Today Miss O' would like to enjoy the plunge of sharing and analyzing a Shakespearean sonnet. What the hell? It's cold and rainy. Pour a glass of wine. Lean back with your laptop. Have a lark.
Here is my favorite of Shakespeare's sonnets, the one I know by heart and learned with ease, anyway, and recite to myself often. I think everyone should memorize at least one of Shakespeare's sonnets before dying. You can find this one, and others, at Poetry Foundation: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174357
If you would care to engage fully with today's post, wherein we explore how to read a sonnet, I would ask that you read the entire sonnet once through. Get whatever you can out of it. (Maybe you will get the whole thing, and that's marvelous, and you can brush the sweat beads from your brow and log out of The Miss O' Show for the week. Kudos! Should you wish to remain, know that after the sonnet I'm going to do the kind of lesson I used to so with my kids at school, or How to Learn a Sonnet.)
Sonnet XXIX: When, in
disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love
remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change
my state with kings.
In a blog post last April, I talked about how to teach a
poem. I thought I’d do a demonstration with this sonnet as an aid to getting
inside what might seem to be a difficult text. As Robert Frost said, “The best
way out is always through,” and in the words of someone who was analyzing Greek
tragedy, “One always meets one’s fate in the path one takes to try to avoid
it.” In other words, if you try to avoid learning this sonnet, the chances are
very good that what the sonnet has to offer you will haunt you in your willful
ignorance of it. Or something.
When teaching a sonnet, it’s nice to share the rules.
Writing a sonnet is like playing any poetry game, not unlike writing a rap
song: Can you deliver your message in a
prescribed pattern of beats and rhyming words? That’s what it amounts to.
The message is made more beautiful when it is given form restrictions. I read
somewhere, but can’t find it on Google, that Frank Lloyd Wright said that
limitations were his best friends. Think about it: Write anything? Build anything?
How do you start? But when one has a certain space, a budget (of money, or in
the case of a poem, lines and syllables), one has to get really creative.
Quick Sonnet
Rules:
·
A sonnet has 14 lines. The first 12 tell the “story,” or give
the background of the narrator’s thinking, and final 2 lines sum up the poem’s message.
·
Each line of a sonnet has (usually) 10 syllables, which is its meter. There’s a beat of da-DUM you can tap out as you read each line:
When IN disGRACE with FORtune AND men’s EYES,
I ALL aLONE beWEEP my OUTcast STATE...
When IN disGRACE with FORtune AND men’s EYES,
I ALL aLONE beWEEP my OUTcast STATE...
·
The syllables I put in all caps are called “stressed” syllables,
so the other syllables, then, are “unstressed.” Each set of unstressed/stressed
syllables is called, in poetry-speak, a metric “foot.” There are 5 pairs of
these “feet,” making 10 syllables.
Sonnets were THE form of poetry during Shakespeare’s time, and the reigning monarch in England was Elizabeth, hence the form was called the Elizabethan sonnet. Schools at that time, being not that far removed from Roman rule, historically speaking, were big into teaching Latin and Greek, so everything got a Greek or Latin name. Hence that metric foot back there was called by the Greek word for “metric foot [SEE NOTE],” or iamb. There are five iambs, and the Greek root for five is pent, so the whole metered line was identified as being written in iambic pentameter. See? [CORRECTION, FROM A CLASSICAL SCHOLAR FRIEND: A slight correction on iambs. The word doesn't really mean anything beyond the rhythm (except, sometimes, "invective," which is what the rhythm was originally used for). Greek meter is based on the alternation of long-short, and iamb refers to short syllables and long syllables (or, if your language is stress-based, unstressed-stressed). "Metron" is measure, and in Greek poetry an iambic metron is made up of two iambs--so what classicists call "iambic trimeter" is what English scholars would call "iambic hexameter." I.T. is very important, as it's the meter of tragic dialogue.
(So iambic trimeter is six iambs, but six dactyls (LSS) are dactylic hexameter--go figure. Maybe a metron has to be at least three syllables. DH is the meter of epic, and Longfellow hits you over the head with it in the opening of Evangeline. THIS is the FORest priMEval, the MURmuring PINES and the HEMlocks.)] [SO I guess the "foot" I'd been taught was metric, and not a literal foot. Oh, kids, Miss O' is learning all the time!]
Sonnets were THE form of poetry during Shakespeare’s time, and the reigning monarch in England was Elizabeth, hence the form was called the Elizabethan sonnet. Schools at that time, being not that far removed from Roman rule, historically speaking, were big into teaching Latin and Greek, so everything got a Greek or Latin name. Hence that metric foot back there was called by the Greek word for “metric foot [SEE NOTE],” or iamb. There are five iambs, and the Greek root for five is pent, so the whole metered line was identified as being written in iambic pentameter. See? [CORRECTION, FROM A CLASSICAL SCHOLAR FRIEND: A slight correction on iambs. The word doesn't really mean anything beyond the rhythm (except, sometimes, "invective," which is what the rhythm was originally used for). Greek meter is based on the alternation of long-short, and iamb refers to short syllables and long syllables (or, if your language is stress-based, unstressed-stressed). "Metron" is measure, and in Greek poetry an iambic metron is made up of two iambs--so what classicists call "iambic trimeter" is what English scholars would call "iambic hexameter." I.T. is very important, as it's the meter of tragic dialogue.
(So iambic trimeter is six iambs, but six dactyls (LSS) are dactylic hexameter--go figure. Maybe a metron has to be at least three syllables. DH is the meter of epic, and Longfellow hits you over the head with it in the opening of Evangeline. THIS is the FORest priMEval, the MURmuring PINES and the HEMlocks.)] [SO I guess the "foot" I'd been taught was metric, and not a literal foot. Oh, kids, Miss O' is learning all the time!]
·
I told that history back there in the same way I tried teaching the
sonnet rules to my students, and I haven’t the vaguest whether they got
anything out of it, of if you did, either. But I do know that understanding the rules and form helped
me memorize Shakespeare for acting purposes. Does one POUND out SYLLABLES when
talking? Of course not—but the rhythm and sounds and rhymes really help when
you have to learn all the goddamned WORDS.
The Rhyme Scheme
Not to be all condescending or anything, because you know this: To see how a poem rhymes, you look at the final vowel
sound in each line. But to understand how a sonnet rhyme scheme works, I'll label the sounds. The first vowel sound you find, you label “a.” The next
vowel sound is “b.” The next, “c,” and so on. When you find a sound that
matches the first one, you call that “a” again. Beside each line of the sonnet,
I’ve added a letter for the rhyme scheme:
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, (a)
I all alone beweep my outcast state, (b—a new sound)
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, (a—it matches “eyes”)
And look upon myself and curse my fate, (b—it matches “state”)
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, (c—a new sound)
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, (d—another new sound)
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope, (c)
With what I most enjoy contented least; (d—the rhyme scheme tells you that in Shakespeare’s time,
this word was most likely pronounced “lest”)
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, (e—new sound, and you’ll notice an extra syllable here—this rhythm
shift shows distress)
Haply I think on thee, and then my state, (f…but it’s really b, isn’t it?)
(Like to the lark at break of day arising (e)
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate; (f/b)
For thy sweet love
remembered such wealth brings (g, typically)
That then I scorn to change
my state with kings. (g)
The typical rhyme scheme is ababcdcdefefgg, or
abbacddceffegg, or some variation of it. The reason to note it is for memorization
purposes. It’s so helpful to have some rhyming there to coach you to the end of
a line.
So let’s take this sonnet line by line, word by word,
and figure out what the hell it means.
When in
disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
What
does it mean to be “in disgrace”? Out of grace—either in a scandal, somehow ruined,
life falling apart—it’s the bottom, and the speaker starts there. To continue: When
in disgrace “with fortune”: 1) To be out of fortune (lowercase f) is to be out of
money. Simple. But if one is hearing the poem, one cannot see whether or not
the letter F is capitalized, and this is how words take on dual meanings: In
Shakespeare’s time, to believe in Fortune rather than God was a big mistake (Romeo cries, "I am Fortune's fool!"):
Fortune, Lady Luck, Chance—these are whimsical, changeable. What is true
and unshakeable is God. To be in disgrace with Fortune (capital F), then, is to
be out of luck, but also an admission to being out of faith. Now to in disgrace
“with men’s eyes”: Men are looking down on him, or away from him, is how I read
that. The speaker is out of luck, out of
faith, out of money, and friendless. And yet how prettily it’s said. [Note:
Different sites include a comma after the opening—When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,—but the Riverside
edition of Shakespeare and lots of other sources do not. I think the comma was
added by some grammar freak editor—the punctuation in Shakespeare’s work is all
over the place—and I think that comma destroys the flow and limits the meaning—minimizing
the disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
to cut to line 2, which we are doing next. This does a real disservice to the
opening punch. No comma!]
I all alone
beweep my outcast state,
What is there to say? The speaker
is all alone, crying about being an outcast, or cast out of society. Since he
(or she, but for simplicity’s sake, he) more or less says that in the first
line, why repeat it? Here he moves from
“I’m alone” to “I feel sorry for myself.” A giant word like “beweep” says, to me, that he knows he’s feeling sorry for
himself, and self-knowledge draws me in.
And trouble
deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
Let’s start with “deaf heaven”:
Heaven, or God, is not listening, and not only will not hear but cannot hear. The word “bootless” means “useless”: In
Shakespeare’s time of foot travel and horse travel, to be without boots was to
be of no use to anyone, presumably. “Bootless cries” are useless cries. To
start with the line’s opening, “And trouble deaf heaven”: The word “trouble” is
really interesting: “I don’t mean to trouble you…” is the kind of thing we
still say, as if our asking for something, for a favor, will be a bother, or
even emotionally difficult for the person we ask. How can you trouble a heaven
that cannot hear you? Again, I think the speaker knows he’s feeling sorry for
himself. He redoubles his efforts by adding “with my bootless cries”: Clearly
if heaven is deaf to his calls, his calls are useless. Self-pity is becoming a
theme. [Note on SOUND: "deaf heaven" has great assonance, or matching vowel sound, for emphasis; and "bootless" sounds a hell of a lot more frustrated than "useless."]
And look
upon myself and curse my fate,
“And look upon myself”: So here he is, the speaker, looking at himself
as in a mirror. He is taking the time to be introspective, which is what poetry
is for. This is why this sonnet exists. By cursing his “fate,” he is again
aligning himself with Fortune, shaking a metaphorical fist at the heavens as if
to say, “Why me, oh Lord?” This is where he is, in case you missed it before.
Wishing me
like to one more rich in hope,
“Wishing me like” means “Wishing myself to be like,” or
“Wishing I were like.” He wants to be like “one more rich in hope.” With "rich," the speaker
returns to “fortune,” but the riches here are not money but “hope.” He feels
hopeless and envies ones who have it. Here the sonnet turns: The speaker,
having identified his problem, is giving us specific examples of his behaviors
in the face of it.
Featured
like him, like him with friends possessed,
“Featured” is an interesting word choice. It can mean
physical features, or looks: “Featured like him” might mean “as good looking as that guy over there.” It might also mean situated:
Set up (with a job or a lifestyle) like that guy. I think it’s about looks—the
speaker is admitting to a shallow kind of envy. The next part, “like him with
friends possessed,” brings in a second “him” to envy: And I want to be like
that other guy, there, the one with all the friends.
Desiring
this man’s art and that man’s scope,
“Desiring this man’s art”: The speaker envies still
another man’s “art,” which could mean his skills in speaking, drawing, what have
you, but it comes down to envying another's talent. The next part, “and that man’s scope,” refers
I think either to vision, or forward-thinking ability, or else to a breadth of
life, living large, so to speak. Either interpretation works, I think. Our speaker is doing a
lot of envying of other people, of what they can do and see that he can't.
With what I
most enjoy contented least;
“With what I most enjoy:” Whatever it is the speaker likes
the most—eating, or whoring, or writing, we don’t know—he is now “contented
least,” or made most unhappy, by doing it. Clearly our speaker is depressed, and
his most pleasurable pastime cannot shake him out of it.
Yet in these
thoughts myself almost despising,
“Yet in these thoughts”: The “yet” does not mean “but,”
but rather “still, to this moment” or “even as we speak.” His admission,
“myself almost despising” is clear enough: I am almost hating myself for thinking all this. It’s the “almost” that redeems
him, it seems. He’s not quite done with life, because he’s at least thinking about all of it.
Haply I
think on thee, and then my state,
“Haply” means, not happily
or even perhaps (which is too casual), but as it happens, or as luck would have it (another Shakespeare line). “I think on thee”: Just as this mood happens, I think of you, I
think about you. When he adds “and then my state,” he means his state of being, and the poem takes yet
another turn, from problem and elaboration to solution. The “and then” is the
turn.
The "thee" is huge: Who is the “thee” to whom the speaker refers? We don’t know. It could be
a lover, a friend, a parent, a sibling, a collective of all. All we know is
that the “thee” is the single thing in his life that can turn him and his mood
around.
(Like to
the lark at break of day arising
This parenthetical thing is curious. Let’s do the words first
and I’ll talk about the parenthesis in the next bit. “Like to the lark at break
of day arising”: He’s making a simile, that when he thinks about “thee,”
his state can be compared to the lark, the bird that calls at dawn, or break of
day. The “arising” is a word that brings to mind uplift, and also the image of
sunrise. It’s a line about awakening.
From sullen
earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
“From sullen earth” is a continuation, the second half of
the comparison: “Sullen” is a deeper sadness, a funk, in a way, a depression.
To personify the earth as sullen is to see himself, really, as the earth. He’s
talking about his own world as sullen. The speaker, who is now thinking of
sunrise, arising, awakening, is also comparing the darkness of earth before
dawn to a dark, sullen mood that changes with the break of dawn and light.
The
parentheses, I think, keep the speaker from going “over the top” when declaring
his change of state. He’s still down, he’s still depressed, and the mood shifts
not to jubilation, but rather to humility.
This is an example of where punctuation is a vital cue to the reader or
performer: Don’t bellow your lark call.
To follow the phrase after the parenthesis, you have to
return to the line before the lark image: “Then my state…sings hymns at
heaven’s gate.” Heaven may be deaf, but thinking of you makes me want to rise
up singing, and sing hymns at the very gates of (deaf) heaven. The speaker, in other
words, finds again his faith. Thinking about his friend, whoever it is, gives
him faith, and indeed, strength.
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
These lines are called the rhyming
couplet, and they are the message of the poem: “For thy sweet love remembered”:
When I remember how I love you, or, when I remember how you love me, “such
wealth brings”, I feel rich. In fact, the speaker feels so rich, “That then I
scorn to change my state with kings.” He scorns, or rejects, the idea of changing
places—whether a depressed mood or a lousy situation—with a king. Whatever his money woes, whatever his lacks, it is the love
of this unknown “thee” that is, in the end, his world.
What a compliment! And really, what
a journey to get to this new place. This is the sonnet that, as I said, I know by heart, carry with
me, and in my darkest moments recite to myself. It’s like medicine. My “thee”
is vast. I always remember how lucky I am.
And then I drink. (Ha, ha!)
Here’s the poem again. Read it all
the way through once more, aloud, with all your new knowledge. I hope you have
enjoyed the journey. Maybe it will embolden you to pick up a few more and learn
those, too.
Love to all!
Sonnet XXIX: When, in
disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
For thy sweet love
remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change
my state with kings.
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