Shakespeare's Not "To - Be - Pitied Lover"Author(s): James SchroeterSource: College English, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Jan., 1962), pp. 250-255Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/373063Accessed: 11/11/2010 23:57

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250 COLLEGE ENGLISH

sub-human toil. White-collar drudges, poring over stacks of wretched themes, will hardly inspire anyone with a respect for the humanities. On the other hand the scientific methodology, which can grow out of programming, enlists ele- mentary school teacher and university

professor under a single banner. The ancient, and fake, distinction between "scholar" and "teacher" will vanish with the recognition that neither title is worth very much without the other. From this new perspective a rapprochement could come about between educator and scholar, between public school and lib- eral arts college, between teacher and critic, and-best of all-between student and teacher.

Reprints of the above article are available from NCTE for $.15 each or 20 or more, $.10 each.

Shakespeare's Not "To-Be-Pitied Lover"

JAMES SCHROETER

Shakespeare's "Sonnet 73" is generally recognized as one of his best, and, in- deed, as one of the finest lyrics in the

English language. It has been frequently anthologized-in collections of Shake-

speare's best work, in collections of no- table poems in English, and in anthologies of world masterpieces. H. C. Beeching (1904) calls it "superb." R. M. Alden (1916) says it is "the finest example of the Shakespearian mode" of sonnet-

writing. Wright Thomas and Stuart Brown (1941) select it (along with some lines from The Waste Land) out of the whole range of English literature as a show piece illustrating the delicacy re-

quired by the fine art of reading poetry.' One would expect that the commen-

tary on so important a poem would be considerable in both quantity and quality. It is true that the quantity has been

large, and a certain amount that is valu- able can be drawn from it. But most of it is in the form of fragmentary notes, con-

sisting of an unsupported judgment, a

comparison, or an interpretation of a dif- ficult word or phrase. Even the elaborate "New Criticisms" are inadequate-those by William Empson (Seven Types of Ambiguity), which seem to be based on the Variorum notes; by John Crowe Ransom (The New Critcism), which are based on Empson; and by Thomas and Brown (Reading Poems), which are based on Ransom. These last critics

analyze the poem to show off a new method of criticizing or reading. Worse, they twist the poem, especially Ransom, to mean something Shakespeare could not possibly have intended.

Part of the difficulty seems to be that these last critics, all of whom are in some

way associated with the "New Criti- cism," were drawn to the poem mainly because of a single line: "Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang." Because of its difficulty, this line had at- tracted the attention of two early editors, Malone (1780) and Steevens (1780), who had to make the hypothesis that "choirs" referred to that part of the cathedral where divine service was performed rather than to the performers, and that the image was probably suggested by the "desolated monasteries" of Reformation

"Henry Charles Beeching, The Sonnets of Shakespeare: with an Introduction and Notes (Boston & London, 1904), p. vi. Raymond MacDonald Alden, The Sonnets of Shakespeare (Boston & New York, 1916), p. 183. Wright Thomas and Stuart Brown, Reading Poems: an Introduction to Critical Study (1941), pp. 744- 748.

Mr. Schroeter is assistant professor of Eng- lish at Temple University. Author of articles on Sophocles, Shakespeare and Poe, he is cur- rently working on a book dealing with American literature since the war.

SHAKESPEARE'S NOT "TO-BE-PITIED LOVER" 251

England, whose "choirs" are compared by the poet to the trees at the end of the autumn, stripped of the foliage which once invited and sheltered the birds.2 When so interpreted, the image resembles the hard-yoked conceits of Donne and the Metaphysical poets so much admired by Eliot and that school of new critics which has followed him. Although it seems likely that Shakespeare would have mended the line had he been able gracefully to bring it into accord with the characteristic visual clarity of his other images, the new critics seized upon it because of its very difficulty, awkwardness and remoteness-because of what Empson calls its "ambiguity." Tak- ing the explanatory paraphernalia in the Variorum as though composed of words by Shakespeare rather than of a compila- tion by editors, he improvises from it the reasons why the comparison between "boughs" and "choirs" is apt:

Because ruined monastery choirs are places in which to sing, because they involve sitting in a row, because they are made of wood, are tied into knots and so forth, because they used to be surrounded by sheltering buildings crystallised out of the likeness of a forest, and coloured with stained glass and painted like flowers and leaves, because they are now abandoned by all but the grey walls coloured like the skies of win- ter, because the cold and Narcissistic charm suggested by choir boys suits well with Shakespeare's feeling for the object of the Sonnets, and for various sociologi- cal and historical reasons (the protestant destruction of monasteries; fear of puritanism), which it would be hard now to trace out in their proportions; these reasons, and many more relating the simile to its place in the Sonnet, must all combine to give the line its beauty, and there is a sort of ambiguity in not knowing which of them to hold most

clearly in mind. Clearly this is involved in all such richness and heightening of effect, and the machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.3

Empson's comments strongly influ- enced Ransom, who in any event would probably have been naturally drawn to the same image. Ostensibly refuting but really embellishing on Empson, he calls the figure a "suspended or temporary ambiguity," and adds that "the boughs are vehicle to Shakespeare's unhappy state, and the choirs are vehicle to the boughs, so that we have a vehicle of a vehicle, technically perhaps to be known as a complex or . . . telescoped meta- phor."4 Ransom's undue admiration of this "telescoped" metaphor, which he says is the "richest" image in the sonnet, de- rives from (even though Ransom does not know it) his generally unbalanced judgement of the whole poem: he thinks the poem shows that Shakespeare's "health is probably bad," that he is "melancholy," that he "finds the world evil and would like to die," and most of all that "his spirits are low."' This un- fortunate view seems to be widespread. Thomas and Brown, who acknowledge their indebtedness to "Mr. T. S. Eliot" and "Mr. I. A. Richards," Empson's teacher, because of his "laboratory method of studying poems," give the "choir" figure the same undue stress as Empson and Ransom.6 Although they refrain from suggesting that Shakespeare

'See The New Variorum Edition of Shake- speare: The Sonnets, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Philadelphia & London, 1944), I, p. 190. There are more notes, both old and recent, con- cerning this line than any other,

'William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930), p. 3.

'John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (1941), pp. 126-128.

"Ibid., p. 123. 'For the "acknowledgment," see Reading

Poems, p. vi. For the "undue stress," see espe- cially pp. 745-747. Thomas and Brown believe that all three metaphors are only a "repetition" of the "bough-choir" figure, and they devote the main part of their analysis to rehashing and expanding on this one metaphor. It ought to be added, though, that despite this fact their discussion is probably the most valuable and complete to have appeared.

252 COLLEGE ENGLISH

was depressed when he wrote it, it is perhaps not unfair to suspect that a generation of American undergraduates is being influenced to view the poem as the pessimistic utterance of a dying man, notable for a single "telescoped" image.

However fragmentary and one-sided, the commentary is by no means value- less. At least two points can be drawn out of it that are sound and basic, and need to be said at the outset. First, the poem falls into a pattern-indeed, is one of the most perfect examples of a pattern -that is characteristic of Shakespeare and the English tradition of sonnet-writing. Unlike the two-part Italian sonnet, there are four well-defined parts: 1) lines 1-4, stating the initial thought; 2) lines 5-8, a second thought parallel to the first; 3) lines 9-12, a statement paralleling the first two; 4) lines 13-14, a final statement synthesizing and completing the first three. Each of these four sentences is contained within a complete prosodic unit having its own set of rhymes: 1) abab; 2) cdcd; 3) efef; 4) gg.7 Thus, the thought pattern (three parallel state- ments plus a concluding fourth) and the

prosodic pattern (three quatrains plus a

couplet) match, exhibiting an identical clarity and balance. Secondly, each of the three quatrains is a metaphor in which the poet or narrator is compared with something else. The first compares his time of life with a certain time of the year, autumn; the second, with a certain time of the day, twilight; while the third

compares it with a stage in the burning of a fire, the nearly final stage just before the embers turn to ash. Several commen- tators, although not all, agree in addition that there is probably some sense in which these metaphors are "progressive."

The critics fail to see, though-or if

they do see, fail to assess properly-that each quatrain includes two metaphors,

one of which, for want of a better term, can be called the "primary," the other the "secondary." The primary com- parison in the first quatrian is between the narrator and autumn, the secondary betwnveen the "boughs" and the "ruin'd choirs." The primary comparison in the next is between the narrator and twilight, the secondary between "black night" and "death's second self." The primary com-

parison in the last is between the narra- tor and the fire, the secondary between "ashes" and the "death-bed." The three

primary images-autumn, twilight, and fire-are warm and positive. The second-

ary metaphors all present ideas of desola- tion, deprivation or death, the first

mainly in auditory terms ("sweet" sing- ers leaving the boughs), the second in visual terms (night taking away the last

light of day), the third in existential terms (being giving place to non-being). Since the critics concentrate entirely on the secondary metaphors, they generally have wound up overlooking the positive aspects of the poem and greatly over-

stressing the negative. By contrast with the secondary meta-

phors, the primary ones are familiar

images that even in Shakespeare's time had a long history of literary usage in which they were associated with the

pleasantest and most basic of human ex-

periences: e.g., fall with abundance and the harvest season, twilight with rest from labor, firelight with conviviality, warmth and good cheer. All are visually picturesque and clear (as all of Shake-

speare's imagery tends to be), and in the same way-in their connection, for ex-

ample, with warm and glowing colors: the brilliant reds and oranges of the autumn foliage, the hazy reds and

oranges of the sunset, the special kind of

orange-red glow of burning embers. But what is more to the point, Shakespeare arranges these images so as to create a cumulative meaning. They fit together in that the second is contained within the first and the third within the second.

'See Edward Hubler, The Sense of Shake- speare's Sonnets (1952), p. 18. He makes this point clearly and well,

SHAKESPEARE'S NOT "TO-BE-PITIED LOVER" 253

Twilight is a time of day that takes on special beauty in fall, when the sunsets are likely to be lingering and unusually colorful; and glowing fires seem especial- ly warm and friendly in the twilight, particularly so in the autumn. In other words, the twilight gains in beauty from the framework of the fall, and the fire from the framework of twilight-autumn, each image providing an appropriate context for the next.

Shakespeare does not select the pri- mary images simply because they are beautiful, however. Obviously, he could have picked others equally or more so. He selects them because all evoke supremely well a special kind of beauty, that "aching sweetness" or nostalgia so characteristic of Renaissance poetry. This nostalgia depends on a blending of pleasure and pain, the pleasure stemming from the beauty and the pain from the fleeting, ephemeral nature-from the fact that the beauty must soon be replaced by ugliness and death. Just as the beauty is cumulative because of the arrange- ment of the metaphors, so is the nos- talgia. Each image marks a stage in a unit of time that grows increasingly shorter: autumn a stage in a year, twi- light a stage in a day, the glowing fire a stage in an indeterminate but still shorter period. In this way, the primary meta- phors set up a movement from a longer to a briefer time span, sharpening the poignancy of the ephemeral.

It might be objected that the primary metaphors are not really distinct from the secondary, and it is true that Shake- speare has written his poem so as to fuse the two. Instead of being set against the primary metaphor, the secondary one is joined to it, and in such a way as to specify the kind of autumn, twilight and fire with which the narrator is compared. It might also be objected that the poem is predominantly negative because the secondary metaphors shape the primary ones, and in a sense this is also true. Since the target of each quatrain (the comple-

tion towards which the thought is driven) is the negative secondary image, which is more active than the primary, the whole direction of the first three quatrains seems overwhelmingly nega- tive. The reader focuses on the desola- tion of winter boughs, the blackness of night, the extinction of the fire rather than the warmth of autumn, twilight and fire-on the death following old age in- stead of old age itself. But the reason for this strategy is that the resolution of the poem, the last line, depends for its effec- tiveness on the sudden perception that all the images with which the narrator is compared are primarily pleasurable rather than painful, beautiful rather than ugly, and that their special quality of beauty is heightened rather than dimin- ished by the pain. By emphasizing the negative and painful, Shakespeare not only deliberately withholds the pleasure, allowing it to break forth in full concen- tration in the concluding line, but also couples the pain to the pleasure, harness- ing it to the latent power of the primary image.

The idea commonly vitiating contem-

porary interpretations of the sonnets is that the images progress towards what Ransom calls a "disastrous finality," or what another commentator, Robert Berkleman, expresses as follows:

The first sentence, picturing the bare trees, laments that the poet has reached the autumn of his years. In the second sentence he has reached the twilight of his day. .... By the third sentence his life has become a dying fire, soon to sink into ashes. Thus through these three sentence-quatrians Death, the half-dis- cerned antagonist, stalks nearer and nearer.

With singular ineptitude, Berkleman goes on to compare the poem with Poe's "The Conqueror Worm" (which Poe included in "Ligeia" to represent the most unrelievedly pessimistic view of death) because of what Berkleman calls

254 COLLEGE ENGLISH

its "suspenseful, relentless passing of time.""

This view would not be worth con- tradicting were it not a widespread one (exactly the same view is expressed by Winifred Lynskey in College English, 1944),1 and it probably needs to be stressed that there is no "passing of time" in Shakespeare's poem, relentless, disas- trous or otherwise. Twilight is no later than autumn, and the dying fire no later than twilight. Winter, night, ashes-the final stages towards which the images move-are equally symbols of death. The progress is that this death-symbolism be- comes increasingly more closely analo- gized with human death, and in such a way as to bring in progressively the idea of the impending death of the narrator. It is quite true that the closeness of the human analogy increases the pain of each image, but it also redemptively increases the opposite, as is clear from examining the images.

The first "death-symbol," the com- parison between the boughs and choirs that Empson and Ransom like so well, presents a picture of complete desola- tion. The leaves have left the trees, the birds have left the boughs, the singers have left the choirs. Nothing is substi- tuted in their place. The second picture, equating "black night" and "death's second self," first introduces "death," but likens night to it because both "seal up all in rest." Black night, which takes away the last light of day, may be more death-like than bare boughs, but it also brings with it the easeful, conciliatory quality of death, the sweetness of sleep. Thus, the image, a favorite with Shake- speare, is more painful but also more redemptive than the first. But the crux of the poem, the part that combines the

most intense positive and negative, is the third quatrain, a complex analogy which likens the life and death of the fire to the life and death of man. This image, by comparison with which the much-dis- cussed bough-choir figure is paltry, de- pends for its power on the way that the aging and death of the fire (and of man) is seen as an organic process, with its two parts, life and death, inextricably bound together.

All of Shakespeare's hardness and pre- cision of thought is concentrated in the last line of the metaphor: "Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by." This line (a far better example of an "ambiguity" than the one selected by Empson) can be interpreted in two dis- tinct senses. The more obvious interpre- tation, the one modern readers usually take, substitutes the word "material" for "that." The line then means that the material in the form of fuel which once nourished the fire will, in the form of ashes, consume it, just as the body of the narrator, which supported his life when he was young, will extinguish it as he

ages. The second interpretation substi- tutes "essence" for "that." The line then means that the action of the fire rather than of the fuel is responsible for both the growth and extinction of the fire, just as man's living process rather than his body is responsible for his aging and death. The negative first view depends on the reader coming to the line with a certain kind of philosophical orientation, the kind that has been common since the Renaissance, that disposes him to find the causes of things in their material make-

up. The positive second view depends on a philosophical orientation that was common before the Renaissance, and that finds the causes of things in their func- tioning rather than in their materials. Put simply, the first view sees human life to be at the mercy of an external power, death and the aging body (exactly as in Poe's "The Conqueror Worm); where- as the second sees death and the aging

8Robert Berkleman, "The Drama in Shake- speare's Sonnets," College English (December 1948), p. 139.

'Winifred Lynskey, "A Critic in Action: Mr. Ransom," College English, (February 1944), pp. 244-245.

SHAKESPEARE'S NOT "TO-BE-PITIED LOVER" 255

body to be at the mercy of life, the exact form they will take, whether beautiful or ugly, being determined by the living process.

The dignity and wholeness of Shake- speare's poem is best appreciated when one takes the second interpretation rather than the first. The consequence of the first is the kind of view taken by Ran- som, who speaks of the "unsuccessful and to-be-pitied lover" as though the narrator is a broken-down and perhaps hideous old man begging for love out of weakness and misery. The consequence of the second is a view in which he is "unsuccessful and to-be-pitied" only in the sense that a glowing fire (the fire at the stage when the coals burn most warmly and evenly) is "to-be-pitied"-or, if the comparison is not too far fetched, that Hamlet, Lear or any of the great tragic heroes is "unsuccessful and to-be- pitied." In other words, the "pity" (or "love," to use Shakespeare's word rather than Ransom's) is something the narra- tor can command because of his worth, not something for which he must sue because of his lack of it.

D. A. Traversi has said that Shake- speare's sonnets are about "the simulta- neous fulfillment and destruction of the values of human life by time."'1 He never applies this to Sonnet 73, but it gets close to the deepest level of mean- ing in the poem, and points up admirably the way in which this sonnet, surely one of Shakespeare's greatest, is thematically linked to the other great sonnets, and to the best of the tragedies.

Shakespeare miraculously bends even the "music" of his poem into harmony with the movement of image and emo- tion. Although his musical effects are extraordinarly varied and complex, one deserves special attention: alliteration. It is used throughout the poem-for ex- ample, in line 7 with its repetition of the explosive "b" in "by and by" and

"black," or in line 13 with its reiteration of the "th" in "this," "thou," and "thy." But the most striking examples occur, significantly, in lines 4, 8, 12 and 14, the lines concluding the four parts, in this way emphasizing the cadential fall of the main divisions and helping to fix their emotional character. It will be noticed that two sounds are played upon in line 4: the "r" occurring in the first four words ("bare ruin'd choirs where") and the "s" which becomes predominant in the last three ("sweet birds sang"). The "s" is taken up, and with a vengeance, in line 8: "Death's second self that seals up all in rest." It occurs in line 12, but the predominant sound there is the "w" of "with," "which," and "was." While continuing the "w" in "well" and "which," the last line subordinates it to a new sound, the "1," which appears in all of the key words of the line: "love," "well," "leave" and "long."

The "s" is relatively dissonant and unresolved, strikingly so in line 8, which fairly hisses as the six "s" sounds mount. By contrast, the transitional "w" and concluding "1" of line 14 are consonant and pleasing, especially the "1," which Poe insisted, probably correctly, is the most beautiful sound in the English language. In other words, the resolving alliteration is saved for the last line just as is the resolving thought which the line expresses. To heighten the effect, Shakespeare brings in the greatest pos- sible alliterative contrast in line 13. There the "th" sound, which is used throughout the first three quatrains, and the "s" of lines 4 and 8 are combined: "This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong." The effect is much like that of the madrigals of Claudio Monteverdi, a contemporary of Shakespeare, whose chief artistic strategy-as, for example, in "Zeffiro Torna"- is to bring his harmonies into their most painful com- binations in the line just before the concluding one, withholding the full sweetness of the resolution until the end.

"D. A. Traversi, An Approach to Shakespeare (1956), p. 59.