Poetry Jam 2020: Shakespeare

[lunabee34]

Our selection for this month is Shakespeare's sonnets.




September: W. D. Snodgrass' Not for Specialists

October: Toi Derricotte's Tender

November: Franny Choi's Soft Science

December: Pablo Neruda's The Heights of Machu Picchu

Comments

[lunabee34]

The copy I'm reading is one that was given to me as a teenager by a friend. I had marked a bunch of sonnets all those years ago, so it was fun seeing what I'd liked back then. Most of them made since to me, and I still like them (12, 18, 30, 35, 55, 60, 64, 94), but I also marked 16/17 and 32/33 and I have no idea why. None of those four speak to me now.

On the whole, I did not dig the sonnets as an adult. I enjoyed 29, 116, 135-6 (word play with Will), and 147 in addition to the ones I've already mentioned, but on the whole, I wasn't grabbed emotionally.

I had forgotten that the first hundred or so sonnets are addressed to a young man, and when I first started reading, I was all, "OMG can he please quit pestering this poor lady to have his babies?" The procreation poems are much less tedious when addressed to a male object of love than a female one.

Themes include the passage of time, aging, inevitability of death, fleeing nature of beauty, legacy through kids and writing.

I also like this line from 9: "the world will be thy widow."

The Wind in the Widows

[executrix]

Yeah, the Fair Youth sonnets are such a "marble monument" that will last forever that..we don't even know the guy's name. And, frankly, I wouldn't want people talking about me behind my back the way he talks about the guy.

For that matter, Shakespeare himself *did* have children (starting way less than nine months before marriage) but that didn't stop his line from dying out quickly.

Re: The Wind in the Widows

[lunabee34]

So many literary mysteries that will never be solved. I can totally see the fun in speculating, but it's just impossible to ever really know.

So we have no Shakespearean descendants? That seems a shame.

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

That is a very powerful line (from #9).

I noted (in reading the dozen or so were included in The Penguin Book of the Sonnet) that the rhymes are not complicated. Just the turns of phrases are, sometimes, very powerful. And I like the cadence and rhythm of some of them.

I did not know that about the Fair Youth or the lack of descendants. All interesting!

[executrix]

There's a bunch of them about his boyfriend copping off with his girlfriend, which would give you the blues, wouldn't it?

[stonepicnicking_okapi]

Definitely!

[lunabee34]

I mean, he won't have children, he won't stop liking that other poet, now he's sleeping with the girl I'm sleeping with who I don't really like? Who does he think he is?

[lunabee34]

I like the rhyme in them actually. It doesn't feel forced or weird like it sometimes does to me in rhymed poetry.

There are some really pretty turns of phrase.

[lyr]

I have always really liked "My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun." I get a kick out of the refutation of the typical, flowery love sonnet about the perfect lady-love that's so overblown as to be ridiculous and patently inhuman. I so get his point that such spectacles of adoration aren't real love. A clear-eyed, honest love is so much more real, so much more loving, so much more interesting.

[lunabee34]

Me too! I love the idea that real love embraces faults and loves despite them.

I read the wikipedia page about the sonnets, and they seem to suggest that whoever this woman is, he didn't really love her or she was actually off-putting and unattractive.

[lyr]

Wow, someone really failed to understand that sonnet. Did they totally miss the last couplet, or what?

[lunabee34]

INORITE?