A LOVER'S COMPLAINT
All signs point to "A Lover's Complaint is the author's exercise in popular literary form and it was thrown in with the Sonnets upon publication." It's remarkable if only because it takes the woman's side in the sad situation she's involved in regarding the man in her life, giving voice to her feelings as opposed to the dude's. So good on you, William!
The Narrator watches from a hill how a woman is weeping as she reads and tears up letters. She takes jeweled trinkets out of a basket and tosses them into the river. An old cattleman happens upon her and asks her what is wrong and perhaps he can help because he is old and wise. She starts to describe a real looker of a man she met, one whom everyone, male or female, thought was sexy and noble, but there was some doubt about the character he presented. So many women crushed on him, but she resisted his initial advances, as she's been burned before and she was suspicious of him. He eventually charmed the petticoats off of her and she relented. She explains how the man made her sweet and lavish promises of his true feelings for her, and it reads like the lord doth protest too much. To this, she finally cries out "O father, what a hell of witchcraft lies In the small orb of one particular tear!" Turned out he was just a Tarquin after all, taking what he wanted and fleeing into the night. She wonders aloud what she is to do, as she can no longer trust men's perfumed words.
Why are men great 'till they gotta be great?
THE PASSIONATE PILGRIM
This is literally the literary version of cocaine cut with crushed baby aspirin. Published in 1599, it's clearly some publisher's attempt to move some quartos by printing a hodge-podge of sonnets and miscellany laced with a handful of genuine Shakespeare moments, including a few passages from Love's Labour's Lost. The remainder are attributed to some randoms, including Marlowe and Sir Walter Raleigh. Well, it's proof that William's name was worth more than the privy paper it was written on at the time.
My favorite poems in the small collection include the one where Venus is watching Adonis bathe stark naked in the river and she fangirls, saying "O Jove... why was not I a flood?" If I had a dollar for every time I imagined myself as water flowing over some handsome thing... Old William really gets me.
THE PHOENIX AND TURTLE
The Elizabethans loved the metaphor of the phoenix and they loved the metaphor of the turtledove and Shakespeare just HAD to combine them in a short but strange poem entirely unlike anything else he's written. As usual, there is a lot of speculation about who or what is being represented by the allegorical nature of the piece, but taken on the surface, it's tragic and heartbreaking as hell. In 67 lines, it calls the birds of the world to the funeral of the phoenix (beauty and rarity) and its mate, the turtledove (chastity and constancy). What follows contains language normally used to describe the holy Trinity and the existential issue of self.
Of course, there's hope that the phoenix may rise again, as is its wont, but the turtledove cannot, so what is true love's true fate?
A FUNERAL ELEGY
This one, though included in the Riverside (published in 1997), is hotly debated as an apocryphal Shakespeare piece at best. For a brief time (1995-2002) it was vaguely accepted as canonical due to the extensive study done by Professor Donald Foster including stylometric computer analysis, but despite his insistence that many aspects of its poetic structure were idiosyncratic to Shakespeare, it is now relegated to a small heap of potential but inconclusive works.
If nothing else, I learned from Prof. Foster's arguments for its inclusion that our Bard had many favorite stylistic flourishes such as enjambment, a high frequency of superlatives, and my personal favorite, hendiadys, which is the use of two nouns joined by a conjunction instead of using an adjective/noun pair. Examples of hendiadys appear in Hamlet over 60 times, including some of my own beloved phrasings like "book and volume," "fantasy and trick," and of course "slings and arrows." Hamlet would rather say "angels and ministers of grace" instead of "ministering angels of grace" and he was made more rich for it.
A Funeral Elegy itself is an appropriately solemn piece, dedicated to the Master John Peter, an educated man of Devonshire who was murdered at age 29. The author is clearly super bummed, and knew the deceased intimately enough to put forth a lovingly remembered life story. He lists his wonderful characteristics, lamenting that his dear existence was cut far too short, while also extracting a lesson about living a life worthwhile. He manages to insert a punning jab at the asshole who killed him, saying that the madness of the murderer was thrust upon the deceased's strong moral principles, and he only died defending his own goodness.
While it's a fine farewell, it (appropriately) is lacking in all the fabulous adornments of language that we've come to love in Shakespeare, which also kind of makes its own argument for NOT being our man after all. On the other hand, florabundant poetry is uncouth for an elegy, so it could just be William toning it down for the occasion while amping up the Biblical references. Wherever one might fall on the debate, it presents material that is far superior and more interesting to analyze than the half-written plays near the end there. It also makes one wonder if Shakespeare had outlived his family, what poetry would he have written for his wife and children? Perhaps then we would have gotten a deeper insight into the man's personal life.
The passage that struck me most was one containing a metaphor wholly unknown to me:
But one in honors, like a seeled dove
Whose inward eyes are dimmed with dignity,
Does think most safety doth remain above,
And seeks to be secure by mounting high:
Whence, when he falls, who did erewhile aspire,
Falls deeper down, for that he climbed higher.
Now men who in lower region live
Exempt from danger of authority
Have fittest times in reason's rules to thrive,
Not vexed with envy of priority,
And those are much more noble in the mind
Than many that have nobleness by kind.
A "seeled dove" is a pigeon whose eyelids have been sewed shut and because it cannot see, it flies ever higher in search of safety. First, what the actual fuck? Second, once you get past the idea of sewing a bird's eyes shut (who are we kidding, we are never getting past that), the core concept here is that the author likens high-status people to this dove, who blindly strive to climb too high and inevitably fall as Lucifer does. But those who "in lower region live" aren't concerned with status are more likely to be more noble than the nobility. who are only "noble" by ancestry. He goes on to speak of how beauty of mind (and nothing else) lends one nobleness:
The beauty of the mind is nobleness.
And such as have that beauty, well deserve
Eternal characters, that after death
Remembrance of their worth we may preserve,
So that their glory die not with their breath.
*slow clap*
ALRIGHTY THEN. Time for the BIG PUSH into the Sonnets for the next month. I am armed with an entire Arden edition of nothing but the Sonnets with side-by-side commentary and one hundred pages of introduction alone. Also, I had downloaded the Shakespeare's Sonnets iPad app ages ago, which affords me specially filmed performances of every fucking poem by several familiar faces from the past year. It is a superlative treat for the ears. I have never been more ready in my life.
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