This second half of the "faire youth" collection was a whirlwind. There's more drama in this forbidden relationship than all the plays put together. What strikes me most is the continual self-awareness that these sugar'd words will outlast the author, the reader, and all the stone monuments ever built by humankind, capturing their passion in perpetuity. If any author alive today wrote something to the effect, we'd all laugh or be offended at their conceit (I mean, who honestly thinks we'll still be singing Beatles songs 400 years from now?). But somehow, William isn't wrong.
66 - A true poem for our hectic #2020 times, as it lists how everything is upside down and inside out, and at the end, we are "Tired with all of these, from these would I be gone." Amen.
76 - I've always had a soft spot for this one. He apologizes for how redundant all the love verses seem, but it's only because his love is constant and is all the news that's fit to print. Awe.
77 - A complex proposition to the beloved to look into their mirror and write down what may be forgotten as time takes its toll. Also, it has one of my favorite running metaphors about artistic compositions as "children nursed, delivered from thy brain," meaning that Shakespeare believed that the mind both gives and receives in contemplation--a concept almost too subtle to properly capture unless one meditates on it for a good long while.
86 - The last of the eight "rival poet" sonnets wherein the author uses some leftover nautical references to ask his love if some other writer has "fuller sails" than he does. The very idea that Shakespeare was actually concerned some other writer was better than him is almost tragically daft.
87 - In which I learned the difference between masculine and feminine rhyme. The former uses one syllable, while the latter uses two, i.e. deserving/swerving as opposed to ghost/boast. It's supposed that the single syllable is stronger, more precise, whereas the double syllable sounds weaker. Last I checked, rhyming can be difficult on a good day, so getting two rhyming sounds in a row is fucking insane. But if it makes you feel better, think whatever you want, men.
94 - Just some sage wisdom: "They that have the power to hurt, and will do none...They rightly do inherit heaven's graces" and those that present as kind but do ill are hypocrites. The last line is directly lifted from Edward III: "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds."
95 - Shakespeare admitting that certain people (the beautiful and the rich) have white privilege.
99 - The sonnet that is not a sonnet! It's a 15-line oddball! Line 5 appears to be the insertion, adding an extra rhyme with the first and third lines, possibly to emphasize something, possibly a line from a draft that was accidentally printed. Either way, it's all about flowers and buds and herbs and I just love that shit.
102 - The line "But that wild music burdens every bough" invokes glorious springtime with songbirds filling the trees and the air and I adore it.
104 - Here, I learned about "polyptoton" which is a figure of speech that repeats words of the same root. In this sonnet, "eye/eyed" is used. Another example comes from John of Gaunt in Richard II: "With eager feeding, food doth choke the feeder."
106 - A blasphemous little ditty, as tight and musical as you could want, in which William praises his boyfriend as nothing less than divine. In the presence of this lovely boy--or any creation God has to offer--we "Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise." A sour-sweet sentiment, that.
108 - As we get old, our love remains fresh and preserved, dear boy. You will always be that sexy young thing in my eyes. No wonder Oscar Wilde went all in for this. But seriously, it's a truly touching poem, likening the repetition of "I love you" as sacred as daily prayers.
110 - And then our writer admits he's been fooling around on the side. That's OK, though, because he only did it to test their love. Oh please.
112 - An apology for the scandal everyone's talking about.
113 - A meditation of how the eye "Doth part his function" with reality and goes inward to the mind, only seeing what it wants to see.
115 - Everything I said before was a friggen lie, because time has proven that I can in fact love you more and more! He's driven mad by this concept that every day he thinks he has seen the fullest intensity of this feeling, but every day it just gets stronger.
116 - This one deserves to be more famous than #18, IMHO. On its surface, it's a romantic-as-hell concept of love everlasting, but having read all the stuff that came before, you really get the sense of how much turmoil one must go through to get to this point in a relationship that's meant to last: "love is not love/Which alters when it alteration finds." High standards, indeed.
118 - Full of rich metaphors about health and food and sharpening our palates, this one's an insanely brilliant and roundabout way of saying "I've learned that you are a prime steak and I've been going out for burgers lately and though steak is my favorite, some days, I just feel like a burger, you know?"
121 - "'Tis better to be vile than vile esteemed." If you're a jerk, and you're honest about it, that's better than being considered a jerk even though you're not. Fuck everyone else; I am what I am.
122 - I could never resist a little nod to Hamlet; "thy tables, are within my brain/Full charactered with lasting memory" reminds me of how the Danish Prince said he'd keep his father's command "Within the book and volume of my brain, Unmix'd with baser matter."
126 - We reach the summit of this long hike with a 12-line piece comparing the youth to Achilles, and how Thetis, his mother, dipped him in the river Styx to protect him from death. It leaves the last two lines enclosed in empty parentheses, like the bare naked heel Thetis failed to coat with that immortal water, but the missing couplet provides so many possibilities, eternally filled with the reader's of imagination. It's a stroke of pure genius to close out this sequence.
If I smoked, I would be reaching for a cigarette right now. That was some hot stuff.
Next week, we conclude(!) our readings of Shakespeare's oeuvre with the "Dark Lady" poems. What is the ultimate fate of our intrepid poet? Will this woman ruin what he has (or wants to have) with his "sweet boy?" Will I cry? Will I pop some champagne? What will my poor heart do sans the daily dose of Will?
I shall not fret. To Will I owe an eternal debt. There's still a promise to be kept.
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