23 July 2005: a while back, I got into an argument with a friend about Helen Vendler's interpretation of the sonnet by Shakespeare below. Today, I'm returning to the argument with a rough draft of my response to Vendler.
SONNET 30
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste;
Then can I drown an eye (unused to flow)
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancelled woe,
And moan th'expense of many a vanished sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoan�d moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee (dear friend)
All losses are restored, and sorrows end.
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About the above, Helen Vendler says, in her book, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets:
Shakespeare here, as in many other sonnets, takes pains to construct a speaker
possessing a multilayered self, receding through panels of time. We might give such
temporal panels the names "now," "recently," "before that," "yet farther back," "in the remote
past." It is hard to construct a credible present-tense self in the short space of fourteen
lines; to construct a richly historical present-and-preterite-and-pluperfect-self in such a
space is a tour de force. The speaker of sonnet 30 is (he tells us) a person who has long
been stoic, whose tears have for a long time been unused to flow. In the situation
sketched in the poem, he begins by deliberately and habitually making these tears flow
again; he willingly--for the sake of an enlivened emotional selfhood--calls up the griefs of
the past. In receding order, before the weeping "now" (T5, where T=Time), there was the
"recent" dry-eyed stoicism (T4); "before that," the frequent be-moan�d moan (T3) of
repeated grief; "further back in the past," the original loss (T2) so often mourned; and "in
the remote past" (T1), a time of achieved happiness, or at least neutrality, before the loss.
These panels of time are laid out with respect to various lacks, grievances, and costs, as
we track the emotional history of the speaker's responses to losses and sorrows (the two
summarizing categories of line 14).
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For me, the above is typical bardolatrous/academic bullshit, a straining to find new
meanings in excessively-analyzed old material to demonstrate one's critical prowess (and
avoid taking on advanced contemporary poetry, which much more greatly needs
explication than Shakespeare's work). All Shakespeare seems to me to be doing in this sonnet is saying
that when he brings to mind past sorrows (as he habitually is wont to do), they make him
sad--until he thinks of his friend. He's in the present, telling us about moments in the past
when he remembered (again) events in yet earlier pasts. This is not genius. It's not even
especially sophisticated. It's just remembering times when one remembered other times.
I should note that my friend (Terry Ross) claims that the speaker in this poem is summoning the act of remembrance, not simply summoning memories. I believe he believes Vendler believes this, but I'm confused by it all. I read "rememberance" as simply a word that fits the line auditorily and means, simply, "memory"--so the line is saying, "I call to mind my memory of things past." The words chosen give the line a suitable grand tone, though the "things past" is silly. What other things would you remember? But "past" sort of rhymes with "waste," or maybe did in Shakespeare's day.
One problem with the idea that Shakespeare is here analyzing how we remember things, or how "remembrance" works, is that his concluding couplet is only about the effect of thoughts of his friend on his remembrance of past unhappinesses, not about the nature of remembrance.
The initial, habitual "now" of weeping, T5, is at the end surprisingly
transformed into a final, actual "now" T5, which resembles T2--that remote happy past
when one had love, precious friends, and the full enjoyment of those vanished sights,
before sorrow entered, extended itself in mourning moans (T3), and (even worse)
hardened the soul into stoicism (T4). The act described in the sonnet--a deliberate, willed,
and habitual turn from the stoic T4 back to T3 (mourning)--is the only way the speaker
has found to reconstitute the pre-stoical feeling self. However, this technique turns out to
be a dangerous one. In line 12, we see the speaker not self-consciously remourning a woe
that he knows to be an old one, but pitched, beyond his original intention, into a grief that
no longer is aestheticized, but rather seems rawly new, original, horrible: "I new pay as if
not paid before." The pay / not paid locution cancels out the previous locutions in which
the second use of a verb or noun positively intensifies the first one, as in "grieve at
grievances" or "fore-bemoaned moan." It is this wholly unexpected result--as an
aestheticized, voluntarily summoned memory of "paid" grief turns into real "not paid" grief-
-that pitches thought into "I think." The speaker calls a halt, even if in supposition, to the
"sessions of sweet silent thought" because they have grown suddenly painful.
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I don't see this, at all. Yes, the speaker starts out in sweet thought, and his decline from
sighing about minor lacks through weeping (even though he's not the kind of person who weeps easily) about the death of loved ones and other losses
is effectively described (although it seems strange that "vanished sight(s)" seem counted
worse than "love's woe," and both seem greater sorrows than the death of "precious
friends"). In any case, the speaker goes on in lines 9 through 12 to more fervently
dramatize his sadness, emphasizing his now feeling them as badly as he did when their
causes were fresh. He's cookin'. He makes his point. After which, he shrugs it off--he's
got his friend, so what do all those dead friends, lost loves, vanished sights mean?
Okay, I've turned as foolishly bardeflating as I believe Vendler is bardolatrous. I believe
that while the end-couplet's brevity is a flaw, the sonnet carries a higher warmth toward
the friend from previous sonnets in the sequence, and sonnet-tradition, which permits
near-idiotic hyperbole, and that the sonnet therefore flows with reasonably emotional
logic into its pay-off.
The intricacy of the temporal scheme is pointed out by the sonnet itself, in its
ostentatiously repetitious Q3 (grieve at grievances foregone...fore-bemoan�d moan...pay
as if not paid)...One could say (especially given the Renaissance confusion of sigh and
sight, recalled by Kerrigan) that Shakespeare is here inventing a new verb: sigh, sight,
sought. A sigh is the eventual result of a sight sought."
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I think "sigh" means "sigh," myself.
The ingenuity of this sonnet has not prevented generations of readers from being drawn
into its vortex. The increasing psychological involvement, as the quatrains proceed--I
summon up...Then can I...Then can I--acts as a present vertical emotional intensification
balancing the horizontally broadening panorama stretching into further panels of the past.
To be able to find pleasure in resummoning griefs that were once anguishing indicates, in
itself a loss of perceptual freshness.
This is, however, balanced by the genuine pathos of the elegiac recollection (precious
friends). The hardness of long-maintained stoicism (foregone, cancelled, unused)
threatens the capacity both to mourn the past and (most especially) to love afresh.
Altogether, 30 is not only one of the richest sonnets of the sequence, but also one of the
most searching, in its analysis of inevitable emotional phases, and of the dangerous
delectation (whether morose or not) of reexperienced grief. In the exactness of
Shakespeare's psychological portraiture, the roaming generalities of Q1 (things
past...many a thing...old woes) yield to the greater specificities of Q2 (friends, love,
vanished sight[s]), which yield in their turn to the accelerating intensifications of Q3
(grieve-grievances, woe-to-woe, fore-bemoan�d-moan, pay-paid).
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It may be because I can't find pleasure in resummoning griefs, nor would I ever think of
"sessions of sweet silent thought" as having to do with unhappiness, but I do not read--
cannot read--the sonnet as describing its speaker's summoning sorrowful memories to
those sessions. I am compelled to find him summoning memories in general, and having
them overwhelmed by the unhappy memories among them. I understand, though, that
some people do seem to find such pleasure, so Vendler's way of reading this sonnet may
well be valid--and even closer to its author's intent--than mine. Hard for me to rank a
poem that, in effect, argues that indulging oneself in happy thoughts of a friend is better
than indulging oneself in happy thoughts of sorrow at the top rank of poetry, though.
And yet the successive phases of feeling (so well enacted by the general, the particular,
and the rapidly intensified) seem to melt into one another because of the resemblance of
their syntactic structures, as if they were all one long process, each generating the next.
Shakespeare respects the fluidity of mental processes (exemplified in lexical and syntactic
concatenation) as much as the division of those processes (for analytic purposes) into
phases reaching from a present into four layers of the past.
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I agree with most of this last paragraph, except that I don't accept the "four layers of the
past" (I perceive only two genuine layers of the past), and I don't know how much
Shakespeare respected "the fluidity of mental processes, for I think he just let sound
considerations help determine what words he used--and, of course, he was big on
repetition. Perhaps, other sonneteers would have been content with contrasting a memory
of something sorrowful with the happiness of a friendship rather than contrasting a
recurring memory with that happiness, I don't know. I grant it its efficacy, but can't
explode in admiration of it.
The credibility of the couplet depends on the probability that once the things summoned
up in thought become rawly painful, the speaker will in reaction turn to the (recent)
friendship with the young man ("I think on thee"), at which event the unexpected renewed
pain of the speaker can be consoled. It is important that the consolation itself is expressed
in the passive voice in one verb and intransitively in the other: "If I think on thee, losses
are restored and sorrows end." No agency is ascribed to the young man. Not "You restore
all losses; you end my sorrows." The speaker does not dare to claim any active
participation by the young man in the restoration of happiness.
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A good albeit minor point. But I can't quite see how the "renewed . . . pain" of the
speaker can be "unexpected" since he speaks of more than one time he's experience such
"renewed . . . pain."
It is in such simultaneous marshaling of temporal continuity, logical discreteness, and
psychological modeling that Shakespeare's Sonnets surpass those of other sonneteers. His
enormous power to order intellectually recalcitrant material into lyrically convincing
schemes is nowhere more visible than in this example.
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I don't see it. I think he took a simple, very standard theme, and made a near masterpiece
of it with his choice of words, imagery and sounds. There's no psychological insight
displayed in this sonnet, unless you think the idea that a person's love for a close friend
can make one forget the worst moments in one's past is. Or that a description of someone
so neurotic as to enjoy indulging in memories of unhappy events is.
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