readerjanedavis

Yes, it is September, but this morning as I write  it might be November or February.  High winds and rain lashing the windows as if we were at sea, and it is cold.

But it is not winter yet: only the beginning of autumn. Yesterday evening I  was looking at the ivy in the back garden and realised that the summer’s growth had almost overwhelmed  Shakespeare, who resides in a corner by the shed, with a bird’s nest on his right shoulder.

Seeing him there made me think of reading a Shakespeare sonnet, which isn’t something I always want to do. Like mackerel, the sonnets  have a peculiar flavour,  and aren’t always what I fancy, though when I read them/am given mackerel I  enjoy them more than I think I will.  And  I’ve really enjoyed a couple of Saturday Dayschools, where we read  a bunch of the sonnets and maybe that is something to  think of again – a sort of mackerel baked whole with ginger,soy and spring onions.

Anyhow, this morning I thought, yes, I’ll read some of them, and so I have, though with an under-thought, which I’ve only just formulated, which was : perhaps I really want to read a Shakespeare play?  Aha. Don’t know if I could do that here? If the Sonnets are mackerel, what are the plays ? Feasts, banquets, weeks away in  other lands… The plays seem the right  vehicle for Shakespeare’s mind. Of course the Sonnets are his mind, too, but this sort of intimacy  doesn’t seem the place  he inhabits best.  At his fullest, he needs players, playing, inside and out. Which isn’t to say that the Sonnets aren’t works of genius in their own right.  Oh, leave that mackerel analogy! It’s as if Shakespeare was a great athlete and might  box or play rugby and win silver or gold at both.  Here he is boxing:

SONNET LXIV (44)

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee!

Would you take it to your Shared Reading group? I would.

How does a novice sonnet-reader get into this? What’s the emotional punch here?  Ouch  – ‘time will come and take my love away’. Everything  else is bobbing and weaving, is jab, jab, jab.

For beginners  with sonnets the rule is read it all, then  read it in chunks. The chunks here mostly fall into two lines or four lines, marked by the semicolons and colons, and by the repetition of the word ‘when’  as the first word. Let’s take it a bit at a time:

When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;

Those repeated ‘when’s’ become something but at the first one we don’t know that yet. Is it just me, or does ‘when’ imply a pattern of thought: when this, then that.  When I go the shop (then) I buy things.  but what we get here is a long list of  whens with no ‘then’ outcome until the end of the poem. So we have to read and wait. The waiting is  marked by the semicolon.

‘When I have seen’ is also – is it?  – plural?  Has it happened many times in the past? I have seen is certainly a completed action in the past. I’m not sure what it is  here in the grammar that makes me think it is plural. Seen over and over.

You might ask, why is it ‘Time’s fell hand ‘? I look up ‘fell’ in the Etymological dictionary. Fell is causes to fall, is cruel. I looked at ‘defaced’ and think of vandalism, wanton damage. It’s random and cruel, remorseless and careless – that’s Time.  And what does Time deface?

The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;

I am thinking of graveyards, of memorials, perhaps because of ‘buried age’. The rich proud cost – is that stuff – masonry, marble tombs, oak caskets. Rich is one thing, proud another. This line is stuffed full of meanings – this is Shakespeare’s brain, floating like a butterfly, jab, jab, jab. You pay your money – jab! You create some monument that  expresses your self-pride – jab! You know what? – It gets covered in cobwebs and ivy  – jab! Because you  are dead – jab!  Because you are ancient, in the past, over, done – jab!

He’s bouncing around on his toes.

More tomorrow.