Sonnet 29

When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
I haply think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
  For thy sweet love rememb'red such wealth brings,
  That then I scorn to change my state for kings.

But the disgrace is also "with men's eyes," or normal, social disgrace--something, again, that would not need to be specified if the word were intended to mean simple disgrace, and not, in part, the odd kind of disgrace with Fortune that I say it is.

Note, by the way, all the n-consonances, the internal near-rhyme of "When" with "men's," the short-i-assonances and the w-alliterations, and the perfect iambic pentameter, all of which give the poem's first line liquid grace--without quite being overdone.

Yikes, just one line done and already I'm worn out. I'll try to get through at least one more. The next line has some nice melodations, particularly the three successive t-consonances that so sharply emphasize the "outcast state" the persona is beweeping. Their force is made even stronger by the contrast provided by the serene flow of the line's l-dominated beginning. The only problematical locution here is "outcast state," which literally means "condition of being cast out," but almost surely does not mean that but carries on the metaphor of being mistreated, or cast out of good luck, by fate (as I will argue at greater length when discussing the reading of the line by my friend who thinks Marlowe wrote it about his exile after his faked death).

The next two lines mean what they explicitly say, with one extra beat that conoisseurs will tell you was aesthetically brilliant but I think a case of the poet deciding meaning was more important than strict meter (albeit, it is usually good for a poem's meter to break down ever so slightly now and again, for variety, or appropriately to suggest disorder or clumsiness). "Bootless" is a conventional word of the time for "vain" and provides a third alliterative b after "beweep" and "troubled. Heaven is conventionally personified as deaf.

The next four lines all go neatly together as straight-forward expressions of envious wishes with little to highly praise them for other than competence (except for the bad rhyme of "possessed" with "least," and two breakdowns of the iambic meter), and a good (but not rare) grasp of common human nature. The lines flow but have no metaphoric ornamentation or other distinctions. Nor should they. Indeed, their gradual descent from verbal richness helps set up the explosion of the next four lines.

Here we have the splendid simile I remarked upon in yesterday's entry, and an undermeaning concerning escape from the earth (personified as "sullen," as I think I also mentioned yesterday) into the sky, into the most upward reaches of the sky, to--in fact--the brink of heaven (which, amusingly, is no longer personified). There is also an undermeaning strongly implying a release from night into day. Then the final, just-right ending couplet.

Here's what I said in yesterday's about the poem's sestet (its last six lines, which provide the sonnet its standard contrast with its octave, or first eight lines): "What makes the sonnet is its simile (although the image of the persona's state singing hymns is a mite illogical--but one ignores that by misreading 'state' as 'I.' The simile comes at just the right place in the narrative, and raises the mood to just short of maximal pleasure--"at heaven's gate." The couplet that follows is a cliche but beautifully and smoothly phrased, and carried by the beauty of the lark's singing, and the new day beginning (which, come to think of it, may be an undermeaning, albeit a brief one). A quiet withdrawel, which allows the lark-simile to blaze uncompeted against, so properly conventional." Just to get all the details of this close reading of mine into one place.

Note: my reading is of what the poem means today, to me, not of what it may have meant to its author or his contemporaries, which is a matter for literary historians, not explicators.