Set IV: Runes 43-56
The Long Year Set: I See I Have Returned

         Sonnets 43-47, which open Set IV, elaborate the subject of “eyes” in various conceits. Though this popular Renaissance topic seems relatively quibblesome to modern readers because of its Metaphysical intricacies and nuanced wordplay, here it allows Will to explore the question of vision, including his own conception of the future and how his time-consuming project may eventually fare. All the runes in the set, then, open with variations on the notion of “seeing.” Sonnets 48-52, the next loose group in Set IV, variously deal with the poet’s “pilgrimage” toward the auditor/muse/friend—whoever that figure is in any given instance. The pilgrimage motif generates some sharp self-denigrating imagery, with Will a writer/rider on a “dull beast,” making haste slowly. Sonnet 53—opening with the question “What is your substance?”—initiates a winding-down group of four sonnet texts that explore questions of truth in art. Some of the material here seems vaguely classical—with references to Adonis, Helen, Mars, and “Grecian” attire.
         One of the closing sonnets in the set, No. 55, “Not Marble, nor the guilded monument,” the most famous of the visible texts here, deals affirmatively with the capacity of art to enshrine the beloved subject; its materials get scattered in the unrhymed but still couplet-like endings of the runes, providing quiet resolves of various kinds.

         Obviously, the earlier topics—preserving the friend’s beauty, contemplating the paradoxes and mixed, “doomed” nature of the current project—persist in Set IV. Set III has tended toward melancholy contemplations of how the writing project itself alienates the poet from his subject(s). In that sense those texts seem self-focused. Here in Set IV the new business of “eyes” allows the poet to turn outward, not only envisioning “where the friend is” but also looking toward the eventual discovery of what he is about. The sonnet texts about progressing toward a goal also help move the poet out of himself and away toward his auditors, whoever those might eventually be; even at their bleakest, these new figures at least establish a teleology and eschew weepy self-pity.

         As the person most responsible for the current “new unfolding”—for revealing what Will calls his “sharpened” stone or “edge”—I hear in Set IV whole poems in which the poet might well be talking directly to me and, by extension, to any and all future readers, creating hypothetical scenarios that just now we are all helping to eventuate. While these comments would have worked well enough in the poet’s own day to address his coterie readers—Dr. Hall, Thomas Thorpe, Southampton, or others—if they ever picked through the artifact-strewn terrain of the poet’s underworld, Will seems rightly to have anticipated that private, contemporary readings of his texts would remain limited and underground, and also tht someday the Great Work of the Quarto might be unleashed on the world. One motivation for finishing the project must surely have been his desire to leave a lasting mark that would reveal the intricacies of his capabilities as an artist.

         Will has a way of providing what look like clues about almost everything—including the naming of the sets. Two of the most insistent (and contradictory) possibilities in Set IV occur in Rune 48.10—in the pun “Sense (Sin see...) seldom coming in ‘The Long Year’ set”—and, almost contiguously, in Rune 49.11—in the pun “...call (see, Hall,...; eye Le...) ‘Art of Beauty’ set.” The “long year” is an especially appealing concept because of its biographical suggestiveness. My title here, as usual, involves surmise and compromise.

     43. Be It Not Said (A Gilded Monument)

     I see things most clearly when I’m napping, playful, misty-eyed, or imaginative.
     If my listless body (all water and earth) ever becomes engaged in thought,
     that pair of “air and fire”—one given to flimsy illusions, the other one a raging passion—
  4 I mean my eye and heart, my perceptions and feelings—lock bodily in a fight to the death:
     The pact between these faculties falls apart, and the gap between them is wide.
     How cautious and full of affection I was when I first began this journey.
     Until I return to that point, if I ever do,
  8 how heavily I move along.
     Therefore my love can make allowances for my slow progress in this project, for all my stumblings, for the drawn-out indignities these poems inflict.
     Granted such forgiveness, even in my condition I’m well-off. Answer to the riddle, key for unlocking things, point where I might anchor and unload my burden—
     what are you made of?
12 Oh, how much more beautiful beauty seems at this distance from it! And how much more beautiful than I can express!
     Memorials of marble or gold, solid and beautiful structures,
     sweet love, do not recreate you in your panoply of strength. No one should say they do.    

    44. Up-Lockèd Treasure

     Whenever readers see these texts, whose content they may have overlooked or undervalued,
      the limits of distance—and I do go pretty far here—should not stop me from coming across.
     Wherever I may be, you still have both eyes; and both sonnets and runes are still with you.
  4 Thus it is that two sets of texts divide (and conquer) your two eyes’ attention
     with each one of both pairs, in symbiosis, doing good turns for the other
     by shoving every tidbit back and forth under real bars like prisoners in adjacent cells helping each other out (the nose between your eyes is one “true” bar)
     just at the point when you frown on my flaws (and add even more “bars” to your face).
  8 When what I aim at (an end to my tedious advancement)
     and expect from this stupid ass I ride on—perversely it speeds away, not toward you—
     can help the creature arrive at the sweet locked-up treasure that is its goal
     so that those millions of overshadowing mysteries can wait on you
12 by means of true understanding, which has its own ornamental beauty,
     then princes will be forgotten long before the world forgets this powerful verse,
     your sharp weapon. (You’ll need it to divide things up truly.) Should the appetite for what’s here be any less keen than the knife itself?

     46. The Obelisk Restored

     Now two points of dim brightness here in the dark are drawn
     a remote distance to gaze back toward where you are,
     shifting here and there rapidly as eyes can, alternately vacant and alert as eyes will be.
  4 My own heart—or art—may sometimes glance longingly at the freedom to come and go—the open space off to the right of my leaf invites such freedom—
     or otherwise, melancholy from love, that heart—or art—might smother himself
     with misguided hands, restricted as he is to precincts entrusted to his responsibility
     where he has been called by judicious considerations to that reckoning he now undergoes.
  8 Thus the measurable distance from your friend—from me—is great;
     until I return there’s no need for letters, certainly no need to mark the route with mileposts,
     to make the prick of infrequent pleasures less sharp,
     but you alone can supply every lineation, shading, and nuance
12 of that sweet insinuation that is alive in such a mitigating happiness:
     When I do return, an overgrown stone marker—like an obelisk smeared with the mire of whorish time, a single monument to the whole of my circular progress—
     will have been restored by the future to its former grandeur.

    47. Of Feasts and Beasts

     Later, you who illuminate these shadows despite your absence and your hypothetical reality
     may come to understand these chimeric subtexts—later, although my life and verse partook
     of former times. When all these livelier parts of myself are gone,
  4 I still feel that you rest in my heart and therefore my art; the concept of some understanding reader, at least, is implicit in my work.
     Thus my eye can feast on this small painted likeness of my love and imagine the perpetuation of that image then as well as now.
     But you who regard my jewels as inconsequential games—
     anticipating the time to come when you have an odd encounter with
  8 the beast that carries me here, worn out from my troubles and haltings—
     O, what explanation will that beast reveal then for me or himself or for what we’re about?
     Now you see why times of feasting my eye on your image are so serious and precious.
     Try to create a real “Adonis,” an artful representation, and the counterfeits
12 (as blighted blossoms to roses) may appear as deeply etched and as bright.
     When wasteful war overturns statues,
     my love, you will still be beloved but will already have suffered your demise, and even my monument to you have been destroyed, although now you fill up your day and mine.

      48. Hungry Eyes: A Closet Never Pierced

     What an entertaining display your reflected image and this verse it inspires would make
     anywhere! Remote from you
     on a genial mission of love to you—
  4 a closet never penetrated by sharp eyes—
     and your envisioned banquet, my heart is invited
     by the lure of an ultimate solace that is now my greatest grief;
     then, hardly acknowledged—and inexorably as the sun, a conceit for your own eye too, but for its brightness rather than for its regular motion—I
  8 plod routinely, dully, dutifully onward, carrying that weight of grief inside
     in a situation where even extreme speed can only seem slow,
     because your record of infrequently “coming”—always set for some distant date—
     could no more be imitated
12 than your aromatic essence. Both roses
     and struggles—emblems for the two kinds of texts here—might (and apparently do) in effect dislodge the stonework in your fortress, digging
     at your eyes (or other parts) there in your private banquet room until those eyes respond with amazement, even tears, at the cornucopic spectacle!

          49. Spurring Beauty On

1-3 I comprise four elements, have four limbs, depend on two eyes. I’m married but live alone, with four (right now) in my family. I can fly imaginatively toward an ideal condition if only your illumination makes my thoughts nimble. My leaf, a seamless whole despite its overt groups of four and two, also needs your light if it is to soar.
  4 But the unnamed one to whom I direct my suit denies my request for inspiring light.
     Again my vision finds itself left alone, dwelling with my own heart’s (and art’s) imaginings.
     Dearest dear friend—my only preoccupation—
     when my love changed from the lesser thing it used to be,
  8 that wretch knew, as if by some instinct
     that then I would ride, spurred, as if mounted on the wind
     astride ideal Beauty. Like valuable jewels my spurs (and Beauty’s eyes) are spaced
     apart on her cheeks, which the spurs redden. All art, mounted upon Beauty,
12 hang just as precariously—and threateningly. There is not as much reckless play wrought
     by the implements of war or by war itself as in the name of art. Quick temper, heated passion, and the light of inspiration will still be burning
     tomorrow. Think again, and don’t squelch my inspiration. Don’t kill our love. Don’t shoot me down on my highflying steed.

       50. Settled Gravity

     When will still unborn readers see your misty image shine bright?
     The very thought pulls the locale of that event
     into the shady realm of death and oppressive melancholy
  4 but also conveys the truth that such ideal handsomeness belongs to all eyes and contains the possibility of its own future reappearance
     and that such physical beauty is complementary to a handsome man’s ideas about love.
     Art being my recourse and medium (though it becomes common property and gets stolen),
     I’ll use it to clarify some relationships between looks and ideas. A man of “settled gravity,”
  8 this writer—a rider astride art—did not go in for speed: Being carried away from you,
     a Pegasus-mounted poet, I’ll never really even experience movement
     nor be in charge of its direction. A few jewels in the fancy necklace,
     and you are painted anew in Grecian garments
12 when the winds of future summers bring forth hidden buds, discreetly nascent images—
     still-living mementos of you,
     love’s spirit, but always monotonous, never as vivid or as sharply “pointed” as real men are.

 
     51. This Sad Interim

     I ask how I might view things happily.
     But, ah, the idea kills me that I am not seen as
     a whole recurrence—and won’t be until my life’s work as a writer is, with Sonnets and Runes reconciled.
  4 This matter aside, I’m posting a peripheral poem—this particular line sits in a high righthand position on the folio leaf where it enjoys breathing room—
     so that, since this title reveals both your ever-present image and my professed love for you,
     I haven’t really buried you in some chest.
     Anticipating future wholeness, I do conceal myself in this hidden poem:
  8 No bloody spur digging into a flank can move this hymn along,
     so it seems that the horse that bears me can never keep up with the pace of my passion.
     That’s how the time passes here, where you are my whole heart, my treasure.
     As to spring and harvest time, conventional analogies a poet might choose,
12 their virtue lies only in their showiness—which is antithetical to the privacy of this art.
     From death, meaninglessness, and all forgotten struggles in human history
     let this sad verse interlude distance us as an ocean would. (Like an infinite gathering of tears, the ocean is a more expansive conceit for my love than any seasonal figure.)

     52. A Geography of the Heart

     For having seen you in real life,
     two eyes can leap long distances when you are not here, so that we are joined anyway:
     those fast messengers having brought back from you
  4 an inquiring body of thoughts, all heart-dwellers,
     you are still with me, even though absent,
     except where you aren’t (though I feel your presence there)—
     in the desert of my rational self-evaluation.
  8 That sometimes-angry recognition pierces the hide of my hidden heart,
     then, with a dagger-like desire for perfection, wholeness, and affection;
     or, to put it differently, like clothing hiding a natural “wardrobe,”
     the one that I am, a poor indicator of the hidden beauty you are, shows
12 that your perfections exist untouched and languish unadmired in darkness.
     If you step forth, praise for you will still find a place in the world,
     of which one part is a virgin beach for couples newly joined, dazzling enough to cause paired eyes to squint.

     53. Sweet Roses, Come

     My flawed and distant friend, roses (emblems of your recurring beauty) even in the dead of night are beautiful—
     just the right mix of earth and water,
     even just now returning assuredly—
  4 and the precepts that the roses teach influence me to decide
     that now you can move my thoughts no farther
     inside the tender enclosure of my breast
     toward raising this hand of mine against myself
  8 (an action that my body responds to with a groan).
     Here no droopy nag, no skinbag, shall neigh in his heated race
     to make some special moment especially fine.
     As your endowment becomes plainer, those roses I mentioned
12 expire all alone. Sweet roses, don’t do that:
     So people of every coming age can see,
     show up daily to decorate the hills, displaying thorny stems that look like a runic W.

    54. Excuse My Jade: A New Unfolding

     Life over, death keeps sightless eyes closed. Even awake, I stay fatigued, but
     I have to keep working to entertain the ages with groanings
     about their thriving condition, ticking them off here in meter to myself,
  4 something for eyes, something for hearts.
     Thus I am still with my readers of all times, and they with me,
     in a company that you, my friend, can join or leave at will
     to attend to valid concerns of your own,
  8 matters that hurt me to think about more than spurs in my side would. Having declared myself his ally,
     only love, then, for love’s sake, will justify my weary pace and side excursions
     by new revelations of his own hidden splendor, of pride in my work,
     and of you, my friend—in every blessed shape known to man.
12 The sweetest lingering essence comes from the fine deaths of those
     who exhaust every possibility in the world until the very end,
     when Love returns, toward the end of making the scene a happier one.

 
     55. Call It Winter

     Until I see you, all days look like nights to me,
     the recipient of nothings, in tiny increments;
     this fact tallied, I am at that point no longer happy. Equally
  4 ecstatic, my eyes have nothing to look at by day except their own lenses
     or else, in sleep, can only picture you in my imagination,
     and I’m afraid I’ll find you taken away there too.
     You have every legal right to leave poor me
  8 (for the mournful thought of your absence reminds me of this too).
     Since Will left you, intentionally but regretfully,
     you’ve been blessed with a range of worthiness that inspires a poet,
     partaking of every outward grace.
12 Thus, given your nature and absence, my young friend, as beautiful and lovely
     as I’ve said, until the Judgment when you come back in the flesh (like Christ or spring)
     to establish absolute standards of worthiness, let’s call it winter, a season full of burdens.     

     56. A Prize So Dear

     Now, the nights that are brightened when I see you in dreams
     being only crying sessions advertising our problems and those that days and nights bring,
     I reject my dreams, order my tears back where they came from, and instantly grow sad,
  4 after which my heart’s prerogative, the deep feeling shown in my dreams and tears,
     reawakens it to a beloved, appealing sight—
     in fact, shows itself thievishly anxious for that dear prize.
     Later, I can’t explain why anyone would love;
  8 only grief is ahead of me, and my happiness is past.
     I’ll run toward you and let sorrow or joy go whatever way it will;
     I’ll feel victory when I’m yours, and, when I’m still nobody’s, I’ll hope
     that your affections stay singularly uncommitted. In the interest of constancy,
12 when everything I’m talking about fades away, your reality is still crystallizing in verse.
     You go on living in this poem and dwell in lovers’ eyes
     and in the summers of bosom friends and lovers—and are thus thrice welcomed but still more wished for, the more cherished, a prize even rarer than before.

Set V: Runes 57-70
Laboring for Invention

         This set houses several major sonnets on mutability, including Sonnets 60, 64, 65. Collectively the 28 texts here drift toward an emphasis on the poet’s obsequious role, insuring the friend’s permanence, through art, so as to record “what beauty was of yore” (Sonnet 68.14) for future ages, including ours; Will’s skepticism in his struggle is also a dominant topic in this set. Materials in the sonnets suggesting the flawed nature of both the poet and his subject (e.g., Sonnets 62, 67) color all the texts.          Though some texts might be heard as addressing any current reader, the sense persists that Will has in mind some particular male auditor/muse with whom he shares a dark secret, though what the friend’s “sin” is remains mysterious. (Perhaps it is merely being a part of the coterie, with its School of Night aspects.) Adumbrations of the Dark Mistress (a conceit for the ms.) and the “other poet(s)” antagonistic to Will appear here and there in the set.

         Because the Sonnets themselves shift person (from “you” to “he” particularly), the Runes pick up a kind of name-that-pronoun ambiguity that usually is not such a factor in the overt texts. Here Sonnets 57-61 maintain a second-person address that Sonnet 62—where the paradoxical “thee/myself” intrudes—confounds. Sonnets 63-68 generally use the third person to speak of the friend. And the “couplet” texts on the leaf, Sonnets 69-70, return to second-person address. The upshot in the runes is ambiguity of reference; often the “he” pronouns gain new antecedents in context, ceasing to refer to the muse at all.
         While none of the Sonnets has ever been heard before to comment on the poet’s struggles with double composition—and on how the Q project itself makes “sins” inevitable—that topic is now insistent, and not just in the Runes. After the fact, it must hereafter be applied to the sonnet texts, too, to help us understand their fruitful possibilities. The opening of Sonnet 66, “Tired with all these...,” for example, now means much more to us than it did before. And “Those parts…the world’s eye doth view” (Sonnet 69.1) now must mean “the Sonnets—not the Runes.”

         Among good “set titles” that Will slips us within Set V are “Windy Puffery” (see Rune 61), “Commend a Crow” (see Rune 60), and “The Ornament of Beauty is Suspect” (see Rune 59). The somewhat generic set title that I choosecomes from Rune 59.3.

     57. The Map of Days Outworn

     Being your slave, what choice do I have here but to attend to
     the thing forbidden by heaven that first enslaved me.
     If there is nothing new in the world, just what there is,
  4 like waves moving toward the pebbled shore,
     do you want your image to go on filling
     (everybody is controlled by sinful egotism) my eye
     until my love reaches the stage I have already reached
  8 as one who has seen ruthless time claw away at
     “imperishable” wit and bold perception? Not being stone, earth, or infinite sea,
     and bored with all these, the elemental conceits of my verse, I cry out for restful death!
     Ah, why should a man live with such infection,
12 making his cheeks look like wrinkled maps from worn-out days,
     especially if such components are to become the parts of you that are revealed to the world?
     It’s not your fault if you look blemished here in these poems.

     58. A Beggar Born

     Whenever you may be in the right mood
     I’d like to direct the activity of your mind during leisure—by using my imagination and wit,
     as has happened formerly…. How our minds are mesmerized!
  4 With such pastimes our minutes rush toward oblivion, their destiny;
     my heavy eyelids hurry toward sleepless night;
     and all my soul, every part of me,
     is overburdened and crushed by the hurtful hand of time—
  8 the splendid price we pay for living long enough to put the past behind us.
     Nothing more nor less than sad mortality overcomes our faculties
     as two (a pair of eyes, you and I) see a poor, bereft beggar born here in these lines
     to grace with his presence an indecorous secular scene
12 where beauty lived and died in verse. Act the way flowers always have,
     needing nothing that affectionate human concern can supply.
     It is always natural for beauty to be the target of maliciousness.

   60. Commend a Crow

     Having no services to perform until you ask for them (or until the new pages of my work are gathered),
     being your slave, bound to await your pleasure and serve you in your pastimes
     like an adult burdened with childish responsibilities
  4 in a sequence of chores—in such a situation, all of these texts (each one presumptuous, each prefacing those that follow) vie for attention (I struggle with them even as you will)
     while images of you (as I try to envision you) mock my eye,
     since your image is so rooted, so deeply engraved in my heart (and since my vision is an internal one),
     all lines and wrinkles. When finally this prefatory stage in the history of my heart and art;
  8 and “timeless” brass; and effrontery (perpetually controlled by human anger
     of a sort whose actions are no more effectual than those of flowers);
     and purest faith (repudiated in disillusionment,
     as fragile as lace itself); and my own heart’s company—
12 when finally all of these are past and gone, there still has dared to perch on a living brow
     and utter stark truth—in a way that even enemies approve of—
     an “upstart crow” that flies in the sweetest air of heaven.

     62. I Watch the Clock

     While I watch the clock waiting for you, my king,
     not free myself, the enforced absence of your generous, wide-ranging self
     that has now lasted for more than 16 months
  4 crawls toward a consummation that will crown it
     here far away from where you are. Thus I await the intervention into my life and work
     of a paragon of form and substance
     while the many beauties that that kingly figure now commands
  8 show military superiority at the seashore of his kingdom
     over the torturous siege of daily batterings
     and over unceremonious loss of maidenly virtue.
     And—the power of weapons, armor, or prisons having lost viability against him—any chance that that vital complexion is to be seen
12 in the realm of sepulchers would seem to be cut off, thwarting death’s prerogative.
     Another upshot of your triumph, my king, is that poets intent on giving you your due (or on giving you, my readers, whatever you think you see here)
     have their statuses enhanced, since posterity will love them (or maybe think them crazy).

     63. A Second Life on Second Head

     Poet, neither consider bitter absence from a loved one depressing
     nor regard patience as weakness. To help me stay patient and stop both errors of thought,
     let me see your face, my muse! Some old book or other
  4 would dramatize malignant figures struggling to overcome the writer’s hero—dark crescents trying to shade out the sun, invading to establish their beachheads—
     revealing by contrast my weak skill and wasted time
     and making my own writing project seem trivial to me.
     Are complete human oblivion
  8 and a vanished terra firma to be outcomes of the ocean’s triumph?
     In a world where impregnable rocks succumb
     and pure perfection is wrongfully put down,
     why should second rate art seek deviously
12 to live a second, parasitic life—like an eclipse on the face of the sun.
     One may add other points to confuse this poem of praise further, especially by voicing criticisms to help tear it down;
     for viciousness, like a cancer, has a natural—often covert—affinity for sweet buds.

     64. Loss and Store: The Treasure of His Spring

     After you told your servant goodbye—
     I don’t accuse you of inflicting hurt
     since then—my initial reaction to the loss was set down in writing;
  4 now bountiful time, which always gives us the present, confuses
     the extent and duration of those of my thoughts that would try to possess you
     as I surpass all others, even the richest,
     storing up my Rose—my Rows—the treasure of springtime,
  8 increasing a reserve in which loss and gain are equally mixed.
     No strong storehouse gates escape time’s decay,
     for hinges break and the gates swag; drooping likewise wilts
     roses (such as those I try to store here). From imperfect adumbrations, then, perceive that the poet’s Rose is perfectly real and truly beautiful.
12 Until now, the locks of the dead would have formed just another hair-knot nosegay;
     by looking past such a trinket now, the eye has revealed—
     and you, my friend, represent—a pure white rose in its prime, presented to you, my reader.

      66. This Composèd Wonder

     Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, imagine
     that you yourself might be fortunate enough to spend your time
     with this erected miracle that you are engendering and helping to frame—
  4 and imagine the parallel trenches that doing so would dig in beauty’s brow!
     This work is my passion; it keeps my eye active and alert,
     assailed though it is by old age and the parchment skin surrounding it,
     on guard against the cruel cuts of age
  8 and senility. Itself overcome and left to fade away,
     shall this best jewel in time’s chest lie hidden,
     and Dr. Foolishness—performing a tedious procedure skillfully—
     fail because the patient bleeds to death? Two jewels (like testicles, one more extroverted than the other) blush through throbbing veins:
12 the apparent one, all obvious show, displaying what it is,
     and the surmised one a thing that people reconstruct in imagination (using your prowess as a measure) as
     either totally unassailable or, when besieged, triumphant. (More largely, your hidden jewel shows itself in this its hefty discharge.)

     67. What Ruin Hath Taught

     Now, sit and mope like a dejected servant, thinking of nothing,
     of couples and coupling—of zero or 2, of what you will. It’s up to you, Will,
     whether we two get pieced together, and where. (Reader, it’s up to you to recompose the Runes.) Better that the eye
  4 feast on true natural rarities,
     aspects of my own true love, who keeps me awake nights—and whom I address here.
     (I see prideful self love in another light.)
     So that my love shall never dart out of memory, leaving a hurt,
  8 this ruinous state has taught me to ruminate as I do here
     about what strong hand can hold back ruin’s quick passage (or Will’s movement in meter)
     or can block simple fact, really not simple at all.
     For nature has no treasury now but truth’s
12 and makes no summer from anybody else’s greenery.
     Then, even while maintaining the look of support for me, wrong-thinking boors are thinking,
      “Surely, Will, this tribute of yours cannot be yours. Given its form and character, it’s not even a tribute. And surely this can’t be another tribute to ‘Southy,’ the Earl of Southampton.”

      68. Weeds for Captain Ill

     Everywhere except where you are (a happy exception!) you make men
     forgive you for wrongs that they imagine and dwell on or that you really inflicted.
     The process is as inevitably as—wherever the earth turns or rebellions happen—
  4 time’s mowing everything and everybody down, each in turn, so that nothing lasts.
     For me to keep on in the role of your attentive watchman,
     given your vanity and self-centeredness, would be sinful.
     My sweet love is beautiful; however, my lover is life
  8 that time will come and take. My love not being here,
     who can deny the hold of his beauty or reject the ruin it brings? And who can stop my spoiling his appearance in these lines with odd adornments?
     Thus, I in the role of Captain Good, standing by the bier of Captain Ill,
     proud of many gains—my own, my friend’s—and still flourishing because of both,
12 decide to adorn his beauty in figurative garments never worn by anyone dead before:
     To your fair rose, let’s add the rank smell of weeds, adorning you thus in funeral garb
     and lacing you and death up in it, thereby expanding admiration infinitely for us both. (Tying weeds onto your “flow-er” would make it bigger for all eternity.)

     70. What Beauty Was of Yore

     Whatever you do, one man thinks no ill of you;
     your choices of pursuits, bad or good, are to him beyond reproach.
     Worse writers have addressed their verse subjects with praise and admiration,
  4 praising your worthiness despite its merciless arm—
     which is far away from me, but all too intimate with others—
     painting this great era with the beauty of your days.
     Those days shall live, the man in their midst still fresh,
  8 but now the age cries to have what it also fears to lose.
     That man, my love, indelibly inscribed, may still shine bright.
     Right up until my death, I’ll “beleave” my book with this unique love that once existed
     in days long past, before these very bad recent ones,
12 to show up spurious art with real beauty from another time.
     The foolish part—from my angle—is that you thus become familiar;
     then you (rather than I) may command the hearts of many subjects.

Set VI: Runes 71-84
When We Are Dead

         Full of the usual personal ambiguities and of indefinite insinuations of “guilt” and of “rival poets,” the sonnets and runes in this half-way set anticipate the deaths of Will and his muse and focus on the poems’ capacities to memorialize the friend (and to blur the poet into obscurity). Though the persona’s stresses and anxieties do not dominate the materials here, the personal complaint “That time of year thou may’st in me behold” in Sonnet 73 has proven to be the most appreciated sonnet in the set. One appealing runic companion is Rune 82, with its strongly affirmative epithet “He of tall building and of goodly pride”; another is Rune 75, on mutability, showing Will working at some hour 400 years ago, an instant much like the one we now “enjoy.”
         While Sonnet 71 envisions that Will might die first and instructs the friend on how to react, Sonnet 81 equivocates—in effect saying, “Either I’ll go first, or you will…”—but rests in the assurance that the friend’s “name from hence immortal life shall have” because Will’s verses will preserve it. One of the great ironies in Q is that we do remember the friend, but always as a nameless figure.

         A recurring thread in the set is the notion that the poet’s skill is not up to its job; a number of the runes might, in fact, be called apologies. Now that we know of its complexity, we understand how the nature of the project made Will’s outcomes inevitably flawed. We also understand the implication of “both your poets” (Rune 84.13)—Will Shakespeare as author of Sonnets and of Runes—and of the term “two newfound methods and two compounds strange” (Rune 74.6). Further, we can see how far off the mark Will’s tongue-in-cheek characterization of himself falls when he speaks of a “true-telling friend” who is recording the friend’s attributes “in true, plain words” (Rune 82.12). Ideas of fecundity and of counterparts here now gain new meaning. The themes of mutability and of permanence through art and the poet’s search for new figures and his interest in the long-range outcome of his texts—these ideas carry over from earlier sets.
        The opening of Sonnet 82, “I grant thou wert not married to my Muse,” seems puzzling in its obvious context as an address to whatever “muse” Will is supposed to be talking to but makes some sense as a coy, numerologically placed complaint about the poet’s own marriage: Will and Anne married in 1582, and the line is one of many clues that Anne in some sense may be (in the poet’s mind) one version of his Perverse Mistress. (The line puns, “I grant Tower in ode…,” “I guarantee whore-tenet merry, Ed. Tommy…,” “I grant thou wert not married, Tommy, m’ wife [Q Muse, with a long s that looks like an f],” and so on.) Rune 82 manages in its early lines (cf. puns, 82.1-2) to encode a coy reference to F. (de) Sandell(s), a Shottery farmer who was a friend of Anne Hathaway’s father and who posted bond on the occasion of Anne and Will’s marriage.

         Sonnet 77, the halfway point in Will’s projected cycle, focuses appropriately on “wasting precious minutes”; its two middle lines read, “Thou by thy dial’s shady stealth mayst know / Time’s thievish progress to eternity.” Rune 77 uses one of these two lines in its mid-section to comment on the pictographic connection between 77 and “half-added feathers” that in one sense mean “half-completed” products of a quill pen. (Each “7” looks like an angel’s wing, though the two may be “half-added” because both are stuck awkwardly on the same side.) Perhaps, despite the subtextual plethora of Anne-berating wit in Q, the opening of Rune 77 should be read as conciliatory: “That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot, / Anne, hang more praise upon deceased I, / Which by and by black night doth take away.”

     71. Whose Epitaph to Make?

     When I am dead, do not go on and on mourning for me.
     Oh, you are the last person in the world to be asked to eulogize me.
     You may live to see that season when I die,
  4 but hold your peace and stay composed when that cruel end comes.
     These ideas about you nourish my mind and keep me living;
     but why is my verse so lacking in new substance?
     Your reflection here will (at least) show you how beautiful you once were,
  8 so often have I invoked you as my inspiration,
     calling upon you alone for support.
     Oh, how faint (but also how playful) I feel when I write about you!
     If it happens that I outlive you and write your epitaph, instead of the other way around,
12 I will simply mention your nonexistence. While married to my muse (you have been my inspiration)
     I never felt that you needed the artifice of eulogy or embellishment.
     What is your name? Which name, yours or mine, will the earlier epitaph feature? Answers to such questions would say it all. Who or what could say more?

     74. Bare Runèd Quires

     For me to leave this evil world and live with vilest worms
     before you do—that could accomplish no good purpose and would leave an unworthy legacy:
     empty runic songsheets where formerly sweet birds (and your “Sweet Bard S.”) sang into the dark,
  4 remnants that will stick with you as a memorial
     the way a miser is inseparable from his wealth.
     Two newfound techniques, two compounds unique
     to this text (my erudite specialty), you may sample;
  8 and, at your discretion, you may disperse the poems that result.
     Further, my ineffective inspiration makes room for another poet or recomposer:
     this duplicity, this double praise of you, makes me tongue-tied.
     Though lodged in my mind and heart, each part here will be forgotten
12 by the fair subject whom the parts address. Every section being blessed (and thus lessened)
     by the inadequate offerings of a greatly indebted poet,
     which sonnet or rune can illustrate the vitality of someone like you?

     75. Lean Penury
   
     No, if and when you read this line, don’t remind yourself
     (unless you are prepared to rationalize our mutability)
     that in me you see the evening of such a day
  4 as the one in which you review this; you look over it
     now as one who enjoys the prime of life, and then....
     Why do I still create over and over, all of one piece,
     these “wrinkles,” mirror images that will appear under the close scrutiny
  8 of your eyes, beautiful enough to have taught the dumb to sing like angels?
     I admit, sweet love, the lovely case you make;
     only because your worth is as wide as the ocean (and not from my skill)
     will your name have immortal life from now on.
12 Your mind and reputation are as beautiful as your complexion,
      and therefore it appears that I have dozed in this account of you. (Certainly I sometimes sleep dreaming of you.)
      What poverty, what indigence lives in this reporter’s pen!

      76. A Noted Weed of Mouthèd Graves

     My hand, that wrote it (for I love you so
     for doing more for me than I deserve, enriching my barren life)
     as, after the sun sets in the west,
  4 that very part of me was dedicated to you.
     Unsure whether (but fearful that) this grasping era will pilfer its treasure
     and stronghold, witty creativity in the well-known cloak
     of mournful sepulchers (like a knotty weed beside a grave) will give you attention and perpetuate your memory,
  8 but also will produce leaden ignorance and ignored tributes. High flying and escape
     call for efforts from a worthier pen.
     But the little sail, like the showiest, propels,
     though I, once departed to the far corners of the world, must die
12 seeking your worth, a thing past the limits of my praise
     that only you yourself, living, could show adequately.
     That merit gives me and my writings a significant glory.

     77. How Far a Modern Quill Comes Short

     In your sympathetic contemplations I want you to forget me as a living entity
     and instead to festoon with praise my deceased self,
     which is inexorably doomed by the natural order of things to disappear in darkness:
  4 Thereby the earth might get only what’s coming to him, the physical part of me.
     Now, granting that to be with you would be best—and trying as I do here to meter out my best verses for you to read privately—
     every word I’ve spoken about separation, each unsigned word I struggle to write, almost destroys me while also, perhaps, threatening to degrade my reputation as writer.
     By devious calculations that flit like shadows on your sundial you may detect
  8 half-finished quillwork here added to this circling, flighty erudition. (Doing this very text, I’m just halfway through this project.)
     Despite that part of you that this poet uses his imagination to conjure up,
     given that my pert yawp and mode of navigation (remember, I’m “afoot”) are far inferior to those the wide earth has,
     he will by nature yield me only an ordinary death and eventual oblivion,
12 and thus he has compelled me as an artist to explore in original ways
     the limits of contemporary composition before having it inevitably fall short of the mark.
     Only he who writes about you can measure (if anyone can) that gap.

     78. Some Fresher Stamp
   
     If thinking about me sometime should make you grieve,
     then foresight and an author’s honesty, both usually in short supply, would Willingly show you
     a restful death, yours or mine—a more soothing condition in either case than real life.
  4 My spirit is yours, the better part of me
     thus improved to show the world these playful predilections
     in the process of revealing their origins and mode of development.
     Time is a progress to eternity in which much is taken away;
  8 and, given the presence of grace, it is a double nobility
     that time robs you of before repaying you, finally, with grace:
     On your wide expanse there appears, at Will’s command,
     even after you seem to men to be dead and buried,
12 some newer sign of that stage when you outdid time by living,
     asserting your virtues. The worth that thrives in you—
     the fact that you are what you are—adds dignity to history, the story of time.

      79. Staying Afloat

     O, I say, when you scrutinize this verse,
     O, your true love will be least likely to seem false:
     For here you see a glowing fire of the sort
  4 that assures you that you have only lost the ashes of what has already burned.
     Sometime when you are savoring your reflection in this mirror,
     O, know, sweet love, that everything here is about you.
     Notice what this memorial cannot record,
  8 yet be very proud of what it does anthologize:
     This text attributes virtue to you that indeed used to be yours.
     Just the least support from you will keep me afloat;
     my gentle verse shall be your memorial
12 and shall still be that, love, even after people unnamed have figured out
     all of this and have detected our friendship. You left me muzzled for the sin of loving you;
     but all that this tribute (or any reader or sleuth) has to do is copy your attributes.  

     81. Such A Counterpart

     After my death, do not even say my pitiful name;
     let it be buried where my body is
     on the deathbed where it must die.
  4 The reluctant product of a wretch’s surgery
     that neither enjoys nor seeks any pleasure,
     the best I can write comes out as old words newly dressed,
     children delivered by section from your brain, and then attended to.
  8 In the writings of another, merely by controlling the style, you
     inspire it with your handsome face, shaping it with your lips; that writer has the means of getting
     separate raw material. A creature wracked, I am a worthless remedy, no booty, a molding chamber that only tortures.
     Anyway, assuming that unknown future voices praise your life so that it’s openly recast,
12 you, truly fair, will have been sympathetically portrayed.
     As the long-gone writer, now dead, I do not impair beauty by staying mute,
     and some future, counterpart voice shall spread the fame of my friend’s wit—or beauty’s, or maybe even his own.

     83. That Which I Bring Forth

     Thoughtful people should pay no attention to your lament (which is like that of a disappointed father);
     for it is I who bear the shame of what I give birth to!
     You understand this, and it strengthens your passion:
  4 The value of your love is self contained (and not in its object); the value of what I produce is in its substance.
     Thus day after day, like a laboring wife, I both languish and experience superabundance.
     For, just as the sun (or a son) is both new and routine each day,
     so these duties appear, my offspring poems, whenever you notice them.
  8 But you are the source of my productivity, and make advances;
     then don’t credit my art for what it says.
     Thus if my art shall thrive, and I be put aside,
     you still shall live—my pen has such effectiveness and “wifely” virtue—
12 and the crude representation of these efforts (and of your eyes) also remains imperfect; in actuality and in normal operation,
     either of your beautiful eyes has more life in it than what I have created!
     As I have said, you are directly responsible for fathering this cursed adjunct to your bounteous beauty.

     84. Both Your Poets

     My friend, go ahead and let me and my verses ridicule you after I am gone,     
     and rightly so, because you love worthless things,
     and love those writings that you must be separated from before long—
  4 I mean these poems, which actually remain with you after I leave.
     Either feasting on everything or totally gone,
     thus my love repeats itself, still counting what is already numbered, narrating an old story.    
     You will profit (and your book will be as much enriched from it
  8 as from erudition) from my crude ignorance,
      since what my ignorant writing owes you, you yourself supply to compensate.
     The worst part was this: My love for you caused deterioration
      of the powers of speech.
12 Where cheeks need life-giving energy, you provide it. Rhetoric being corrupted,
      then, the writer of the Sonnets and of these Runes can, as tribute, only practice
      playing the foolish sycophant—making these poems of praise worse!