Tree Soul - Entelechy - Pencil drawing

The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Dr. Helen Vendler - commentary

The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets  is a wonderful experience which provoked the following comments which I don't have the standing to make.... .

Dr. Vendler asks “Where, then, does the charm of lyric lie?....they can be summed up in the phrase 'the arrangement of statement'.  Form is content-as-arranged; content is form-as-deployed.” But I had a hard time accepting that the Sonnets were at core primarily an “innovation in presentation” of a common theme – romantic love.  If instead one assumes Shakespeare was intensely focused on the subject of “love” rather than "a love," then it is understandable that the sonnets would not conform to my idea of traditional love poems.  If the subject of the sonnets is love then the sonnets are semantically very rich.  Let me explain why I think it is fruitful to take this perspective.

Read this way, the sonnets tease out many if not all of love’s facets because Shakespeare set them in the context of a forbidden homosexual relationship.  That context provides an intense chiaroscuro to highlight love's facets in a way a traditional love poem almost certainly could not.

What the first 17 sonnets establish very successfully, I think, is that the speaker’s love of the youth is pure and intense.  Even so, the sonnets don’t strike me as love poems in the romantic sense at all.  None of the youth’s beauty is shared with the reader - just that the speaker was besotted with someone he thought pretty.  S doesn’t share any of the particulars with us (color of eye, color of hair, skin [color or texture] – the normal fare of a love poem).  Instead many of the Sonnets leave us with the strong feeling that the youth was a narcissistic, somewhat promiscuous fop and the speaker was mired in degraded self loathing and feelings of rejection. I can’t help but think that Shakespeare intended us to read the Sonnets this way for a reason.  What “Love” is, is learned by what it is NOT in this context.  To again quote The Art...,, “Shakespeare’s mind operates always by antithesis.” A homosexual relationship context allowed Shakespeare to discuss what love is in the absence of off-spring; in the absence of social acceptance; in the absence of the constancy provided by marriage; in the absence of pure physical beauty; in the absence of being able to grow old together en famile where physical beauty is relative to the stage of life.  If my supposition is right, (to paraphrase The Art of Shakespeare’s…)  the context is imaginative.  It allows the terms of love to take on meanings that reinforce, meaningfully contradict, and play with those meanings as we previously conceived them in a way that is aesthetically novel, in a way that is striking, memorable, beautiful, disturbing, and surprising. As to why he would chose the Sonnet form for such a subject rather than a free form play - it may be that conforming to the highly conventional lyric structure gives him license to approach such a conventional subject on such unconventional terms.

Take Sonnet 73 to illustrate these points.

73 might not be so successful if written to a woman – by a long shot.  I would never write this sonnet to a woman I was trying to woo back.  To tell her to love me because she should love an aging increasingly unattractive man before she too gets uglier and dies!?!  Instead the homosexual context enables the sonnet to posit a reasonable presumption that the youth might accept that he and the speaker are alike  but only different in age.  The speaker tells the youth he should want to love him more intensely because time is so fleeting and cruel – to love him in the moment – a wonderful sentiment that might not work in a traditional love poem – a facet of love which is wonderfully explored but only possible in this context.