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Sunday Sonnet – 12 April 2015

gunshots

Medical care in Elizabethan times was a regular horror show. Your treatment–if you were unlucky enough to survive long enough to receive care–might come from a physician, a surgeon or an apothecary, depending on the ailment. I call number 147 Shakespeare’s ‘Medical Sonnet.’ The Poet longs to break away from the Dark Lady, but his lust resists all powers of reason. Lust is his fever, and reason is the physician; one has left in lieu of the other. 

147

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
At random from the truth vainly express’d;
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night. 

The Poet has ignored reason, and so good sense–his physician–has left him: ‘Angry that his prescriptions are not kept, Hath left me.’ The Poet longs for death, but this disease won’t quite kill him: “Desire is death, which physic did except. Finally, the Poet is past the point of caring: “Past cure I am, now reason is past care.’ 

As if this wonderfully intricate metaphor weren’t enough, Sonnet 147 ends with one of the most delicious couplets ever: 

For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night. 

Finally, the opening: ‘My love is like a fever.’ Rock ‘n’ rollers to this very day have used this metaphor–so worn out we can no longer stand it. Shakespeare invented it.   

The image comes from the cover of a French book on the treatment of battle wounds, printed in Shakespeare’s time.

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Sunday Sonnet – 29 March 2015

Aemilia-Lanyer

With freezing rain pelting the countryside, today seems a good time for masochistic verse. Shakespeare’s Dark Lady Sonnet 141 enumerates all the faults of his lady love–her looks, her personality and even his own sin of nonetheless loving her: 

141

In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note;
But ’tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleased to dote;
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted,
Nor tender feeling, to base touches prone,
Nor taste, nor smell, desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone:
But my five wits nor my five senses can
Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee,
Who leaves unsway’d the likeness of a man,
Thy proud hearts slave and vassal wretch to be:
Only my plague thus far I count my gain,
That she that makes me sin awards me pain. 

Sonnets of Shakespeare’s time where largely written following the ‘Petrarchan Ideal’ of love–that is, that the object of your lovely sonnet should be a be chaste, beautiful aristocratic woman whom the Poet can never hope to posses. Shakespeare says the hell with that. 

Quite the opposite, the Dark Lady is not pleasant in appearance–‘I do not love thee with mine eyes, For they in thee a thousand errors note’; her voice is hardly pleasing–‘Nor are mine ears with thy tongue’s tune delighted’; and physical contact, even sexual, is not hot–‘Nor tender feeling, to base touches prone.’ 

However, despite all this or even the Poet’s own good sense, The Dark Lady still owns the Poet’s heart: ‘But my five wits nor my five senses can Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee.’

Don’t choose this poem to read at Nuptials or to give to your beloved. 

The image is of Aemilia Lanier, an Elizabethan poet who supposedly had an affair with William Shakespeare. Some people believe she might’ve been the Dark Lady of the Sonnets. There’s scant evidence of this, and there’s even doubt this painting is her. Lanier was a woman who dared to publish a book of verse in Shakespeare’s time, so there aren’t many records left. She was a woman, after all, and except for obsessive and progressive minds like Mr. Shakespeare, Elizabethans didn’t much trouble themselves writing about real women, unless they could fit them into something like the ridiculous notion of the Petrarchan Ideal. Or if she was Queen.

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Sunday Sonnet – 08 February 2015

Tennant

The delicious and dark eroticism of the Dark Lady sonnets reaches its peak, I think, in Number 132.   Oh, how the Poet loves and lusts for the Dark Lady, though she doesn’t love him.   That unrequited love is epitomized in Shakespeare’s pun of the words ‘morning’ and ‘mourning.’ And what of the Elizabethan perception of female beauty? Plain and simple, it was misogynistic and racist. Will Shakespeare turns that on its head: for the Poet, black is sublimely beautiful, and this beautiful woman is more powerful than the Poet himself. 

132

Thine eyes I love, and they, as pitying me,
Knowing thy heart torments me with disdain,
Have put on black and loving mourners be,
Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain.
And truly not the morning sun of heaven
Better becomes the grey cheeks of the east,
Nor that full star that ushers in the even
Doth half that glory to the sober west,
As those two mourning eyes become thy face:
O, let it then as well beseem thy heart
To mourn for me, since mourning doth thee grace,
And suit thy pity like in every part.
Then will I swear beauty herself is black
And all they foul that thy complexion lack. 

So odd, so strange that these sonnets were written in the Elizabethan era–the late 1500’s and the very earliest years of the new century. As I’ve said before, Will Shakespeare never published these sonnets–they were printed without his permission. Little wonder. What was going that he should write such dangerous stuff–verses that were surely shocking in their time? 

It all makes me wonder–and believe–that there was more than just imagination behind all the sonnets to the ‘Young Man’ (homoerotic and very much against he the law), and more than imagination behind all the sonnets to this magnificently dark and angry and beautiful ‘Dark Lady.’ 

The image is of David Tennant and Nina Sosanya in a Royal Shakespeare Company production of As You Like It. They look lovely together, don’t they? If the Dark Lady sonnets were indeed autobiographical, might there once have been a scene like this played out in Shakespeare’s own life? We’ll never know for certain.