall. His love stands and grows, but not in the extremes of selfish passion’s “heat” nor self-pity’s drowning “showres.” It is self-regarding lust’s effect to follow parching heat with drowning showers, Venus and Adonis’ “tempest after sun” (800). The Bard’s love “comforteth, like sunshine after rain,” its gentle spring always fresh remaining (801).

Sonnet 59 introduces the final grouping in this chapter. The standard form of its argument’s progression faces some significant obstacles. If, counterfactually, we accept the prevailing emendation of Q’s question mark at the end of Q1 to an exclamation point, then Q1 affirms that there may well be “nothing new under the sun.” Using the beloved’s beauty and grace (“the composed wonder of your frame” [10]: whether the beloved himself or the verse that mirrors it, or both) as the test case of the theory, Q2–Q3 speculates about whether “revolution” might “be the same” (12). Knowing just how idle the speculation is because there is no way to test it, the sly speaker wishes he could make a search through five-hundred years of time (or five-hundred years of courtly verse) to find the beloved’s equal in beauty so that, as Q3 records, he “might see” (9) whether that old world could show “we are mended, or where better they, / Or whether revolution be the same” (11–12). Emendation of l.11’s “where” to “wh’ er” or “whe’er” destroys Q’s wit: the issue is not a matter of either/or at all, but an opportunity for wordplay emphasizing the irresolvable nature of the issue under discussion. Does “we are mended” (11) mean that we have progressed and improved (something new under the sun) or does it mean that “we are mended” by the old world and thus that we have regressed from what “hath been before” (2) (nothing new under the sun)? Does “where better they” (11), complement the latter sense of the preceding half line, meaning “wherein they were better” or the previous halfline’s former sense, meaning “wherein we better them”? If such witty dubieties have not yet made us dizzy enough, for good measure l.12 puns on “revolution’s” political sense and astronomical “revolutions.” Following up on l.11’s better/worse quandaries, l.12 throws up its hands to ask whether those terms applied to past and present images of perfection are really meaningful at all, because things may not have grown better or worse, but may simply have repeated themselves without meaningful distinction.

After such a tour de force, the couplet seems to let all the air out of this soufflé. Suddenly the speaker violates the spirit of knowing ambiguity in his purely hypothetical speculation to make a seemingly serious claim of self-certainty. Depending upon whether “worse” (14) modifies “subjects” or is an adverb describing the manner in which former poets have “given admiring praise” to their beloveds, the speaker makes a definitive claim for the superiority of his beloved or for the unrivalled excellence of his verse tribute to that beloved compared to them, even though he knows no more concretely what those tributes “say” (9) any more than he knows whether they could indeed “show me your” spitting “image” (7). If the couplet refers to the speaker’s art, the poem ends with a blowhard’s unconvincing swagger. If, for flattering effect, the lines understatedly allude to the beloved as a paragon among men, they seem less justified than undermined by the poem’s reasoning prior to the questionable boast.

In its double-speak, if the couplet should insinuate an irony about the beloved’s not meriting the praise he’s been accorded (a reading reinforced by clearer manifestations of blame directed toward him on other occasions in the sequence), such a nearly overt slap in the face certainly would seem to come out of the blue here. A judgment to that effect is neither justified nor prepared for by anything in the poem. Quite the contrary, in fact. If, alternatively, the couplet is taken straight, then, the logic of Q1–3 has been arbitrarily banished. Nor does it help that in the very process of declaring his art and his beloved’s uniqueness in the couplet, the thirteenth line, following hard on the heels of Q1–Q3, could suggest, albeit fleetingly, that there may well be complete identity between the speaker and the “wits of former daies” (13).

The level of inconsequence in the speaker’s position here may provide us with an unexpected benefit, however. It may make us question the point of courtly love lyric in general insofar as what that tradition boils down to is nothing more than the illogical insistence (like the one we’ve just witnessed) each poet in the tradition makes about the preeminent worth of his beloved and of his praise of that beloved, a vain preeminence based on nothing more substantial than each poet’s word for it that he deserves the prize. If, in other words, the entire tradition we are speaking of here is “nothing new, but that which is, / Hath been before, how are our [poets’] brains beguild [‘diverted’ but also ‘genuinely deceived’], / Which laboring for invention [‘novelty’ rather than ‘substance’] beare amisse / The second burthen of a former child” (1–4). The “child” here in whose name the labor of poetic creation proves stillborn (both misconceived and abortive) is not a child who can ever live and grow into a figure of consequence. The “former child” (4) too juvenile to deliver anything to full term despite laboring for invention has simply given way to the latter-day child who callowly insists on his own greatness with nothing more to prove it than his willful insistence that things must be as he declares they are. Thus, the entire love lyric tradition itself intimates only that “revolution be the same” (12).

That the Bard is concerning himself with these matters reveals itself in the otherwise inexplicable reference the poem makes to the five hundred years or so (l.6) “since minde at first in carrecter was done” (8). Surely he was more than aware that the history of poetical composition was of far greater duration than half a millennium; but to a Renaissance poet the origins of the European courtly tradition in troubadour love lyric could exactingly enough be defined in that time frame. An art that made use of orthographic “carrecters” clearly was not “first” (8) introduced five hundred years from Shake-speare’s replication of it, but an art that first described woeful states of mind as if they were human “carrecters” or “individual personalities” did in fact date to that day.

Nonetheless there could not be a more substantial difference between the Bard and his persona. For our mock heroic spear-shaker rattling his spurting pen here, the world is a stage on which he can maintain a primping pretense of preeminence that distinguishes him (in his own mind at least) from all other pretenders to glory, however disheartening the labor of their self-invention. For the Bard, the world is a stage whereon, through the proper labor of our invention, we may once again bring to life all that otherwise can only be presumed irretrievably dead. In Q1, the quaking spear-shaker disconsolately reflects that everything is “but” or “only” belated repetition cycling upon itself endlessly, all our labor for invention or “newness” a sad “misconception” or something fearfully worse. For the Bard, Q1 is not a sad exclamation, but a genuine question posed to us (note Q’s question mark at quatrain’s end). Taking advantage of the nearly identical Renaissance pronunciation shared by “nothing” (1) and “noting,” he forwards a more hopeful hypothetical. If the only (“but that” taken to mean “except”) thing in our world that is not thrall to nature’s cyclical, steady state condition is our ability to note anew that what is in our lives “hath beene before” (2) in those who have preceded us, then how truly are our foolish minds “beguild” (not the spear-shaker’s “pleasantly diverted” but truly “self-deceived”) when all our errant labors to distinguish ourselves from our ancestors prove no less abortive than theirs before us. For him, it is wholly up to us whether we see this properly or not—either bringing hopeful new life properly into the world or merely, like so many before us, “bear[ing] amisse” (3) or “in error” the creative seed with which we have been blessed. If we bear the “former child”—“humanity in its youthful stages”—properly, we may deliver into the world a living legacy; if not, we deliver stillborn into the world the same old misconceptions of our own special destiny standing in its vain sense of its own distinction above all others who have gone before us to our common graves.

For the spear-shaker in his empty longing, Q2 is a hopelessly “back-ward” (in other words, “ill-conceived”) counterfactual wish longing for evidence of worth in the past that might rival what he imagines he himself possesses in the present. For the Bard, Q2 is an open-ended optative addressed to us all, we who in retrospective meditation (our “back-ward looke” [5] can “record” or “take to heart again”)—no dead letter of historical “record” [5] this—our own true “image” (7) reflected there in all its complexity and underutilized worth. To his namesake the past is but prelude: Q2 no more than what modern editors make of it by replacing the period at the end of l.8 with a comma because they wrongly imagine the poem’s sense requires that Q2 be subordinated to the action of Q3. But for the Bard, Q2’s self-reflection and self-confrontation are worthy ends in themselves; and Q3 stands beside it as a clarification of what showing oneself one’s own image (likewise showing “me” to be “your image” [7] as well) might yet mean. If one were to “record” or “take to heart again” reflectively our own images in “antique booke[s]” (7), “That I might see” (9)—or alternatively, “that eye might see,” its blind eyes cleansed—“what the old world” in all its richness and variety “could say” (9): that is, “communicate to” us (not, as previously, “compete with” us about) “whether we are mended” or “improved” or “where better they / Or whether revolution be the same” (11–12). To the Bard, this “composed wonder of your frame” (10) is no blarney designed to impress a susceptible dupe by overpraising his transient physical beauty; it is what the proper labor of invention might yet create in the very depths of our souls through which alone the past may live to communicate with us. We will only begin to hear what our living ancestors have to say to us if we respond to it ourselves in the “composed wonder” of a “fram[ing]” all our own—our curiosity and awe, our “wonder,” properly conceived and delivered into the world by our “composed” attention. That “composed wonder” can alone deliberate properly where “we are mended, or where better they, / Or whether revolution be the same.”

The couplet is, then, not the spear-shaker’s idly self-gratifying boast on behalf of a personal favorite and an art that celebrates him. It is instead the Bard’s loving tribute to his forbears in the artistic tradition he continues to keep alive, an art of “admiring praise” (14) for all that is worthy of praise. What the Bard is “sure” (13) of is not his own preeminence or even that of his beloved “subjects” (14). In his rueful bemusement at us all he is only sure that among the subjects in literary history’s kingdom of art, some to whom such admiring praise has been “given” (14) were and are “worse” than those who look upon that art with the appropriately “composed wonder” it deserves.

Sonnet 106 returns to 59’s discussion of the relationship of the poet-speaker’s present verse celebration of his beloved to the love lyric tradition in which he labors for distinction. The speaker’s show-stopping last line, disingenuously claiming that he stands dumbfounded before the divine presence manifested in the young man, lays it on with a trowel. Designed to impress his auditor and his readers with his wit even more than with its subject, the speaker has somehow found the words to describe what he claims cannot be described. So good is this rhetor at what he does, in fact, that he dares try to convince his auditors that though he has nothing substantial to add to the loving testimonials of the prophets who came before him, he is nonetheless their fulfillment. They saw but through a glass darkly, however “devining” (11) their prophetic prefigurations; but he now sees face to face.

But this ersatz John the Baptist cannot even manage to squeak out an Ecce Homo. Though he has no doubt pleased himself with the wit he manages to generate in the couplet, its burden is that he has in fact nothing at all to say. He is counting on the victim of his blarney to supply the understood personal pronoun being declared divine here.

The “devining eyes” (11) with which he imagines he sees are less prophetically penetrating than they are “self-deifying.” There is more than a hint of smiling condescension (compare to 124’s “smiling pomp” [6]) in the poet-speaker’s characterization of the work of his predecessors in the octave: their “antic” “antique Pen[s]” (7) pressed into service to compose “Chronicle[s] of wasted time” (1), their days wasted celebrating, not an enduring loveliness, but “ladies dead” and disconcertingly androgynous “lovely Knights” (4). Their rhymes’ description of “beauties best” (5) merely gather dust through time on unvisited book repository shelves, musty with “old rime’s” hoary signs of aging and impending death. How could their descriptive dissections of beauty’s “hand, . . . foote, . . . lip, . . . eye, [or] brow” (6) ever hope to compete with the full-bodied beauty with which his nonpareil presently glows?

But if the spear-shaker remains smugly self-confident that there is not much of a competition to be waged here, the Bard thinks differently. The speaker imagines he can sample the “Chronicle of wasted time” (1) at some safe personal remove from it; the Bard knows that the speaker is himself ineluctably “in” that Chronicle beside his rivals. His own creations in the genre are themselves subject to aging and contemptuous dismissal, one day to become as quaintly out of style as theirs seem to him now. The “prophecie” (9) his predecessors left him may well prefigure to the preening speaker a “mock-religious equation between the beloved and Christ (compare sonnet 105)” (Booth 341); but for the Bard theirs is a prophecy and prefiguration of a common doom, one in which “revolution be the same” (59:12). The “composed wonder” of the beloved’s “frame” the speaker worships is as subject to “wasted time” (1) as was the physical prime of once lovely “Ladies” now very dead and of other “lovely Knights” than his. “This our time” (10) and the verse celebrating it will soon become as passé as the verses he finds it so tempting to deride here.

The Bard knows that the only way to re-deem an art dedicated to the monumental preservation of what is passing in order to try to impress the future is to stop wasting the present doing so. When he looks into the chronicle of wasted time in such an art, he “sees” in it only a dim prefiguration of a far profounder truth he would share in addressing readers one at a time and personally: that is, the present beauty “you maister now” (8). (Note how he does not mock the archaic past, as his namesake did, but “gives it life anew” in this allusive appropriation of the “maisterie” of Chaucer [Franklin’s Tale, 764–70] and Spenser [FQ 3.1.25.7].) The “now” that we “behold[,] these present dayes” (13) is for him no sacrilegious idol we bow down before in order to placate powers we secretly fear. It is a divine power in our grasp that none of us has “still [or ‘yet’] enough your worth to sing” (12) because its depth is a “worth unknown,” a maisterie that “you may stir” back to life now. We should not be wasting everyone’s precious time pretending to be dumbfounded by external beauties when, truly (and literally) speaking, we are not. We should be looking at the present with a genuine gaze of wonder. But even more important, we should be engaged with “this our time” (10) by joining with the chorus of other tongues to praise it properly—not with high-sounding lip service, but with the sincerest form of praise, our own emulation of its creative unfolding realized in concert with it. The couplet is not a self-satisfied boast but a moral imperative addressed to us all to live in an ever fuller appreciation of l’ora beatrice “now” (14).

Recalling a number of earlier poems whose confession of artistic inadequacy turns out to be a surreptitious tribute to the speaker’s art (most notably perhaps 76), 108 is a poem that seemingly tries to make a virtue of necessity: happily insisting on the need and value of the devoted reiteration of ritualistic prayers in a world where the speaker’s store of other gifts to give has run dry. (We must, of course, ignore for the moment the paradoxical fact that the speaker’s disingenuous confession of a certain witlessness here is, truth be told, a lively exercise of wit in which he is taking secret pride.)

The gist of the speaker’s argument seems clear enough: having confessed in Q1 that his pen’s “Inck” has emptied his “braine” of ways to “register” (3) or “expresse” (4) the love he feels for his beloved’s “deare merit” (4), Q2 explains that he has since been reduced to repeating the young man’s praises, just as the orthodox say their “prayers divine” (5), “each day say[ing] ore the very same” (6) ritualistically. If the Christian “faithful” never tire of “counting” (7) over their beads or “hallow[ing]” the “faire name” (8) of their Father in heaven, he, too, will “count no old thing old, thou mine, I thine” (7) in his fidelity to the same prayers and praises to his “divine” and “eternall love” (9). Nor is it alone his prayers and praises that repeat themselves here: the cavalier blasphemy so prominent in 105 and 106 likewise manifests itself here again as well. The sestet, whose figurative depths are more difficult to penetrate, then goes on to explain why such ritualistic praise never grows stale, but remains forever young.

Even in this first and most overt construction of the poem’s sense, the sestet cannot help but undercut the effect of Q2. When the persona persists in affirming “eternall love” for the beloved in the sestet, in no way does it match the honorific exaltation of the beloved that Q2 fashions. In a gratuitously tactless way, it throws in the addressee’s face (and ours) that “time and outward forme” (14) have intervened to catastrophic effect—not merely in his verses (“shew[ing] [w]it dead”), but also in the beloved’s physical decline from his beauty’s perfection (“shew[ing] it dead” [14]). His saying that these sad facts have not been able to snuff out the remaining flicker of love burning for the beloved’s beauty in the poet’s brain may not represent a compensational effect sufficient to salvage the flattering impression he clearly wishes to leave. He becomes, instead, like Touchstone declaring his love for Audrey by describing her as “an ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own” (AYLI 4.4.58). Less flattered than flummoxed by hearing the sestet, the beloved may well think he is just as ill-favored a thing—“ill-favored,” that is, in the sense that the favor he is being shown is ill. If the poet’s love for the young man is an “eternall love” (9), ever to be manifested “in loves fresh case” (9), it is no longer an unadulterated one. This is not Q2’s pure white radiance of eternity; it is an eternal love that has fallen into time and change, a brightness now shadowed and colored by sublunary change and death. Though the speaker’s spirit may not “waighe . . . the dust and injury of age” (10), he cannot shake them off either—not in himself, not in the beloved’s physical beauty, nor even in whatever “injury” to one another they may have inflicted in their interactions over time. Though he makes a show of waving “injury” away rhetorically, the sense of it he mentions endures as ineluctably in his brain as does his loving affection for his friend. The speaker assumes their love need not “give to necessary wrinckles place” (11)—or “preeminence” presumably—maintaining the ascendancy of eternal love in their consciousness instead; nevertheless, in ways he does not apparently realize he has already broken the assurance he gave so confidently in Q2 in that “necessary wrinckles” have, he confesses, found “place” on the beloved’s face, wrinkles the speaker cannot completely hide. Thus, mentioning that wrinkles have no place on the brow of love disquietingly hints that they have nevertheless already figuratively furrowed the speaker’s. And if his eternal love, making “antiquitie for aye his page” (12), lays claim to a transforming or rejuvenating power by which age is miraculously converted to a youth with promise of greatness yet to be realized (as in knights’ young pages), there is nonetheless in the figure a residue of absurdity in treating what is now elderly as a thing to be ominously subordinated and put to school. Thus he accords his beloved less respect than he deserves, just as there might well be something disquietingly condescending in continuing to call his friend “sweet boy” (5) when he and the beloved both know that the man he would treat here as his “page” in saying so is no child, but over time has become but an “old thing” no longer counted “old” (8). In the couplet’s peroration the speaker reiterates that his love for his friend will remain forever young, but we know not from what inner resource this rejuvenation will spring. Will the “there” (13) from which the “first conceit of love” (13) is to be reconstituted be “loves fresh case” (9) in the lover’s chest despite its aging external form or will it be reconstituted in l.1s “braine” from which the “first conceit” of love (the first “conception” of love or the first “vain illusion” of love, or both) was born, a brain “where time and outward form would shew it [and ‘wit’] dead” (14)? In the end, the sestet cannot happily sustain the hopeful note it tries to hold when the last words used to describe a love that is ever “fresh” proceeds to “shew it dead.”

The trouble with the couplet is not simply that the emotional force of its final word threatens to overwhelm the promised transcendence of the vague abstraction “first conceit . . . bred” in the previous line. It is that we cannot be sure what the antecedent of “there” is in l.13. Does it, as the speaker intends, refer back to “loves fresh case” (9) as the source of Love’s rejuvenation? Or, in ironic fashion, does it refer back to the poet’s own brain whose vain illusion of love he mistakes for a reality (it being the “first [vain] conceit” with which his affection for the youth began and now grows yet more outrageous if the god he claims to be praying to is, in fact, but a “page” he would lord it over)? Likewise we cannot know whether “there bred, / Where time and outward forme would show it dead” (13–14) characterizes how “loves fresh case” emerges from the effect of the person of the beloved on him still, despite time’s effects on his friend’s physical beauty, or whether it alludes unwittingly to the vain conceit of love hatched in his own brain where time and outward frame would “shew it dead,” displaying “(w)it” as lifeless at its birth as it is in the present reincarnation.

The blasphemy in his purported devotion to the young man is not, to be precise, that he worships a false god, but that he worships nothing, continuing but to proselytize for his “first conceit of love.” His ever hallowing (or is it, more mundanely, “hallooing”) the beloved’s “fair name” (8) is no sign of sacramental reverence, but only a familiarity that sullies his good name, a familiarity in his flattering sycophant that barely masks contempt. (One cannot determine whether the tone of “I must each day say ore the very same” [6] is humbly apologetic or “put upon.”)7 The speaker may well think that an empty-headed and witless repetition of praise may do the young man proper honor (considering its wondrous source), but the Bard knows better. As Booth notes (349), the evangelist’s warning in recommending the Lord’s Prayer to the faithful (Matt. 6:7) should likewise chasten the speaker’s here: “When ye pray, use no vain repetitions on the heathen: for they thinke to be heard for their much babling.”

In making his self-justifying claim for himself and his love in the sestet, the speaker in no way imagines that he may be saying anything incriminating; but in making his fresh “case” (9) for the merits of his love, he never once weighs any “injury” (10) he may have done to the beloved this long while nor does he give to “necessary wrinckles” (11) that over time have become a part of his beloved’s being a deferential “place” (11) of honor. Instead, condescendingly, he simply tries to make “antiquitie for aye [and ‘I’] his page” (12): that is, his subordinate “dependency” or, alternatively, “the blank sheet” meant only to record his “first conceit [both ‘fictive literary figuration’ and ‘egoistic fantasy’] of love there bred, / Where time and outward forme would shew it [‘eternal love in the form of a vain conceit’ or ‘show-wit’] dead” (13–14).

Though it has ever been thus, it need not be so. Love is not simply making what one can of a diminished and diminishing thing as the speaker here, mimicking the speaker of 73, does. It can be, instead, what 115 envisions, “but yet” (5) a babe that “still doth grow” (115:14) even as it gives necessary wrinckles place. Unlike his namesake, in Q1 the Bard is not at wit’s end as to what he may yet do to continue the proper praise of love. For him, l.4’s question mark does not govern the entire quatrain but merely ll.3–4. The first two lines of the poem represent a declarative proposition he can live with. His namesake may confess to being empty-headed, but not the Bard. For him “what’s in the braine” that (emphasis mine) “inck may character” (1), ever able to “figure to thee [his readers] my true spirit” (2). The question that follows, then, does not communicate exhausted frustration, but eager anticipation of a continuing expense of spirit in the service of the best of causes. Regarding a figurative canvas awaiting painting, he asks: “What’s new to speake” (3), then, “what now [or ‘present’] to register” that can alone “expresse my love, or thy deare merit” (4)—two things he genuinely believes “one twaine”: “thou mine, I thine” (7). His love is not for the possession of a person: it yearns not to own but to expand and share in the “deare merit” he loves in his only begetters, a merit that still can grow despite the dust and injury of age and necessary wrinkles, its deathless heart and soul eternally young. His “prayers divine” (5) are not Matthew’s “vain repetitions” recited by rote and somewhat discontentedly by a spirit depleted by age and exhaustion. Answering his own eager question in ll.3–4, for both himself and the figure he addresses as the “sweet boy” (5), Love himself, he affirms that the “now” (3) to be registered in speech that is ever new is “not[h]ing” (or “taking note of” the) “but yet” (5)—or that which is still to be—just as “prayers divine” (5) take note of the infinite good one should worship. Thus what he says and registers “each day say[ing] ore” (6) cannot ever “get old.” For him, “the very same” (6) should not be glossed as “mindless repetition,” but, more idiomatically, as any expression of love given “no matter what.”

The sestet then restates this miracle of rare device. Thus, the exercise of “eternall love” in “loves fresh case” every day “waighes not the dust” upon our feet and remains unhobbled by the “injury of age,” nor does it “give to necessary wrinckles” any more or less respect than they deserve; but “eternall love” makes antiquity for ever its youthful page, the yet developing servant of good, as well as the as yet unfilled page where the first conceits or “concepts” of love may breed and grow in writer and reader. Thus, writer and reader, living in devoted regard for the poet’s love and our “deare merit,” may note “but yet” in lively anticipation of increase, where time and outward forme would appear to “shew” his verse and its wit dead.

Like 123 and 124 before it, 125 takes a strong stand in defense of the steadfastness of the spear-shaker’s devotion to his beloved. Defying time (123), circumstance (124), and, now, all concern with “forme and favor” (or “social niceties” and “preferment”), these final sorties brandish a mean looking spear, voicing bellicose yet empty threats. Once again here the couplet dramatizes the speaker in high dudgeon, working himself up in righteous indignation and virtuous defiance to declare that he stands beyond the reach of the vicissitudes of time and tide, “all alone” and “hugely polliticke” (124:11), defending the innocence and worth of his love and good name against any “subbornd Informer” (125:13) who would attempt to bear false witness against him and his love.

Having made the common assumption that the speech here is straight from the horse’s mouth, Hammond is dismayed at the speaker’s rejection of all art (including it would appear the sweet arts designed to embellish love) at poem’s end—but not to worry. Anyone tasting this rhetorical confection, this “compound sweet” (7), would never mistake it for the “simple savor” (7) of meat and potatoes, unadorned, he claims for it. Abjuring art, the spear-shaker here betrays himself as artful to a fault.

Perhaps in response to some vain challenge from his beloved that he is not doing enough to dwell on the beloved’s beauteous “forme” (5) or to show and win “favor” (7), in Q1 he waves away any such need by wittily declaring what a wasteful investment such things represent, the return naught (“Were it ought to me?”) for investments in public displays of deference that merely honor with outward show what already is “extern” (2). What is the point of laying great monumental public bases to honor an eternity “which” (4) only “proves” (4) of shorter duration than “wast” of war or time’s gradual “ruining” (4)—whether it is the putative “eternity” itself or, more humorously, these unfinished foundations or “bases” themselves that should prove so readily vulnerable to decay.

Carrying the “wasteful investment” trope forward more conspicuously in Q2, he delivers a homespun homily chastening the spendthrift economy of social climbers who, living in the high “rent” (6) district on “compounds sweet” (7), lose the “simple savor” (7) of more modest fare, expending their wealth on “gazing” (8) yearningly at what they do not possess when they could feed on something that could sustain them. Quite sure that he is no such fool, the speaker proceeds in Q3 to defend his own wiser choice. With comically artful, Latinate sophistications in his obsequious oblations, he defends the “simple savor” of the kind of loving he would most enjoy: “mutuall render” (12) that “knows no art” (11). When it comes to loving, he’s a meat and potatoes kind of guy. Or, to be more graphic, he’s a raw flesh sort of guy for whom the only thing to be shared in love is mutual rendering of flesh rationalized as virtue. It is a curiously pinched domestic economy he touts. He may think that this sort of love “exchange” is pure (unadulterated by “seconds” [11] or “elements of inferior grade”), but how ample is such love when it allows for no “second” helpings (or, more probably, “second” persons in love), knowing “no art” (or “[h]art”), but instead “mutuall render, onely” (12). In Q1–2, the speaker may well think his diversionary tack regarding wasteful spending habits a clever ploy to dodge any further obligation to dwell on “forme and favor” (5); but how much wiser an investment can it be to live alone for mutual render, me for thee and thee for me, not making “one twain” but canceling one another out in a zero-sum game? How much wiser to “know no art” but one’s own artful dodging, to “mix with [no] seconds,” but “all alone” stand “hugely pollitick”—little more than a shaken spear or any stiff tool grasped firmly by the hand?

Duncan-Jones interestingly speculates that the “subbornd Informer” (13) who publicly challenges the truth of the speaker’s love is 123’s Time itself. (It would be difficult to imagine a more deforming informer.) But it could well be those many skeptics who in 124 accused the speaker of temporizing that now show themselves hypocrites suborning their own testimony against him and informing against themselves in paying too much rent to dwell in form and favor. The “subbornd Informer” might even be the addressee or some anonymous accuser who has claimed, falsely, that the poet has not done enough to dwell on form and favor in his relationship to the young man. One thing is certain, however. The speaker will stand up to defend his honor no matter who bears false witness against him in charging him with crimes against love. Though he still must stand trial in the court of readerly opinion commissioned to determine his guilt or innocence, so sure of his good graces is he that he sounds like the Son of God himself ordering the serpent to “get thee behind me” in banishing his accuser. The only thing that might lighten the tone of this defiance is not any uncertainty he might have about the rightness of his position, but how uneasy a jest it would be if the subject of his apostrophe should in fact be the young man himself. In that case, because he would wish to remain on the friend’s good side—in his “favor”—he would speak this defiance with tongue in cheek, even while enjoying in undisclosed self-satisfaction the clever way he has turned the tables on his accuser.

For his part, the Bard has heard more than enough to determine what the verdict on the spear-shaker’s pleasuring himself in this way should be by poem’s end. In order for Q1 to mean what his persona hopes to convey in it, readers must supplement the first line’s elliptical syntax with an “if” or a “that” between “me” and “I.” But the line makes good satirical sense as written. “Were it ought” or “were it of any benefit” to him, the persona unknowingly asks, that he bear the canopy “to me”—in servility honoring himself alone? The Bard answers the questions that both Q1 and Q2 ask with the volta’s “Noe” (9). “Honoring” (2) fair young man and dark lady’s “outward” (2) beauty with an equally superficial praise “extern” (2) directed to them (suppressing his true feelings within) never does him any substantial good whatever. He has nothing at all to show for it since in the servile beauty of that praise he has not “borne” or “born” anything that might live, but merely paid deference surreptitiously to his own self-conceived majesty. Likewise, none of the “great bases for eternity” (3) he “layd” in the poems claiming to immortalize the youth could ever have proved as enduring as the “wast or ruining” (4) awaiting them. Has he self-reflexively “seene” (5) himself in his self-righteous judgment of others he deems too concerned with “forme and favor” (5)? Again, in l.9’s “noe” the Bard declares that the persona’s homily is little more than a pot calling the kettle black. Has he seen how dwelling on “forme and favor” in his own relationships can result in one’s losing everything? Of course not, “noe.”

The speaker may imagine that his love is virtuous devotion; his “obsequious” (9) directedness toward the beloved’s “heart” (9), a generosity; his “oblacion” (10), one offered to the friend. But the Bard knows that his obsequious devotion to both fair young man and dark lady is the manipulative resort of a born loser paying too much rent for a compound sweet that remains beyond his reach and means. In the process he forgoes the “simple savor” of genuine mutuality. His “oblacion” is not one offered reverently to another. He no doubt means to say that his beloved should “take thou my oblacion” (10) as his due; but the larger syntax governing the phrase allows the Bard to declare that what the speaker really hopes is that by flattering the young man with such obsequious unction the young man will “let me . . . take thou[,] my oblacion, poore but free” (10). The Bard knows that his persona is a perfect fool to think himself ahead of the game in his satisfaction with this “poore” love that acknowledges “no art” (11) with which it might be enriched and no “seconds” (11) with whom it could be engaged for its own betterment. His apologia for “mutuall render” does not declare a higher and more rewarding way, but only a primitive form of barter that yields naught, as ll.1 and 9 unknowingly confess.

In declaring its virtuous defiance of a corrupting world, the couplet more meaningfully conveys the Bard’s explanation why the speaker settles for such a “poore” and diminished thing, calling it love, when full engagement in the art of love with another would give birth to a living good that could grow and multiply. No matter who is addressed as suborned informer in the couplet, the speaker would clearly like to put as much distance as he can between himself and such a vile traitor. But for the Bard “hence” (13) is not the spear- shaker’s haughty imperative; it is a matter-of-factly analytical connective that concludes, based on the poem’s prior evidence, that the speaker himself is the lying traitor who has been “subbornd” by ill-gotten gain. In doing so his “trew soule” (13) has been badly “impeacht” (14) as a witness for his defense, that true soul instead standing “least” (14)—not “most innocently accused” but instead “most insignificantly” under the villain’s “controule” (14) yet. Standing thus impeached, he likewise stands condemned as but another “dweller on forme and favor” (5) whose loveless attempts to manipulate and secure preferment above others has ended, as he himself earlier argued they must, in destitution.

The Bard would live more richly than this “pittifull thriver” in his superior “gazing spent” (8). He does not wish to forgo the simple savor of truly living among others. In addressing his readers, he is quick to declare in Q1–Q2 that he has no desire to dwell, alone, on “forme and favor” in order to secure a place of prominence. He knows that cannot end well. Instead he asks modestly whether we his readers will not “let me be obsequious” in the privacy of “thy heart” (9), there to accept his humble service to us, an artless and unadulterated service that affirms finally no superiority in him to us but “onely” (12) a mutual render “me for thee” (12) as one twain, only begetter and only begotten. Buoyed by this confidence in love, the Bard knows no circumstances can inform against us. Banishing the “subbornd Informers” against our better selves into which we may perpetually devolve, he nevertheless still confidently affirms that his “trew soule” (13) (as ours), even then, “stands least” (in other words, “leased”) in our “controule” (14), always offering us a home for our spirits for which we pay no rent we cannot “afford.” Indeed, it offers us a steady “in-come” upon which we may live and prosper if only we should put down roots there to live. Thus in the mutuality the poet preaches, his “trew soule” can live and prosper under a lease we control, as in poem after poem he lays out for us the essence of that lease’s terms.

After a most troubling and hard journey we have arrived at a destination of sorts in 126. Something of a wild goose chase broken off abruptly, the sequence provides no rest after travail, however. Having marched at the persona’s side during his exile in the wilderness, we are not at the last privileged to see the promised land, let alone enter it in his company. Instead of a long awaited and joyful “meeting of their minds” between speaker and beloved, we must now contend with a wholly unanticipated and seemingly definitive sundering: less the well-wishing “fare well” with which 126 seemingly begins than the inexorable death sentence delivered in the bitterness of its frustration (if under cover of the speaker’s pretense of concern for the lovely boy) as the stage goes black at poem’s end.8 No vision of paradisal enlightenment in an epiphanic encounter with the multifoliate Rose (Sonnet 1’s “Rose” that “might never die”), the “young man” sequence’s conclusion treats us instead to a harrowing spectacle of Armageddon whose outcome no longer hangs in the balance: good in the form of the mythical magnificence of Nature in all her glory (and the youth as her lovely “minnion” [11]) condemned to “answer” (13) to tyrannical Time’s greater power over her and her “lovely Boy” (1), no matter how dearly she would like to “keep” (7) him for herself. Unable to make an end to the poet-speaker’s endless moans in any other way—as in 153–54—the Bard resorts again here to a mythopoetic contextualization of the persona’s personal predicament in order to round off a tale that in narrative terms has no end.

O thou my lovely Boy who in thy power,

Doest hould times fickle glasse, his sickle, hower:

Who hast by wayning growne, and therein shou’st,

Thy lovers withering, as thy sweet selfe grow’st.

If Nature (soveraine misteres over wrack)

As thou goest onwards still will plucke thee backe,

She keepes thee to this purpose, that her skill.

May time disgrace, and wretched mynuit kill.

Yet feare her O thou minnion of her pleasure,

She may detaine, but not still keepe her tresure!

Her Audite (though delayd) answer’d must be,

And her Quietus is to render thee.

( )

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Lest we make our interpretive quandaries here any more difficult than they already are, let us begin with what is familiar in this sudden shift to a new register. It is true that for the first and only time in the sequence we are presented, not with a sonnet but six rhyming couplets. But if this is not a sonnet like the others surrounding it, it is the closest thing to one anyone could hope for. In the Bard’s characteristic manner, the poem’s argument develops with high regard for quatrain integrity and a distinctly Italianate turn at the beginning of what would have been the sestet. The entirety can be heard to make enough completed sense that the only structural oddity would appear to be Q’s concluding parentheses where a couplet might have been. Moreover, why would a scribe or compositor add the empty parentheses when the sixth couplet completes meaningful sense? Based on the recurring fact that initially mystifying marks of punctuation in the sequence (another example of which will need to be discussed momentarily in l.8) inevitably prove interpretively consequential, our initial assumption ought to be that the Bard may well have his reasons to make us stop to contemplate the “void facing us” rather than that some pedantically punctilious compositor would have nothing better to do with his time than to note the poet’s failure to observe formalities when satisfactory sense can be made of what lies inscribed before him.

Adhering to the spear-shaker’s characteristic modus operandi, this little poem forwards bitterness and frustration masked as fondness and praise. The only way his remarks can be heard to cohere in the progress of the quatrains is if Q1 is a praise testimonial, exaggerated by fondness, of the beloved’s control over time in that even as time passes (though others who love him may be withering—the speaker included) he, for his “sweet selfe’s” (4) part, simply grows in beauty. Q2 then explains this strange anomaly by declaring him a doting Dame Nature’s favorite. As the young man “goest onwards still” in time she “will plucke thee backe” (6) so that in him she can prove her dominion over “time[’s] disgrace[s]” (8) and “wretched mynuit[s]” (8) of time spent without him.

If we leave out of account some of the darker counter-indications in the myth the speaker spins out in Q2 to reassure his friend, then so far, so good. However, nothing can make the volta seem anything but a turn for the worse. Nature may win skirmishes over “wretched mynuits” perhaps and even discompose her mighty antagonist momentarily; but he will surely win the war: “she may detaine but not still [‘yet’ or ‘without movement toward death’] keepe her treasure” (10). By contrast to the more satisfying audits that the sequence promised at its inception in 1 and 2, now at the sequence’s end, the final audit requires that even Dame Nature pay her debt to time for the favorites she has enjoyed. Since quietus est was written on receipts signifying that now books could be closed on delinquent accounts, perhaps what the speaker meant but dared not say overtly in Q2 was that Dame Nature is “soveraine misteres” over a kingdom universally going to “wrack” (5), not an absolute monarch who controls or “rules” beyond the reach of ruin in special cases like that of her young favorite.

However saddened, Dame Nature may pay off the debt she owes to close her accounts’ ledger, but the speaker cannot and will not close his books without more of a fight, both with time and with his beloved. Even when he stops speaking at poem’s end there is no quietus est for him. The first sign of his unresolved troubles in Q3 is the word “minnion” (9), which despite its fond purport, cannot completely hide a certain contemptuous hiss in its delivery. The beloved may not simply be Nature’s innocent “darling”; for some reason the speaker may be accusing him of a “slavish servility.” Could he be harboring envious resentment for the diffidence with which his young friend may be maintaining and even growing in beauty with his years while he, one of his neglected lovers, has been left behind, withering away in “wretched mynuits” without his prize, minutes as threatening to him as any Nature had temporarily managed to overcome by maintaining the young man’s presence with her?

If one takes ll.11–12 without bitter angularity of that sort, one must wonder what “fair warning” or “fond farewell” they can complete. If what the speaker has to say about Nature is true, then what help can it be to the young man to warn him of the danger of betrayal by Nature herself? He may say “Yet feare her” (9) to her minion, but what could the young fool possibly do to avoid her betrayal of him on the basis of the speaker’s warning to him of the danger he’s in? The speaker’s seeming kindness here barely covers his fangs. The resentment he can barely hide in his frustration with the young man’s indifference to the persona’s many unanswered pleas for his regard is that the “Audite” (11) addressed to Nature—the “hear ye” her time-bound creditor calls in (though delayed)—unlike the young man’s delaying absence of response to him during the entire sequence, “answer’d must be” (11). Since the young man has consistently failed to respond to his offer of a satisfying “mutuall render, onely me for thee” (125:12), then the only gratification that remains to the spurned suitor is one that behind smiling favor clenches its teeth in the vengeful pronouncement that one day soon Nature will need to “render” her favorite to Time to square her accounts, her “minnion” cast aside unlovingly (as he should be) when he becomes nothing but a liability. Though he has ever betrayed genuine love for the boy, the speaker myopically imagines that he would never do anything as unloving as Nature soon will, had the beloved only trusted in his love.

For the Bard, this last missive in the sequence need not be yet another unanswered plea, however; it need not be a malicious memento mori masquerading as an inexplicably abrupt farewell, however purportedly fond. In it, he sings the same sweet song he endlessly rearranges, a song celebrating the living praise of the multifoliate Rose. In flattery’s overstated manner, the Bard’s namesake may make an outlandish claim in Q1 that he will retract in Q3 (at some damage to consistency, to be sure); but the Bard’s truth-telling has no need or wish to go back on anything it affirms. Without truly believing his own bravado, the spear-shaker may address his beloved as having the “power” (1) to “hould” (2) or seemingly “control” time’s hourglass and destructive “sickle” (2); but the only being who “grow’st” (4) here (thinking himself a “sweet selfe” [4]) while his lover is seen to wane is not the young man, but the speaker as the poem progresses. By poem’s end, it is not the young man who can be thought to wield a draining hourglass and grim sickle; it is the speaker who figuratively waves them before the beloved’s face to threaten him with extinction.

The Bard speaks another language entirely, one his namesake does not comprehend. For the Bard, the “lovely Boy” (1) is not false coinage to be traded for his personal profit. For him, the “lovely Boy” he admires is figurative representation of the living treasure of an incarnation he would share with any and all his readers: the iconic New Year’s babe, mighty opposite of the grim reaper, who carries in his arms, undaunted, the emblems of mortal limitation. This “lovely Boy” is the equivalent and anticipation of Blake’s true vision of time as an eternal youth, lover of l’ora beatrice. “Who” in l.3 and 4 need not refer back to and characterize the young man in terms with which his sycophant hopes to flatter him; “who” may refer instead to the “sickle hour” or “harvest hour’s sickle” in the hands of the “hower” (2). In other words, it may refer to an hour (and hower) that by its (and his) waning delivers creation and furtherance of life, love’s labor not lost, but promising yet greater harvest. Thus, in l.4, even as “thy lovers” (that is, those who truly “appreciate” creative good) wither while doing so, their admiration for love’s power generated in their labors increases with their enhanced sense of the growth of love’s “sweet selfe’[s]” (4) abounding riches. This unorthodox reading of l.4 is buttressed if we attend to Q’s odd spelling of the word “showest” as the hortatory injunction “Shou’st” (3) followed by a comma. Q, then, may not mean “showest” at all, but “should’st.” In the latter case, the Bard would argue that the power he imagines we all wield is not simply a natural fact, it is likewise a moral imperative requiring good stewardship from us all, a condition in which our investment in the labor of creation and our own physical withering can and should mean the growth of the “sweet selfe” we are capable of yet realizing.

The standard way to take the seemingly positive depiction of Dame Nature in Q2 is that she is to be commended for battling successfully to preserve her favorite from going “onwards still” (6) to decay, ever plucking the young man back to a life to be enjoyed with her; but the Bard symbolically depicts Nature here as a Circean lure and enemy of our love’s return to endless progeny and proper enrichment. This Nature (including aspects of human nature as well) presides over our ruin or “wrack” (5) in that she and it “still will plucke thee backe” (6) to its own appetitive “pleasure[s]” (9), imprisoning humanity in a vicious cycle when our better instincts would urge us to “goest onwards” and progressively toward the creation of novel goods we could previously only imagine. In such a gilded cage, nature would “keep thee to this purpose” (7) in a life of merely natural goods that must only diminish over time. That is why Q’s seventh line might rightly end with its surprising period. At first glance, it would seem that this period is clearly a printing error since without it sentence sense is naturally completed to say that “this” (7), her “purpose” and “skill” (7), is to disgrace time and “kill” wretched minutes made so by the absence of her minion. But if one takes the period as purposeful, Nature’s purpose and skill can only refer backward to her dominion over a kingdom of recurring ruin, plucking all of us back from any progress we might make in the art of cultivating ourselves, plucking us back to a passive imprisonment as her plaything. In such a state, human nature disgraces nature’s only higher purpose and skill. In this fashion she (and we) merely disgrace “May[-]time” (8), the season of renewal and full flowering, in order only to kill the wretched minutes of our life sentence, reduced to occupying ourselves with whatever lower order pleasures we find ready to hand with which to while away our own attenuation.

The Bard ends with a fair and loving warning. Called to a final audit in such a world we can show no profit from our labors, only the eternal reassurance of Nature’s generational procession “increasing store with losse, and losse with store” (64:8). When ill Will begins the poem’s volta with the word “yet” (9), he means to say “nonetheless” or “despite her good offices” as the rhetorical setup for his subsequent insult addressed to the unappreciative young man; but for the Bard “yet” means, “even now and always” because the temptation fallen nature poses to our better selves is to become merely a slavish “minnion of [the] pleasure” (9) she provides rather than her loving helpmate, good steward of her graces, and proper husband. Only in the Bard’s way can Nature’s audit amount to anything more than the false steward’s return of one generation for another and become instead what nature and human nature both call out for: an accounting of ourselves that might prove more gratifying to all concerned, a loving nature improved by art, its good and faithful servants fruitfully laboring in the lord’s vineyards.

To one who only hears the voice of ill Will here, the empty concluding parentheses may look very much like an hourglass or an empty grave awaiting us, but to those who hear the Bard’s lovely song in the sequence, these signs of the poet’s unfinished business only signify that the Bard’s story is not yet complete and cannot be told without our midwifery. Since he and we are indeed one twain, his story can only be completed in history itself. He cannot finish it alone because his delighted story is lovingly married to ours, our completed intercourse the groundwork for the gestation and deliverance of a fuller human history itself even to the edge of doom. As Frost would later elaborate regarding the only beliefs that matter—the self-belief, the love belief, the social contract, and belief in divine being—“only the outcome can tell” (“Education By Poetry” 46).

Notes

1. Following Leishman, Braden (169) notes the absence of carpe florem admonitions in the sequence, the rapacious desperation of those who fear time’s tyranny.

2. Peguigney (83–87) and Fineman (52–53) read this sonnet quite otherwise, Fineman going so far as to erase all note of self-critical confession in it: “It is understood, of course, from the very beginning of this sonnet that the poet here praises himself . . . only because he here identifies himself with the young man” (52).

3. Compare to Fineman 150–51.

4. Compare to Burrow 482n11 for the logic by which various emendations of this line have been made.

5. Engle (PMLA 839–41) points out that the seamark and polestar are “directional indicators.”

6. In this context, then, Dante’s comment in The Banquet becomes all the more suggestive both with regard to the pyramids alluded to here and the devotion of the speaker for the anonymous young man: he calls the Egyptian pyramids “stupend structures . . . which a company of crowned asses . . . vainly built, when neither the architect nor the king that made them, or to what use and purpose, are yet known” (116–17).

7. Ferry 47–49, in fact, argues that the speaker’s hallowing “undercuts the elevating convention that the friend is divinely inspiring with the more cynical implication that he exacts daily praises which must be wearily repeated by the worshipper.”

8. Ferry 60 remarks upon the peculiarly “vengeful satisfaction in [the speaker’s] tone in Q3.” Compare to Peguigney’s useful remarks on 126 as well, 202–6.