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.

A way this kind of thing can work is through suspension of disbelief: the reader knows he's in a sonnet, so automatically accepts hyperbole. Also, as I suggested yesterday, this "sonnet carries a higher warmth toward the friend from previous sonnets in the sequence. Hence, the friend is pre-accepted as a miracle-worker. We read in an under-reality that allows the line to work--as poetry. The under-reality being that the fact that the speaker has the friend makes up for all the bad things in the speaker's life--albeit, probably only barely, and only for short periods of time.

Another way of putting it is that Shakespeare invokes a powerful image of depression. This has the effect of tragedy, when well-carried-off, to wit: (1) the reader's security as observer, finally, rather than direct experiencer, of misery gives him pleasure; (2) the reader responds positively to the beauty of the rendition of the dark mood; (3) the reader feels that beauty as a triumph over the Evil portrayed, a coming to terms with it, a making of something Good of it; (4) the reader's sorrow at what he is vicariously experiencing of the speaker's travails, and at the memories it awakens of his own similar travails, becomes shared, and thus reduced in potency; (5) the reader is inspirited by the realization that the speaker has survived the desolations he has written of, so the reader can survive his own desolations; (6) the reader may feel his own sorrows are perhaps not so defeating compared with the speaker's; (7) simple repetition of griefs can dull them.

Looks like I used the sonnet as an excuse to try out my theories about why tragedy is prized. That's something that's always bothered me since I believe (make that know) that one's only final goal in life is pleasure (or the avoidance of pain). The above has everything I can think of that could make tragedy more pleasurable than painful. I hope to come back to it, to amplify and better organize it. Several of the effects listed are perhaps too similar to be listed separately. I'm sure, as I always am, too, that I've forgotten one or two.

Okay, Shakespeare invokes a powerful image of depression. It works so well for most readers that it helps them excuse the botch of the final couplet. (Of course, other things are involved: Shakespeare's reputation makes mushier minds automatically accept anything by him as great, for instance. Related to that is the fact that mostpeople automatically give extra points to the long-cherished--to the extent that it has been long-cherished.)

It's really just the final line that's botched. It is simply too abrupt. How can one empathize with a person who can think of anything that can immediately make the worst horrors of his past meaningless? If some one were to say that no matter how miserable parts of his life have been, his friend or loved one makes him glad to be alive, anyway, okay. But Shakespeare is just about saying, in the most stirring language, and at length, that he's suffered, but so what. This is an unearned happiness, so sentigooic. Perhaps if the speaker didn't thus demean his dead friends, I could take this. His sudden loss of sorrow over the permanent loss of precious friends is too much for me, though.

I think the cure would have been for Shakespeare to have written an Italian Sonnet, reducing the woes remembered to the first eight lines, then showing how thoughts of his friend caused even the worst of his sad remembrances gradually to dwindle, blur and subside to no more than the murmur a distant unseen sea might make against a beach. That is, not end, but diminish--into something as movingly small as Shakespeare made his remembered woes large. He was stuck with the twelve plus two sonnet form, though, so probably had no fully satisfactory way to pull off what I wanted him to have. "All losses blur, and sorrows nearly end?" Right, granting too little rather than too much to the thoughts of the friend. "My worst woes blur, grow murmur-small, then end?" Actually, I think that a huge improvement. It could even save the sonnet. But my opinion isn't worth much, for I'm on drugs at the moment (hydrocodone/APA, a narcotic pain-killer I took a few hours ago for a monor pain I'm still feeling due to a tooth extraction, and in hopes it'd make me feel good enough to do some work, which it has). It doesn't matter. The bardolators would never let the sonnet be changed. And if they did, I'd want them to change the other passage I have a problem with--the descent of the sonnet from the pain of remembering dead friends to the seemingly worse pain of unhappily-ending love affairs to the seeming yet worse pain of "the expense of many a vanished sight" (which seems padding, to me).

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