For Friday: Shakespeare, The Sonnets, Part 1 & the Handout from Wednesday's class

 

For Friday: Shakespeare, The Sonnets, Part 1

Read Sonnets 10, 12, 15, 17, 18, 20: you can read all 20 if you want, but we’ll only have time to discuss a few, so I want to whittle it down to 6 basic poems. However, Shakespeare often writes the same idea two or three different ways in poems adjacent to each other, as you’ll see in 17 and 18, so it might be useful to read the poems just before or just after the ones listed here.

ALSO: the handout I gave in class about the Sonnets is just below the questions in case you missed class on Wednesday. 

Answer TWO of the following:

Q1: Discuss where you see a distinct shift in the relationship between the poet and the ‘young man’ he’s writing to. It could be big or small, or just a slight change in language. What do you think prompted this change? Is the poet just taking a risk, or do you think something outside the poem prompted it? Any clues?

Q2: Discuss a unique metaphor that one of the Sonnets uses that you’ve never read or thought about before. How is it comparing one thing to something else, and why is it so effective? Do you think it would be as effective with the poem’s intended audience?

Q3:  Discuss a line or passage in ONE of the poems that has very unusual syntax (sentence/grammatical structure). What do you think it literally means, and why do you think he writes it this way? Could he have been trying to make it difficult to read or understand?

Q4: Which poem feels or sounds the most like a ‘love poem’ to you? Why is this? What makes the poem unusually intimate or revealing? Also, what makes it so different than the other poems around it?

Q5: How do two of the poems seem to ‘copy’ each other? Or, why might one poem actually be the revision (or the first draft) of another one? Where do we see ideas, words, or metaphors repeated, even if with slight variation? Discuss TWO poems that do this.

READING THE SONNETS: SOME THINGS TO REMEMBER

Iambic Pentameter: an “iamb” is a pair of syllables—unstressed and stressed; “pentameter” means literally five meter, and in this case, a meter of five iambs.

EX: From FAIR-est CREA-tures WE de-SIRE in-CREASE.

The Sonnet: Typically a 14-line poem which has a strict rhyme scheme: ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG. It always ends in a rhyming couplet, set apart from the rest of the poem, which usually twists the meaning somewhat, often with a surprise or a contradiction of what came before. HOWEVER, sometimes Shakespeare will fiddle with the number of lines, and in one poem (late in the sequence) he even removes the couplet! So be on the lookout for subtle changes.

Poetic Syntax: Syntax is how we put a sentence together, and Shakespeare bends the rules of grammar for poetic effect. For example, he often inverts a sentence like “He goes off to the store” to “Off to the store goes he.” Or, in the first sentence of Sonnet 1, he says “From fairest creatures we desire increase,” rather than “We desire increase from the fairest creatures.” Sometimes this is for rhythmic effect, or to create a rhyme. But other times, it is for emphasis—so the object doesn’t get lost in the sentence. And sometimes it’s simply to create ambiguity and mystery. The Elizabethans liked puzzles, and literary puzzles most of all. Especially when you’re writing love poems, which might require a certain amount of secrecy!

The Narrator and Audience: “These sonnets are not the unaddressed speeches of an anonymous “I.” They are utterances in which it matters who is speaking, to whom, and in what situation…Shakespeare’s speaker is not analyzing his inner experience in relation to the loved object, the “she” of most other Elizabethan sequences. Instead, the poems work like conversation, even if they get no direct answer…As with any conversation or phone call overheard, they make a demand on the interpreter to imagine who would say this to whom, and in what situation. Speech is a social activity: what one says depends on whom one speaks to and in what context” (Magnusson, Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Modern Perspective).

The Language of Intimacy: “In Elizabethan English, power differences are strongly marked in use of pronouns: “you” is the usual address to a social superior, with “thou” tending to denote someone of lesser power or in an intimate relationship that is reciprocal. How, then, is it that the speaker dares to “thou” the addressee throughout the first fifteen sonnets?...The private “I,” withheld until Sonnet 10, begins to make quiet intrusions into the safe and publicly accountable language of instruction…this emerging “I” also shifts his pronoun of address, at least temporarily, to the more deferential “you.” Why should the addressee now become “you?...what is fascinating here is how [his consciousness] shows itself in the verbal ballet of “thou” and “you,” “we” and “I”” (Magnusson, Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Modern Perspective).