Set VII: Runes 85-98
How Like a Winter

           Collectively, the lines of the 28 texts here establish a scenario not new in Q but with its own twists: The absence of the poet’s unnamed muse makes even springtime feel like winter (Sonnets 97, 98); the “tongue-tied” posture of the muse (Sonnet 85.1) leaves Will’s verse uninspired and gives other poets the chance to “write good words” about the friend (Sonnet 85.5) while Will searches for new conceits to do his subject justice—a process that the outcomes here show to be much more profitable than the poet himself usually implies, despite the damage that the duplicitous project does to individual texts. Will feels self-pity over the friend’s disregard—hyperbolized as “hate” (Sonnet 90.1)—but continues to admire the friend’s beauty, both criticizing and rationalizing the friend’s “youthful, wanton” behavior (see Rune 87, Sonnet 96.1).
           All in all, the set explores personal and artistic implications of Will’s self-abasing commitment to the project at hand, whose deep-hued “fruit” we are just now unpacking. As usual, materials here often allude sotto voce to the overlaid elements at work in Q: e.g., any “rival” writer here (see, e.g., Sonnet 85.5, Rune 89.1-2) means in one sense Will himself, and his usual lament over “inarticulate,” unrespected verse has in mind the unread Runes we now belatedly broach. Many conceits gain unique meaning as analogues for the Runes themselves—e.g., the “deep hue” in the Rows or “canker” in the Rose (Rune 86.11, Sonnet 98.10); Will’s “strangled acquaintance” (Sonnet 89.8); the puzzling “after-loss” event (Rune 88.6, and see Booth’s long comment); and the figurative “winter” that equates with the “real spring” of the friend’s absence (Sonnets 97.1, 98.1)

           One sure paradox in the set is that amid the complaints about ineffectual verse emerge striking conceits that prove the poet wrong (and deceptive) when he says his “mine” is exhausted (Rune 98.2). Rune 92 seems more honest, somewhat like the soliloquy of Prince Hal in 1 Henry IV 1.2.218ff. that shows us how the speaker is silently working to gain his eventual end. Through his own patient work, Will believes the poems and friend will endure (see, e.g., Runes 86, 92). In various ways Will’s contrived conceits represent himself, his friend, their mutual situation, and/or the Sonnets/Runes project. Notable tropes include the vocal comic figures of the “unlettered cleric” (Rune 90) and “Words” the braggart soldier (Rune 96); the broadly suggestive images of a striking gem on “the finger of a thronèd queen” (Rune 89) and of “widow’s laps” that belatedly bear unlikely fruit (Rune 92.13-14); and vivid new employments of such stock conceits as Diana’s arrow (Rune 85), the poet as court minstrel (Rune 89), Eve’s apple (Rune 97), and a red rose,here rich with sinister suggestiveness (Rune 94.14). The line about Will’s “patented”—i.e., runic—method (Rune 92.3) now makes full sense to us. Some runes in the set, with their disparate figures, objectify the choppy incoherence that Will apologizes for (e.g., Runes 93, 98). Indeed it is true that the arduous mode of Q did cause all the poems in the project to suffer strains.

           The layers of irony in the Q project and the vagueness with which Will admits us into the facts of the “real” world that is the basis for his fiction—these elements leave us still asking many of the familiar questions about the absent friend, the “other” poet(s), and Will’s “real” feelings for and experience with the muse he addresses. Courtly implications, and hints that the friend is superficially occupied with shallow companions (see, e.g., Sonnet 95, Rune 86.12), seem to “fit” Southampton in the 1590s better than other known candidates for the muse slot.

           A quick overview of the set shows no traditionally popular sonnet, though Sonnets 91 (“Some glory in their birth”) and 97 (“How like a winter hath my absence been”) are reasonably familiar. The interesting “error” whereby some copies of Q show Charter as Cha ter (Sonnet 87.3) seems playfully functional in Will’s overall plan, given how “The ‘chatter’ of [the friend’s] worth gives [that person] re-leafing [i.e., new paginations]” in the Runes. The term “chatter” also helps tie the poet to the figure of Words, the talky soldier; for in the runic context the military conceit has the poet assert that he will “fight” against himself and on the muse’s side (see Rune 87.3-4).
          The spread grouping of the set makes clear the couplet-like effect of the thirteenth and fourteenth units in the group—sonnets 97-98, about winter and spring. The pessimistic close of the couplet lines of this “couplet” pair overlays the whole set in the same way that any couplet in any sonnet gives it its final tone color. My selection of a title for the set holds this fact in mind.

     85. How Like a Winter

     My inspiration keeps herself as quiet as a genteel lady in public, so that her inspiring breath no longer moves me along.
     Was that once what kept me under way, filling a captain’s sails to billowing? Great Verse,
     goodbye. Your value is beyond what I’m worthy enough to have.
  4 When you feel inclined to set me ashore or throw me over—freeing me from the burden of this gusty pursuit—or to show me up in public for what I am,
     say that you left me behind because of some flaw of mine;
     further, if you intend to despise me, do it now.
     Some are arrogant about their ancestry—their “berth” in life’s passage—and some about their prowess.
  8 But even if you do the worst thing possible by leaving,
     I’ll go on, always believing that you’re one of those faithful and true
     who have the power to hurt but choose not to—and who see that Will himself hurts no one.
     How sweet and lovely you treat the one you shame as we separate. And how you are able to mask your own faults.
12 Some say your flaw is your youth; some say you’re careless or loose.
     It has seemed like winter while I’ve been away
     from you. Has it really been springtime?

      86. Bound for the Prize     

     While treatises praising you—elaborately compiled
     and bound—have aimed at winning you, a much-too-valuable prize,
     and while it’s likely that you know your own worth, have already reached your decision about me,
  4 and regard my evaluation of you--and also, perhaps, my own merit—with scorn;
     and while I, Will, comment upon my offensive action and your judgment of it
     now while the world is intent on thwarting my efforts,
     some using their wealth, some their physical force or personal attractiveness:
  8 In this situation you are guaranteed to stay mine for life,
     the way a wife always keeps a deceived husband—the way lovers put on appearances
     when they are not doing what they appear to be,
     acting covertly, enjoying secret infection that is like the canker in the rose. In artful beauty—analogous to the rose’s, and seen in these rows,
12 some say—your Grace is a young, sportive gentleperson;
     from you emanates pleasure like that of the passing season
     when April, proud and variegated, has dressed in all his colorful garb.

      87. Chatter of Thy Worth

     Hold back your thoughts and don’t set them down until they find ideal forms of expression—
     that notion has formerly kept pregnant ideas buried in my brain.
     The prerogative of your virtues sets you free from such a restrictive approach;
  4 I’ll fight on your side, against myself:
     Mention my “limping feet” and I’ll demonstrate (or smooth them out, or stop writing).
     Joining with spiteful fortune in trying to bring me to my knees—like a lowly person bowing to uppity people at court—
     are some of my own ideas clothed in peacock raiment, gaudily updated. Sick
  8 or dead, I expect your love will still remain to support me.
     Those may still appear beneath respect to me (like upstarts and new arrivals)
     who move others to abject gestures but themselves stand haughty and aloof.
     The beauty of your budding name is, I admit, spotted
12 with grace and faults, which people of all social levels are attracted to.
     But the snubs I’ve felt, the writer’s block, the very worst stagings at The Globe—all that I’ve experienced during my darkest day
     has only made me more punning and playful.

     88. An After-Loss

     Now, my sweet epithet (honed and recorded by all the muses,
     insuring them postmortem vitality),
     you establish the limits of my husband-like commitment,
  4 which asserts your virtue even if you are false,
     not even trying to argue with you or to rationalize your actions.
     Now my after-party acknowledging defeat is not attended by
     any smart set of mounted hunters,
  8 for its tone is governed by your kind of love,
     your eyes on me but your heart elsewhere,
     unmoved, cold, and unresponsive.
     O, how you enclose your sins in such sweetness!
12 When faults come to you, you turn them into graces:
     Look! When old December’s bareness was all around,
     even the leaden Saturn laughed and frolicked with him at your party.

     89. This Time Removed

     I think good thoughts about you, while some other poet writes such things down skillfully.
     Is that because that other writer had an inspired imagination?
     I can capture you only if you grant me the privilege,
  4 given my own limitations, which I know better than anybody.
     You can’t disgrace me, my love, half as much as I shame myself.
     Ah, please don’t put me to shame later when my heart (and art) has survived this project, with all its rhetorical problems,
     and when my evolving moods can all have their compensatory pleasures. (Just now, every expressive sonnet here has its shadowy companion, a witty rune.)
  8 I know that I don’t need to fear the worst spites at that later time,
     for malevolence or disdain cannot survive in your eye(s),
     the rightful heirs not only of beauty but also of godlike forgiveness.
     That tongue that here tells the story of your days
12 with the same reverent homage that kissing a monarch’s ring would show, and in the same emphatic way that a ring on a queen’s finger makes its statement—
     and that at the same time articulates this record, in soto voce metrics, of private activities of the here and now—was like summertime (and spoke in an “adder’s” meter)
     but was missing the songs of birds and the fragrance of the season.

      90. The Basest Jewel, Teeming, Rich

     Now, you go on like an uneducated cleric shouting Amen!
     in an unnaturally shrill voice that almost knocked me out cold,
     and for all that surfeit of affirmation, what rewards—what proof of my merit—do I get?
  4 To take your side (are you “parting”?) let me set down a parable
     that will give substance and shape to a change this preacher wishes for,
     a change that follows a surmounted sorrow,
     the victory, sweeter than mere relaxation, being sublime happiness:
  8 When, as a mere mortal and a dabbler, my life ends,
     then—because I cannot follow your development
     and play the pastor by protecting nature’s riches from overexpenditure—
     even while making bawdy comments on your frolicking,
12 the most trivial poem here (and also the least pleasure of living) will seem fully
     as profuse as autumn, ripe with a rich harvest
     of flowers (and slurs!) various in their fragrances and colors.

     91. A Summer’s Song

     To every song I sing, that gifted unnamed spirit offers
     neither his own presence nor that of his peers—his evening companions—
     the inspiration for and intended audience of this lyric. A handsome talent is something I lack
  4 because unknown deficiencies and unrecognized faults taint me,
     and so I’ll (“I, Will”—here in somewhat faulty forms) disgrace myself. Knowing your poet,
     you shouldn’t respond gloomily to all this bluster.
     In itself, the mere trivia I’ve set down above is not even a good sample of my skill at verse;
  8 better times and texts are coming for me, a prospect that I see
     many people assenting to. The narratives of false-hearted people—
     who best control the faces they put on—
     always give a kind of praise even in censure.
12 Your faults (including your absence) and these error-ridden reflections of you are like that.
     Bearing the burden of your youthful wantonness
     could make this minstrel sing almost any old lay about summer.

    92. Wrinkles Strange, My Patent Swerving Back

     Subtly polished formal structures
     honoring somebody whom I don’t name here, my verse attracted attention and caused shock;
     thus my unique method (and claim on him) completes another cycle, makes its rounds
  4 so the reader here, in my absence, can struggle to recover wonders, maybe even gain fame.
     I, Will, will act as if I don’t know you
     to accomplish, in the long run, my proposed coup.
     By this superior strategem of mine I’ll give things my best shot, getting better as I go.
 8 Thus my writings, which solicit your favor and rely heavily your moods,
     are set down to appear as posturings, scowlings, tricks, strange wrinkles of the brow—
     while other writers, mere passive caretakers whose only excellence is yours,
     are free to name you. Happy results can come from an unpromising-looking communique
12 when it’s decoded—showing its higher import—and is declared worthy of true things
     just the way the wombs of widows can reverse apparent negatives: After their masters die,
     you’ll find “prowed laps”—sites where their lords were expansive—ripe for plucking.

      93. Abundant Issue

     I concur repeatedly and profusely when I hear people praise you.
     That man—not the hackneyed, soft-spoken apparition people fancy—
     who is you yourself is the one you gave me, at a time before you knew your own worth;
  4 and I, Will, have gained from that action of yours.
     Leave the usual paths of your everyday life, and be on my lips instead;
     if you intend to leave me, at least do not put me last in your priorities.
     Sometimes your love is bitter on my lips, and sometimes ennobling, inspiring creativity.
  8 Your unfaithfulness and unpredictability can’t perturb me or make me inconstant.
     In your making, however, I admit that heaven decreed
     the summer flower to serve only its season. (You are sweet to this “adder” in the garden.)
     O, how large and handsome a structure houses your vices!
12 However many lambs (or iambs) the unempathic wolf may dupe,
     such slaughter has seemed abundantly fruitful, a prolific topic, to me,
     nor have I ever been dazzled by the lily-white options—ghosts, lambs, untainted purity.

     94. The Deeper Million, Something Moor

     Now let something more be added to my highest praise, something dark
     and provocative that nightly moderates praise with new information, red-lettering this hymn
     and prodding me. With this you’ve inspired me. Otherwise I might wrongly
  4 arc only my approving thoughts your way in these distorted rounds.
     Your sweet, beloved name shall live no more
     (after other petty annoyances have worked against you, too)
     in a state of consummate riches, fuller of pride than stately garments.
  8 Try to understand how my future rests on such a turnaround
     as would show love living eternally in your sweet face,
     love that, if kept back selfishly, will only live and die alone.
     Whoever can’t keep his eyes off you, who sees you as shelter and clothing—
12 if only such a one could look toward heaven like a lamb
     (a change of prospect likely only in orphans and unborn creatures)
     and, regaining innocence, no longer praise the blood red of the rose!

     95. O, Find a Happy Title

     Those trivial loving thoughts retained in my mind
     can’t boast of having overcome my silence;
     thus your great, inspiring worth, pent up and undervalued, cultivates
  4 my own self-berating and self-abuse,
     fearful as I am that I, so unworthy, might mispresent it.
     Just come to me to get me past my writer’s block. I’m in such a deadlocked condition that my mouth seems full of manure-polluted straw;
     with your help I’ll enjoy my recreation and verse conceits—my “hawks or horses”—more.
  8 O, what a wonderful subject I’ll find then; how noble I’ll feel,
     regardless of what is in your mind and heart.
     Now, if your heart betrays deep infection,
     the fact that beauty’s veil covers any blemish
12 will still allow you to attract and divert numerous eyes;
     for summer and summer pleasures (and the delights of these my verses) attend you,
     adorned in sweetness, in delightful embellishments and figures.

    96. Veterans

     The talky soldier brings up the rear but, in his own eyes, is always leading the troops; his boasts can come years later, but in his head he’s always still in service.
     “I never was afraid of anything,” emanates from his quarter. Leaving the army and
     returning home, doing everybody a favor, rejoining his mate, always reliving his war years,
  4 exaggerating his exploits, he gets double mileage out of actions he relives. Do me a favor
     and bring up the subject of our old comradeship, speaking to me as if I’d been your captain and you’re now recalling what happened:
     “At first, it was hard going out there…
     and I can say with pride that I had you, the pride of the regiment, and I can still say,
  8 ‘How happy I am to be your friend. I’d be happy to die in your service!’”
     Beyond that, your demeanor and recollection of things would detail nothing but sweetness.
     The lowliest nothing finds his record of exploits improving as time goes on
     and, to impress people, puts a glowing face on everything from the past that he talks about.
12 Do what you can to exert the force of your present position here in this official record
     so that, after you’re gone, even birds (or bards) will keep quiet,
     and it will be your voice that establishes a kind of ideal truth, sung as all war-stories are.

       97. Eve’s Apple

     For all these airy sounds, then, people may pay attention
     only when your countenance has marched up the line of words like notes on a staff;
     in those cases I’ve embraced you the same way dreams create flattering illusions and false romantic hopes.
  4 My love is such, and I belong so completely to you, that
     I’ll commit myself to controvery—to taking your side of the argument, even against myself—
     and to the other forms of anxiety and pressure, and further sad strains, here woefully felt,
     wretched in this solitary activity, in order that you can select
  8 only what is so perfectly lovely as to be unmarred and unstained.
     Your beauty grows very much like Eve’s apple,
     for, in certain sequences of events, sweetest things turn sourest.
     Be wary, dear heart, about the various privileges of choice and change embodied here.
12 Then again, don’t worry. I love you completely, in all your variety.
     Even if these strains are songs to be heard—not apples to be tasted—they sing so gloomily
     that it might be said to seem now like winter, with you gone, apples out of season.

      98. Speaking in Effect

     Trying to express my inarticulate thoughts effectively and artfully,
     I found that I lacked substance, the mine (of the mind) depleted—
     kingly in my dreams, but lacking command when conscious;
  4 despite your merits and the treatment you deserve, I, Will, show matters all wrong,
     because I’m privately burdened with holding dear the singular man whom you dislike
     seeing rendered by inadequate comparisons, inept conceits. Losing you, won’t it seem that
     this is all behind me, making me most wretched?
  8 You may be insincere or false, your looks deceiving, and yet I don’t know it
     while I perceive only your sweet virtue. You don’t have the look of (and are not suitably cloaked here in such conceits as)
     decaying lilies, bad smelling—worse than mourning clothes.
     The knife of hardest steel, abused in execution, loses its edge,
12 and the same might apply to you; because you are mine and have mine-like resources, my report on you is the good one
     sent out here to the world on these sheets. Countenance pale, dreading the coming winters,
     I have played with these figures and poems as if toying with your shadow.

Set VIII: Runes 99A/99B-112A/112B
Three Themes in One

           This set, instigated with a formal aberration, is uniquely challenging.

           Numerologically important (in much the same way the year 1999 was) and emphatically positioned (like an emphatic larger letter signaling a new text), Sonnet 99 startles “like toothy lark at break of day arising” because it has 15 lines, not 14. Unlike other playful quirks in the formal mechanics of Q—odd metrical lengths, irregular rhyme schemes, or airy parenthetical lines—the “extra line” in Sonnet 99 is a serious aberration in Q’s mathematical architecture, one that stops reconstruction of the Runes cold until a player can “solve” the “problem” it generates.

           As any peer might have done in Will’s own day, I myself came upon this quirky challenge after I was well into the game. (Who first goes through a book and counts lines?) At that point the neat structural scheme I’d detected in Q seemed to crumple, flawed by one pesky extra line. What could be “done” with it? If one line should be discounted in the recomposition process, which one was “extra”? The rhyme scheme of 99 (ababa…) and the preface-like “feel” of Sonnet 99.1 both made the first line seem extraneous, but a more natural inclination was to lop off the extra line at the bottom—given our fondness for ABC order, our urge to “even the tops” of texts on the page, and our tendency to read “down” and not skip anything.

           As usual in Q’s forking-paths game, trial and error provided a way to proceed, and one option does not block the other: The “extra” authorized line is fully functional, a teasing challenge that curbs peer cockiness, shows oneupmanship, complicates the wit and “increase” of the game, and even punctuates the structure of Q with a showy climax in Set VIII to precede Q’s denouement in Sets IX-XI.

           In an already bifurcated cycle where Sonnets overlay Runes and vice versa, the 15-line text bedazzles by triggering a subsidiary division, two whole subsets of texts—A and B variants—in the set it headlines. (Hence the set title, Will’s own phrase.) Though the A and B sets are almost alike, the aegis-like position of the switchable line tends to send any given text off on its own tangent—so tenuous are the associative nuances in any runic linestring. (Imagine two identical paragraphs of obtuse prose with differently worded topic sentences.)

           Practically, a recompositor must in two separate stages ignore both Sonnet 99.1 and Sonnet 99.15. Ignoring line 15, the almost automatic choice, allows the subset of A texts to emerge. Ignoring line 1, thus letting the second line of Sonnet 99 function in the recomposition process as its first, produces the B texts. One can visualize this two-step process by imagining that in the first case the tops of Sonnets 99 and 100 are level on the Q leaf—leaving 99.15 dangling at the bottom without any succession of siblings; by shifting the text of Sonnet 99 up one line to create new horizontal alignments, each one of the lines 2-14 in Sonnet 99 gains a new string of successive siblings, with line 99.1 orphaned and (for the duration) non-functional at the top. Cultivated puns, especially in Sonnet 99.1 and 99.15, originally helped reveal such a solution to the Runemaster’s witty challenge. These puns include the play “The ‘forward violate’ [i.e., ‘disruptive preface’] thus did “[No.] IC [i.e., Roman numeral 99] hide” (99.1) and the lament about “looking for more ‘flowers’ [cf. lines of flowing ink]” and “seeing none” there (in 99.15). The latter is exactly what one senses upon reaching line 15 and not observing any righthand companions for it. Other puns elsewhere in the set reinforced my deductions—e.g., “that thou fore-jettest so long” (Sonnet 100.1); “three themes in one” (Sonnet 105.12); the pun on “A/Bism” (Sonnet 112.9); and the acrostic wit about A/B in Rune 110A. The meanings that emerge in the dual sets of recompositions are, of course, the real proof; the punning details are merely breadcrumbs dropped in the night forest for disoriented players to try to follow.

           Typically in Q, where all dualities are coeval, neither set of variants takes precedence, despite our inclination to read the A variants as primary, the B’s as afterthoughts. Admittedly, the emphatic first-line capitals in Q do seem to favor the A-form recomposition of Rune 99—which begins with glaring caps—over its B twin, which opens unemphatically. Nothing substantive, however, indicates that A-texts are better than B’s; in some cases, the quality of the latter seems superior.

           In a small dilemma that mirrors all the larger ones, a first editor of the Runes faces choices about what to keep, value, and discount in Q’s myriad possibilities. The two perfectly parallel treatments of A’s and B’s that you see below admittedly generates much repetition and redundancy. For this reason, my original, first-draft compromise was to give the B texts an abbreviated presentation that still respected their viability. Here, however, I pursue each version of the paired texts separately and completely. In some cases, the difference of the first line seems to generate a B text quite divergent in its focus from the A text that it varies.

           Read for “serious” meaning, Set VIII persists with familiar topics: The poet’s role and flaws, his isolation from and on-going dedication to the muse, the difficulty of finding new conceits, the friend’s mixed nature, Will’s vacillation between optimism and melancholy. Motives in the Runes of the set, triggered by some individually cohesive topics in Sonnets 99-112, include flowers (see Sonnet 99), figures from romance (see Sonnet 106), and the unspecified personal scandal that is the topic in the set’s “couplet” texts, Sonnets 111-112—and, e.g., in Rune 100.

           Much of the set feels teasingly personal in ways that do not seem directly to involve the Stratford family. Perhaps Southampton’s taint after the Essex rebellion—or some intense or misunderstood relationship between Will and Southy—is in the background. The notions of the muse’s absence and of the passage of three years (see, e.g., Sonnet 104) are provocative but in themselves inconclusive. Will’s complaints about repetition (e.g. Sonnets 102-103) and “wasting time” (Sonnet 106) and such epithets as “wild music” (Sonnet 102.11), “profound abysm” (Sonnet 112.9), inventive change (see Sonnet 105.11), and jam-packed verses (see Sonnet 103.13) all gain new meaning with our expanded understanding of the 3-D quality of the Q enterprise.

Below are paraphrases of the “B” Variants, which
ignore line 1 of sonnet 99 (99.1) and use line 15 (99.15)

     99A. The Chronicle of Wasted Time (I)

     I scolded the early spring violet, regally-colored and beautiful, this way:
     “Where have you been, my inspiration, to leave me so long alone?
     O, absent muse, how will you compensate for being away?”
  4 My love is stronger now but appears weaker when I express it,
     alas! (My love appears to be lacking.) Whatever poor poetry my inspiration produces
     here, beautiful friend, you can never be tiresome or depleted.
     Don’t let it be said that my love is false worship or idleness
  8 expended here in this chronicle of wasted time—
     and neither should my superstitious fears (as if before an awful god) nor my prophetic insights be called idol worship.
     Whatever is in my brain to be characterized in ink,
     O, never say I was false-hearted.
12 Alas, it’s true I’ve oscillated and seemed helter-skelter.
     O, is it because of me that you find life unfortunate?
     My love and concern for you—and your feelings for me—fill heart, brain, inkwell, and text.

     99B. The Chronicle of Wasted Time (II)

     Sweet muse, where have you hidden your sweet fragrance now?
     Where have you been, my inspiration, to leave me so long alone?
     O, absent muse, whatever the means you eventually use to make this up to me,
  4 my love is stronger at the moment but appears weaker when I express it.  
     alas! (My love appears to be lacking.) Whatever poor poetry my inspiration produces
     here, beautiful friend, you can never be tiresome or depleted.
     Don’t let it be said that my love is false worship or idleness
  8 expended here in this chronicle of wasted time—
     and neither should my superstitious fears (as if before an awful god) nor my prophetic insights be called idol worship.
     Whatever is in my brain to be characterized in ink,
     O, never say I was false-hearted.
12 Alas, it’s true I’ve oscillated and seemed helter-skelter.
     O, is it because of me that you find life unfortunate?
     My love and concern for you—and your feelings for me—fill heart, brain, inkwell, and text.

     100A. Vulgar Scandal, Idle Show

     Sweet thief, where did you steal your fragrant sweetness? Where have you been hiding it?
     (I mention your strongest attribute.)
     The fact that your beauty seems to vanquish reliability and substance
  4 doesn’t make me love any less (though I may see you less often, and though a lack of integrity would always seem to diminish beauty)
     that beauty which in you has such liberty and range to display herself.
     Standing in for you as you used to be when I first looked into your eye—
     not, my love, an idle display, a showy decorated object to adore—
  8 I see pictured the most beautiful creatures, wits, men
     of the world—imagining the best endowed men that might ever be—
     but these have not equaled you, my true spirit, nor shown you fairly.
     Although our dissociation seemed to make the light of reason or flame of passion burn less brightly in me
12 and seemed to make me your jester, dressed in patchwork, you should examine
     yourself too—the guilty goddess who has inspired my errors
     and stamped “Vulgar Scandal” on my forehead.

     100B. Dreaming on Things to Come

     Not reacting to my affectionate bluster or the heat of my breath, your “purple pride”
     (to bring up your strongest attribute, indeed your only real claim to fame)
     “died” handsomely because, to be honest, you neglected her.
  4 Although her showy display has abated, my affection isn’t lessened for
     what once had such liberty and range to show her beauty
     right up front, ever since I first spied your (shall we say) “I-beam”—
     not, my love, just an “idle” display or merely an ostentatious thing to adore.
  8 I’ve read about the most beautiful creatures
     in the whole world, imagining the best endowed men that might ever be,
     but nothing has ever measured up to you—my right-angled spirit, my seminal force.
     Although our being apart may have seemed to cool my ardor, making my love-flare sputter
12 and turning me into one of your jesters dressed in patchwork, just look at
     this “bad girl” of my own
     that has given me a reputation tainted with vulgar scandal, branded me with initials (crotch- like “V” and ass-like “S”) that vary my real ones. (Not quite a laurel wreath, is it?)

     If you’re not reading verses inspired by my love,
     you’re expending face-flushing anger, frustration, and embarrassment on worthless poems.
     Truth and beauty find their groundings in my love,
  4 and that love is hawked openly, though its great merit, estimated
     on the basis of its naked truth, its bare essence, is too valuable for that,
     so beautiful do you seem even now, after these three cold years
     during which my lyrics praising you appear all alike
  8 as beauty, creating and refurbishing old meters,
     still asserts control over the tenure (and text) of my true love,
     determining what’s new to say, what should be entered now in the record.
     It would be just as easy to stray from these principles and practices,
12 cutting my thoughts into little pieces, selling cheap what is most precious;
     that would not be the preferable way to provide for my life,
     for what I care about, or for my reputation.

     101B. What Now to Register? (II)

     The color of your unblemished face would register your mood. What is that mood now?
     Do you waste your rage on some worthless song?
     Such questions about reality and beauty find their groundings in you, and in my love for you;
  4 that love can be hawked openly, though its great merit, estimated
     on the basis of its naked truth, its bare essence, is too valuable for that,
     so beautiful do you seem even now, after these three cold years
     during which my lyrics praising you appear all alike
  8 as beauty, creating and refurbishing old meters,
     still asserts control over the tenure (and text) of my true love,
     determining what’s new to say, what should be entered now in the record.
     It would be just as easy to stray from these principles and practices,
12 cutting my thoughts into little pieces, selling cheap what is most precious;
     that would not be the preferable way to provide for my life,
     for what I care about, or for my reputation.

     102A. My Added Praise Beside: A Confined Doom (I)

     Whatever may cloud your gentle cheek,
     blocking the powerful rays you send down on base subjects,
     you shine on them anyway; and, thereby ennobled,
  4 the proud voice of the beneficiary publishes the news abroad.
     Thus, with an enlightened speech, my additional secondary praises (in these buried texts)
     have shaken down—like forest leaves—three summers’ assertions of worth
     (now and forever directed toward and concerned with only one,
  8 praising him) dealing with dead ladies, and handsome knights
     imagined as lovers, penalized, whose narrow fate
     is a conceit for my own love, and for your cherished worth,
     earnestly expressed, as if my soul, lying in your breast, were the speaker.
12 Fashioned as derivative tales about familiar problems but based on a current love
     and then couched in a public medium that imposes restraint and decorum—
     in these forms you overshadow and vitalize my failures and are the instrument of my successes.

     102B. My Added Praise Beside: A Confined Doom (I)

     Amid the flow of affection in these lines, you seem quite inconveniently to have died,
     an overshadowing occurrence to your lowly subjects and my lowly topics.
     But you manage to shine on them anyway; and, thereby ennobled,
  4 the proud voice of the beneficiary publishes the news abroad.
     Thus, with an enlightened speech, my additional secondary praises (in these buried texts)
     have shaken down—like forest leaves—three summers’ assertions of worth
     (now and forever directed toward and concerned with only one,
  8 praising him) dealing with dead ladies, and handsome knights
     imagined as lovers, penalized, whose narrow fate
     is a conceit for my own love, and for your cherished worth,
     earnestly expressed, as if my soul, lying in your breast, were the speaker.
12 Fashioned as derivative tales about familiar problems but based on a current love
     and then couched in a public medium that imposes restraint and decorum—
     in these forms you overshadow and vitalize my failures and are the instrument of my successes.

     103A. Nothing Divine (I)

     You have died, alas, here in my veins where love circulates!
     Come back, negligent muse! Make amends at once! Remedy these dire straits.
     Answer me, my inspiration! Can you not tell me
  4 that our love was merely in its early stages before?
     O, do not blame me if I cannot go on writing,
     “Three beautiful springs having turned to yellow autumns;
     my love, considerate now, surely will be so in times to come
  8 as well….” Outshone by an utmost beauty as bright as a splendid coat of arms,
     the dying moon underwent eclipse (and perhaps will again)—
     a negation, something invisible, sweet boy, and yet as divine as prayer.
     That vision of beauty’s heavenly consummation is my love’s home; if I have strayed from it,
12 it remains absolute. I have looked on that truth;
     from that blazing encounter my family name is seared with infamy, is pierced with Cupid’s “…spear.”
     To me, you are the whole world, and I must go on with this struggle.

     103B. Nothing Divine (II)

     I plucked a lily here for you to hold.
     Come back quickly, negligent muse, and claim it before it wilts.
     Answer me, my inspiration! Can you not tell me
  4 that our love was merely in its early stages before?
     O, do not blame me if I cannot go on writing,
     “Three beautiful springs having turned to yellow autumns;
     my love, considerate now, surely will be so in times to come
  8 as well….” Outshone by an utmost beauty as bright as a splendid coat of arms,
     the dying moon underwent eclipse (and perhaps will again)—
     a negation, something invisible, sweet boy, and yet as divine as prayer.
     That vision of beauty’s heavenly consummation is my love’s home; if I have strayed from it,
12 it remains absolute. I have looked on that truth;
     from that blazing encounter my family name is seared with infamy, is pierced with Cupid’s “…spear.”
     To me, you are the whole world, and I must go on with this struggle.

     104A. A Wondrous Excellence (I)

     I plucked (and thus killed) a lily to put in your hand—
     spending time so idly making genteel verses!
     Truth needs no added decoration,
  4 while I’ve customarily assailed it with lyrics in a decorated style.
     Look in your mirror, whatever the season, and there a countenance appears
     that I have watched through the passing of the years
     always constant for its amazing excellence
  8 of limb, feature, and mind,
     so that pessimistic predictions about you prove themselves false.
     Every day I have to say the same thing over and over.
     Like a traveler, I come back to where I began,
12 indirectly and mysteriously, but transcendent, guided by your perfection—or by heaven—
     and, almost there, I’m humbled and quiet
     hearing you say what you find bad and good in me.

     104B. A Wondrous Excellence (II)

     “And buds of marjoram had stol’n thy hair….”
     How idly I spend my time making delicate verse!
     Truth needs no added decoration,
  4 while I’ve customarily assailed it with lyrics in a decorated style.
     Look in your mirror, whatever the season, and there a countenance appears
     that I have watched through the passing of the years
     always constant for its amazing excellence
  8 of limb, feature, and mind,
     so that pessimistic predictions about you prove themselves false.
     Every day I have to say the same thing over and over.
     Like a traveler, I come back to where I began,
12 indirectly and mysteriously, but transcendent, guided by your perfection—or by heaven—
     and, almost there, I’m humbled and quiet
     hearing you say what you find bad and good in me.

     105A. The Dyer’s Hand (I)

     “Now, sweet spices stole their fragrance from your hair”—
     these songs of yours sing such trite figures as that (in such convoluted syntax) for ears to hear! Notice how
     beauty is no instrument for heralding its own truth
  4 in the way that the nightingale (again I’m pressed for a figure) heralds the coming of summer.
     Such beauty and expressiveness go far beyond my dull skill,
     the fragrances of three springs having been consumed by three hot summers.
     Therefore my verse has limited itself to the immutable truth
  8 that the models of old songs and classic writers lead one to express.
     Though uncertainties now threaten to rule, regal self-assurance gains control:
     Measuring no basic, traditional thing as outdated; recognizing that we’re still each other’s;
     staying timely, metrically straightforward, and never outmoded, these things that are purely of the moment—
12 these blank pages filled with backward looking, playful views and with tricks to whiten the subject’s face—have given my heart new vigor
     to carry out its task in this context, just like the hand in the dyer’s vat,
     working alone, hidden and silent, totally self-absorbed.

      105B. The Dyer’s Hand (II)

     The roses—perched precariously above thorns, knowing their own beauty cannot turn itself into verses, reticent to offend a poet who can do so for them—stood up and
     sang in the ear of this poet who makes your verses, “Regard
     natural beauty as inadequate to record in poetry its own lovely reality
  4 in the way that the nightingale sings out to announce the start of summer.”
     Such facility goes far beyond my own dull skill—and in fact I’ve already almost exhausted my range here as a poet,
     three hot summers having consumed the fragrances of the last three springs.
     Therefore my verse has limited itself to the unchanging quality
  8 that in my opinion is seeking expression in nature’s beauty—and in classic poems.
     Uncertainties may now threaten to rule, but the fearful roses may rest easier, for my own self-assurance gains regal control:
     Measuring no basic or traditional thing as outdated, noting that you and I still belong to each other,
     staying timely and metrically accurate, not finding themselves discarded for modern modes,
12 these diverting glances—full of various sorts of playful tricks, bleachings, and white outs—have given my heart (and art) new vigor
     to carry out its task in this context, just like the hand in the dyer’s vat (another colorful medium),
     working alone, hidden and silent, totally preoccupied and self-absorbed.

     106A. Roses and Thorns

     In the figure of roses “standing fearfully on thorns”
     your poet offers both facile ornament and a thesis;
     but Best is best shown in an unmitigated and more originally expressed condition
  4 playing his pipes, as it were, in the climactic ascent of maturity.
     Deadening my lines and embarrassing me with awkwardness,
     ever since I first saw you flourishing (as you still are)
     my repetitious thesis keeps on leaving out variety and uniqueness—
  8 the very kind of beauty you now control—
     and “peace” calls forth those time-honored olives, figures unchanged
     since I first revered your fair name,
     so that I weep, as if to blot out my poor writings before correction,
12 even while bad efforts at composition show that you are my best love.
     Pity me, then, wish me revitalized,
     and hope that my sharp, self-critical pen unflinchingly superimposes right in the lines where wrong was erased.

     106B. Another White Despair

     Here occurs another erasure on the page, more blankness, more embarrassing errors.
     Your poet—since he’s creating a palimpsest—thus epitomizes both his technique and thesis.
     Really, the best art requires originality and complexity of the sort this project attempts
  4 in order to “play its pipes” in mature fashion.
     Weakening my verses—at least making me look bad to readers who only see the Sonnets—
     ever since I first saw you flourishing (as you still are) and was inspired to write about you
     is the fact that I’ve been writing visible sonnets but having to suppress my counterpoint runes
  8 (you yourself are good at showing a conventional public self and suppressing the rest)
     so that, “Peace” triggering “Olives,” my public poems sound predictable and clichéd
     the same way my very first poems about you did;
     the situation I describe means that I’m always having to write on top of what’s underneath
12 and that my bad attempts at verse show general readers my total love for you (but little else).
     Understand my situation, then, and hope I find the energy and acumen
     to revise so that what can be seen on the page is better than what I choose to suppress.

     107A. In So Profound Abysm (I)

     Another time of pale despair, another empty blank, making a writer blush!
     Arise, sluggish inspiration, and survey my love’s sweet face!
     Will you be silent just because he needs no praise?
  4 Admittedly this languid summertime is pleasant.
     Wouldn’t it be sinful, then, to try to mend one’s ways or to patch what’s already perfect?
     “Beauty makes steady progress anyway, like the hands of a timepiece,
     attractive, attentive, and accurate”—that’s my whole thesis.
  8 Thus praises of beauty’s attributes are like self-fulfilling prophesies.
     Now, with fragrant showers of this balmy summer
     felt as they are, love what is eternal. In the present case of love, which is always new,
     never think (though my nature was dominated by
12 the transitory present) that everything is over or that nothing is to be done. Enjoy the eternal
     while I, like a “self-Willed” sick man, drink:
     Into what a deep crevasse, a bottomless pool, I focus my total attention and put my faith!

     Something appeared that was tinged with red and white but wasn’t really either one:
     Arise, sluggish inspiration, and survey my love’s sweet face!
     Will you be silent just because he needs no praise?
  4 Admittedly this languid summertime is pleasant.
     Wouldn’t it be sinful, then, to try to mend one’s ways or to patch what’s already perfect?
     “Beauty makes steady progress anyway, like the hands of a timepiece,
     attractive, attentive, and accurate”—that’s my whole thesis.
  8 Thus praises of beauty’s attributes are like self-fulfilling prophesies.
     Now, with fragrant showers of this balmy summer
     felt as they are, love what is eternal. In the present case of love, which is always new,
     never think (though my nature was dominated by
12 the transitory present) that everything is over or that nothing is to be done. Enjoy the eternal
     while I, like a “self-Willed” sick man, drink:
     Into what a deep crevasse, a bottomless pool, I focus my total attention and put my faith!

     108A. My Adder’s Sense (I)

     Something neither red nor white—your lips, your face—combined both colors;
     if time (or verse) has engraved you with a mouth (or wit),
     stop issuing (and rationalizing) silence—which reflects your choice, rather than necessity, and doesn’t assert your truth.
  4 At a time when mournful hymns of silence hush the night
     to blemish the subject that once was a wellspring of perfection,
     there steal from one’s visage and tropes, quite imperceptibly,
     “Handsome, kind, and dependable” or some variation on those words,
  8 attributes of our Age, aspects of our metrical endeavor, all representing you.
     My love appears fresh, so death yields to me.
     To disregard the dust and indignity of aging—
     frailties that besiege all living creatures—
12 reflects my taste. I will never again grind out
     vinegar potions to heal my contagious infection
     of the voices of others stung by my writhing and figured—but now positive rather than negative—lines, incrementally added to the tally.

         Rune 108B. My Adder’s Sense (II)

     Thievish time might’ve dumbfounded or even killed you (or stopped speech on your behalf)
     if he were to’ve engraved any wrinkles on your mouth, or elsewhere on your countenance.
     Let’s not use such hypotheticals to explain the current silence, which instead reflects aspects of your reality and nature.
  4 Thus when mournful hymns of silence hush the night…
     to blemish the subject that once was a wellspring of perfection,
     there steal from one’s visage and tropes, quite imperceptibly,
     “Handsome, kind, and dependable” or some variation on those words,
  8 attributes of our Age, aspects of our metrical endeavor, all representing you.
     My love appears fresh, so death yields to me.
     To disregard the dust and indignity of aging—
     frailties that besiege all living creatures—
12 reflects my taste. I will never again grind out
     vinegar potions to heal my contagious infection
     of the voices of others stung by my writhing and figured—but now positive rather than negative—lines, incrementally added to the tally.

     109A. Wild Music, Newer Proof

     Decay would even claim your breath, my unnamed friend, to add to his booty:
     If anything can hold him up to ridicule
     by maintaining vitality long after a fancy entombment,
  4 that very thing—wild music—sounds our here from every instrument,
     as all my verses tend toward creating that effect
     so that your sweet coloring, which I contemplate, does not decline—
     and I use up all my ingenuity effecting your transmutation.
  8 On another point, my verses formerly looked only toward the future;
     since then, the spitefulness of poet or friend can thrive poorly. Here, weak verse
     stands firm against its inevitable flaws (or jokes)—
     admitting that it could be quite preposterously marred
12 in later proof stages. To exalt (but also tease and test) a friend who goes back with me farther than any of my critics or admirers,
     no bitterness that I, Will, might contemplate in bitterness
     is piped on my instrument for those of either persuasion to hear.

     109B. Newer Proof

     Now—given that it may steal him at his peak and will undercut his proud accomplishments—
      physical decay can be held up to ridicule and exposed, if at all,
      to insure my friend’s vitality long after a fancy entombment
 4 by just such crazy figures and themes as those that sound out here from every strand.
     For my verses have no other objective,
     so that your sweet coloring, which I contemplate, does not decline—
     and I use up all my ingenuity effecting your transmutation.
  8 On another point, my verses formerly looked only toward the future;
     since then, the spitefulness of poet or friend can thrive poorly. Here, weak verse
     stands firm against its inevitable flaws (or jokes)—
     admitting that it could be quite preposterously marred
12 in later proof stages. To exalt (but also tease and test) a friend who goes back with me farther than any of my critics or admirers,
     no bitterness that I, Will, might contemplate in bitterness
     is piped on my instrument for those of either persuasion to hear.

     110A. Double Penance

     Especially for what he steals—in the more positive context of his progress
     and general character—time’s spoilage is everywhere despised;
     let me add that two items will be praised throughout time,
  4 as sweetness becomes commonplace. Their cherished pleasure released,
     then, praising your gifts and graces
     gains impetus; and (does my eye see wrongly?)
     three interrelated topics, affording a wonderful range,
  8 nonetheless might be too narrow for praising your virtues.
     While my eye remarks critically on overly dull (even mute) hoards
     but concurrently looks on pages that will last into eternity—
     setting down without reward all your goodness
12 (a God—Triune, perhaps—of love, my single homage and topic),
      not correcting what is already correct, which would be double subjection for a writer in a bifurcated writing project—
     note how productive I am (and hellishly duplicitous) while seeming desultory.

     110B. Three Themes in One, or Double Penance

     Suppose a vindictive cancer destroyed time itself
     and time’s ravages earned universal scorn,
     so that being—living itself—gained the praise of future generations
  4 and all sweet things became commonplace, their cherished pleasures freed from mutability and loosed upon the world—
     then, praising your gifts and graces
     gains impetus; and (does my eye see wrongly?)
     three interrelated topics, affording a wonderful range,
  8 nonetheless might be too narrow for praising your virtues.
     While my eye remarks critically on overly dull (even mute) hoards
     but concurrently looks on pages that will last into eternity—
     setting down without reward all your goodness
12 (a God—Triune, perhaps—of love, my single homage and topic),
      not correcting what is already correct, which would be double subjection for a writer in a bifurcated writing project—
     note how productive I am (and hellishly duplicitous) while seeming desultory.

     111A. This Thy Monument (I)

     A vicious cancer’s trying to kill him?
     Hurry faster, then, to bring my love immortality: Time destroys life!
     So do your work, muse! I’m showing you how.
  4 Mimicking my muse, I sometimes withhold words (by not writing or by “whispering” here)
     so there’s much, much more room in this cycle for substantive material, much of it hidden.
     For fear of not adding words or of not being heard, let me address future ages openly:
     Fairness, kindness, and truth have often been isolated, hermit like,
  8 in the experience of those of us who witness these present days,
     and you my future readers (and my friend) shall find here your memorial—
     discovering, engendered there, the primal, wellspring figure of love—perhaps a “no-thing.”
     Relatively speaking, I don’t give a fig for this expansive universe. (This vast project has its own fecundity. Still, my address here to the world may prove pointless.)
12 Then welcome me—for me that would be the next best thing to heaven—
     and show compassion toward me, dear friend, and I assure you
     that you’re equally vital in my concerns and that I’m working hard to keep you thriving.

     111B. This Thy Monument (II)

     I saw many flowers in nature and wrote about them in these lyrics, yet I could see none
     bringing my love fame. Faster than time can destroy life,
     then, do your work, muse! I’m illustrating the technique.
  4 Mimicking my muse, I sometimes withhold words (by not writing or by “whispering” here)
     so there’s much, much more room in this cycle for substantive material, much of it hidden.
     For fear of not adding words or of not being heard, let me address future ages openly:
     Fairness, kindness, and truth have often been isolated, hermit like,
  8 in the experience of those of us who witness these present days,
     and you my future readers (and my friend) shall find here your memorial—
     discovering, engendered there, the primal, wellspring figure of love—perhaps a “no-thing.”
     Relatively speaking, I don’t give a fig for this expansive universe. (This vast project has its own fecundity. Still, my address here to the world may prove pointless.)
12 Then welcome me—for me that would be the next best thing to heaven—
     and show compassion toward me, dear friend, and I assure you
     that you’re equally vital in my concerns and that I’m working hard to keep you thriving.

     112A. Save Thou My Rows I Knit!

     I went on writing inky, flowing lines about flowers, with no real ones in view;
     thus you, my friend, act as a stay against time—who cuts everything down—
     by making our mutable condition seem far away, as it does now momentarily.
  4 Since I don’t want my poems to bore you, or depict you as less bright or sharp than you are,
     let your own mirror show you, when you look in it,
     that summer’s beauty was dead until you were born,
     a season whose three separate months never before stopped to reside at the same place.
  8 Must eyes be amazed, but tongue-tied, in the face of such beauty?
     When tyrants’ trappings—their wavelike peaks of power, their brass tombs—are things past
     and when time has forgotten it, and all outward appearances of it suggest that it has died,
     save my Rose, my friend—this flower I write of, my work, these rows, this ruse. In these rows you are my everything,
12 up to and including even your pure, supremely affectionate heart.
     That very thing, your solicitous attention, is enough to keep me alive—
     I whom all the world (except me) presumes dead.

     112B. Save Thou My Rose

     Perhaps, my friend, if you appear to lack sweetness or color, as if already dead, without losing other physical attributes of the living,
     that just acts as a stay against time—who harvests everything at summer’s end with his sharpened scythe—
     by making our mutable condition seem far away, as it does now momentarily.
  4 Since I don’t want my poems to bore you, or depict you as less bright or sharp than you are,
     let your own mirror show you, when you look in it,
     that summer’s beauty was dead until you were born,
     a season whose three separate months never before stopped to reside at the same place.
  8 Must eyes be amazed, but tongue-tied, in the face of such beauty?
     When tyrants’ trappings—their wavelike peaks of power, their brass tombs—are things past
     and when time has forgotten it, and all outward appearances of it suggest that it has died,
     save my Rose, my friend—this flower I write of, my work, these rows, this ruse. In these rows you are my everything,
12 up to and including even your pure, supremely affectionate heart.
     That very thing, your solicitous attention, is enough to keep me alive—
     I whom all the world (except me) presumes dead.

Set IX: Runes 113-126
Far from Accident

         Unaware of Q’s runic game, Sonnets editors have mostly ignored the “empty couplet” lines in Sonnet 126 as meaningless, unauthorized printer’s “filler.” In truth, these “quietuses two” (Sonnet 126.12) work as real lines and house complex sense and wit. In Runes 125 and 126 the lines have separate jobs, while on the leaf and in Sonnet 126 they work together.
          Interlinked are famous lines from Q’s “misnumbered” Sonnet 116 that, disparately, accrue new runic meanings. The pun “Let me knot two, the marriage of true minds”—housing “mirage” and the play “theme airy eye, a jest t’ rue, my ends”—alludes not only to all the linked Sonnets and Runes but specifically to the “knotty two” lines that close the set. Sonnet 116’s own coy close, “If this be error…,” comments both on Will (and Thomas Thorpe)’s “misnumbering” of 116 as 119 and on these two “missing” lines, which will punningly calls “Quietuses two” that “render thee” (Sonnet 126.12). Now, when Will tells us to “admit impediments,” (Sonnet 119.2), we concede Q’s stumblingblocks but don’t “alter” our affections upon finding the alterations (suggesting “adorations”).
          In a minimal sense, the “bending sickles” of Sonnet 116 also designate the two up-coming sets of italicized parentheses that we see in Sonnet 126, so that the “rosy lips and cheeks” that those parentheses house are pictographically one of the poet’s referents in Sonnet 116.9. These “rendered” parentheses, reasonably accurate as lips, also form a visual pun on fat buttocks, “cheeks” cut in two or “rendered,” with the broadened pictograph (     )(     ) implicit. The pun “Butt, bare side out (Butt bare sight out), even to the edge of doom” (Sonnet 116.12) has these paired “cheeks” in mind, “rendered.” The pictograph, further, may show a belted fat middle; a vacuous person; paired gums for chewing; a crowned head; dovelike whiteness; and the “zero” lurking in “Crow” (see “Crow or Dove” in Sonnet 113.12, initial in the set). Concurrently these marginalized airy spaces are the “edge of doom” that Will mentions at Sonnet 116.12, “rendering” the empty Unknowns that at bottom await us all and that will “render” humankind: The top one stands for heaven, the nether one for hell. As two “knotted” items, the empty-line pair also show us “the marriage of jesty rumens” (cf. Sonnet 116.1). The joke is Will’s, the stomach knots ours.
          The “renderings” probably refer also to Southampton’s moustache, also “cheeks” in one sense, though “proving” this is a complex, cumulative deduction. Briefly, in Rune 126, “em-peached” (13) links with the pun “Two [empty lines] give full growth to that which still doth grow” (3). Other puns (e.g., those in Rune 126.5-6) also point to an in-group joke about whether Southy had looked better moustached or clean-shaven. John Sanford’s Latin poem (1592) had praised Southy’s beauty “although his mouth scarcely yet blooms with tender down” (qtd. Akrigg 36).
          More broadly, the final formal “Audite” in Set IX echoes and complements the initial aberration in Set VIII. As paired “mysteries,” these last two lines also point forward as analogues that epitomize the upcoming Perverse Mistress sets (X, XI)—sets that provide a “couplet” close to the entire Q scheme, just as these two empty lines help round off Set IX. The MegaSonnets’ couplet is ironically vertical, not horizontal, as Q’s organization scheme helps us visualize. Link: How Will Wrote the Runes.
          The epithet “quietuses two” also describes the blank corners of each folio leaf, providing a corroborating clue about arrangement of materials on the spreads. The joke in “rendering” suggests that one might doodle in these “quietuses.” The pun “…tore end earthy” (Rune 126.14) means “bawdy, separated toward the bottom.” In this set, Will’s “birds”—his “Crow and Dove”— soar higher, in the equivalent of the heavens, by coming early in the set, and also atop Rune 124.
           Maybe the two empty page corners gave Will the idea of letting two “nothings,” two aberrant “perverse mysteries,” gain significance in his large plan. In the broadest sense, the “Quietuses” that still “render”—that “show,” “divide,” and torture like a rack—are the Runes themselves.
          Representative of other minimal wit in Set IX are the odd double T’s and commas in Rune 113.10—where redundancies point to Thomas Thorpe, the printer (and signer of the dedication) whose complicity was required to see that Will’s minimal authorizations were honored through the printing state rather than being “corrected” and edited out. Similarly eye-catching is the gappy pictographic spacing at Sonnet 120.6, encoding the pun “As I bare ass , ye have pastel of Tommy.” The italicized-word string also exemplifies a likely game element.
          In new conceits, diverse materials in the set reiterate familiar themes that include vision, heart vs. mind, separation, suffering, faithfulness, apologies for Q and pride in it, the muse as ideal paragon and as Captain Ill—as Winner and Waster. I draw the set title from among many other authorizations: e.g., This Flattery; Thy Pyramid’s Built Up; The Marriage of True Minds; Nothing Novel, Nothing Strange; This Alchemy; My Sportive Blood; Tan, Sacred Beauty; Thy Registers.

     113. I Bore the Canopy

     Since I left you, what I see is in my mind
     and on the paths it takes. With you as their crowning feature,
     those lines that I wrote before this one don’t tell the whole truth,
  4 thus barring me from the company of right thinkers who see things exactly as they are—and blocking my union with you and the reunion of Sonnets and Runes here.
     I may justly be accused of having come short in every respect,
     whetting all our appetites for more.
     Whatever potions of siren tears I’ve drunk, filling me with frustration,
  8 the fact that you were once unkind to me stands me in good stead now that
     things have improved in my life. Potions once thought bitter,
     your gift to me, the fare you offered, these thinly columned summaries of what you are—these remain within my brain.
     No, time cannot gloat that I am proven fickle.
12 If my dear love were just a princely child—and not, as I said before, a crowning glory—
     would I complain about having been his canopy-bearer?
     You, my lovely boy, are indebted to those in your power and should acknowledge that.

     114. Thy Pyramid Full-Charactered

     The very thing that keeps me going in life, this project,
     is what I’m offering for your consumption—this flattering praise, the plague of monarchs.
     Even those prior flatteries that said I could not love you more
  4 admit to stammerings, blocked paths, problems, and excess baggage: Love isn’t an affection
     that can or should compensate either your great virtues or any empty spaces in your character.
     We whip our taste into frenzies with strong potions
     distilled from laboratory apparatuses as foul as hell inside,
  8 and, after doing so, we’ve typically felt sorrow of a sort that brings back earlier pain.
     When present existence prevails to drive away my thoughts about non-being, then,
     fully inscribed and decorated to house permanently what’s unforgettable about you,
     your memorial, like a pyramid for a pharaoh, gets built up with renewed strength.
12 It’s true that that monument, as fortune’s bastard, may go unattributed to its sire or maker.
     For my Sonnets, the half of this tribute that’s exposed to view, to honor your physical beauty
     is enough to occupy time’s capricious passage, to hold off his hour of reaping.

  115. Nothing Novel, Nothing Strange

     My eye partly sees and partly doesn’t:
     Put another way, how can I say that my eye tells the truth?
     Yet still my mind has not found any reason why
  4 that ocular faculty that changes in response to the changes it discovers
     forgot to pay your dearest love a visit
     as a means of heading off unseen ailments between us.
     Adjusting hope with fear and medicating fear with hope,
  8 I’m obliged to bow under the weight of this negligent oversight—
     and the mere pleasure of seeing you is lost, pleasure called “just pleasure” but     
     really something that shall always be ranked superior to idle self-indulgence.
     Nothing seems original or exotic to me,
12 a man subject to the caprices of fortune, favored or ravaged by time
     successively. What substantial bases for eternity
     have been built up by diminution? Who reveals himself in monumental foundations erected in idleness?

  116. This Alchemy, Thy Lover’s Withering

     Vision seems present, but the eye is blurred and practically blind—tears quench its light—
     and it was your love that taught it how to mix its forms; reactive alchemy also happens
     when my full eye or my passion either burns clearer
  4 or arcs elsewhere, locating the absent one
     whom I am bound and tied to day by day.
     In tearful purgations we make ourselves sick to avoid sickness,
     still feeling loss, still not victorious—though I imagined I would have triumphed by now:
  8 Unless my feelings become hardened into immutable materials
     (not in my own estimation, but according to insights that others have)
     that last eternally,
     they are mere reworkings of things seen earlier, decorations déjà vu that gloss things over,
12 weeds among weeds, flowers picked to mingle with other flowers—
     all observations that prove, then, what brief waste and hidden ruin one may find
     here in your lover’s withering, even while your life grows sweetly elsewhere.

     117. Far from Accident

     Now, it brings nothing stable or substantial to the heart
     to dwell on grotesque creations and on things unassimilated and chaotic—
     that’s merely marking time, with its millions of trivial and disorganized occurrences.
  4 Quite conversely, it is as an indelible and permanent point of reference
     that I have associated with unnamed future readers and thinkers.
     Even so, my friend, being full of your nearly-cloying sweetness,
     my heart has committed frightful errors!
  8 For even if you were affronted, were shaken by my monstrous behavior
     in times past, why should anybody else go through that? Inaccurate and unfaithful onlookers,
     finished shortly, lasting only as long as the brain and heart,
     we have only brief lives, and therefore we gaze with wonder—and also try to impress others.
12 No, this structure was not formed accidentally. Far from it.
     Have I not envisioned readers who dwell on things formal and attractive
     (if the order of things persists as it has) overthrowing the mysteries?

     118. Sportive Blood

     Birds, flowers, or other figures that your sweet self really does not assume—
     angelic shapes suggestive of you, forms that seem to reassemble in you—
     may intervene insidiously in lovers’ vows, writers’ commitments, and even royal decrees.
  4 Your real self meanwhile confronts rough seas and always remains unperturbed,
     never temporalized (and also not overly committed to metrical verse, or to Tommy). Being under a costly obligation to you, as a writer
     I’ve adjusted my own diet to harsh liquids of other sorts than “rough water”
     while you’ve thought yourself angelically happy.
  8 Thus you’ve passed a hell of a long time, while I’ve paid the price for that interim!
     Recognize my playful vigor and acknowledge it!
     Find it in your own nature to survive!
     Whatever self you pawn off on us, whatever old form you assume to decoy us with
12 persists in healthy, smiling splendor and is undiminished.
     Even if you lose everything, or more, by your profligacy,
     let your poet Will, if not your own volition, restore you as you continue to press forward.

     119. Tan, Sacred Beauty

     Errors dashed-off, impulsive projects, these lively artifacts are unrelated to reason,
     making each item a paragon of badness.
     Parchment, my sacred beauty, darken in the face of brilliance, foil the keenest purpose, withstand the sharpest probes.
  4 In this dark, it is a guiding star to every straying ship
     that I have hoisted—a raised sail to catch any wind—
     and, sick as I am of insipid certainties, have found in some measure apt.
     What far-ranging things have shocked my provincial sight!
  8 How I have driven myself like a slavedriver, never stopping!
     Why do spies less insightful than I focus their glasses on my weaknesses
     until each has to adjust his seeing part to leveled emptiness
     and construe those defects of mine as to some extent the end result of over-aspiration
12 perpetually beaten down and held captive by frustration—as a voyage frustratingly becalmed?
     For a sweet couplet (in a duplicitous project), passing up simpler fare,
     my “tan, sacred beauty” holds you to seeing this as the course I had in mind; she has that ability.

     120. Altering Things

     Not even the vision of a strong mind holds onto what it catches sight of:
     As fast as objects group before his eyes,
     such a mind may be swayed by powerful influences or distracted by other developments
  4 of questionable value, however objective they may be, however fixed that thinker’s stature.
     Which would take me the farthest from your range of vision—
     for me to become sick before my time, needlessly,
     driven to distraction by this feverish madness,
  8 or to tally up and brood on how I once suffered in the context of your criminal behavior?
     No matter who officially evaluates as bad what I regard as good
     about you, your true record can never become obscured.
     So imagine that we of a previous time have overheard any of those who would set themselves up as your critics being informed about
12 what kinds of good times attract our sort of man in this era:
     May such pitiful men, their lives wasted in voyeurism,
     be disgraced by time and destroyed by the anguish of minute preoccupations!

      121. The Poor Retainer

     Now, whether my vision catches the most common or most courtly sight,
     O, I respond like a fawning fool, as if it were the first thing I’d ever seen!
     Alas, why do people fear that tyrant Time?
  4 Love’s not time’s fool, though clown-like makeup and cheerfully ingenuous statements
     pencil down both my Willfulness and my errors,
     revealing the stratagems I’ll employ in any affair of the heart.
     O, now I discover some positive effects of imperfection,
  8 O, that this current subtextual melodrama might patch together in a reconstituted form.
     No, I am what I am; and those who underestimate me by charging
     that a poor retainer could not hold so much—
     either you or this written record of your nature—I show to be doubly wrong!
12 This retainer, the fool of Love, does not stand in awe of conventional prudence, that heretic!
     No, let me be servile and flattering in your heart.
     Yet you should fear your heart, O, since you’re her favorite, the darling of her pleasure.

     122. Reckon Up the Rune 

     The sweetest aspect offered, the most deformed creation—
     my expansive, kinglike mind drinks up both!
     Do I not, then, have enough experience to say I love you best (if not “I love you, beast”)
  4 of all things within the arced swath my mind cuts? Approach,
     and, after adequate demonstration, reach your own conclusion. Catalog
     all the “flaws” of mine that once did not exist, later enlarged to faults—resting assuring
     that experience with evil can temper and mature what’s already better than good.
  8 (How hard real repentance hits me at bottom! To be honest, evil doesn’t improve, it hurts.)
     For balance, add up not only my errors but also the abuses I’ve suffered, and compare me to the broad range of humans, to those well-favored and those deformed.
     I need no scorecards to rate your dear love.
     I have no questions about present or past,
12 each operating on a system that grants life hour by hour;
     and, if you take my offering, a poor thing but freely given,
     your love may enjoy her treasure awhile without keeping it from me or others forever.

     123. Not Mixed with Seconds: Runèd Love Rebuilt

     The mountain or the sea, the day or night—anywhere, at any time
     my eye can see clearly what satisfies its taste
     now that I’ve overcome indecision:
  4 Love doesn’t change. With this pronouncement about love, the passing of time
     brings me into the range of your frowning eyes
     and—thus sternly corrected and improved by contact with such an ideal—into good health.
     And, my flawed love being thus rehabilited (even as this runic love poem is reconstituted)
  8 and quickly offered to you, and you in turn offering yourself back to me,
     I can be straight with you, though subjects I’ve mentioned—hills, waves, hours shadowed on sundials, eyes—and certainly people in general and these runes all may have their own crooks, slants, and angled indirections.
     Therefore I’ve boldly dissociated myself from all such things that aren’t on the level.
     Though your recorded past, these verses about you, and what our eyes see in the world are all false, inaccurate, and unreliable,
12 there stands nonetheless—singularly isolated, magnificently self-contained, skillfully contrived, and in total control—
     something timeless, untainted by inferiority, transcending artfulness.
     Her judgment, when finally articulated, must be reckoned with.

     124. Tabled Renderings

     This page shapes birds of different feathers (dovelike sonnets, crowlike runes), light meat or dark, to suit your features
     and prepares a cup suited to the palate that goes with them—
     crowning the present moment, unsure about the rest—
  4 but ends up carrying that cup, like a lackey, till Doomsday.
     Now don’t shoot at me (I may be a Bard, but I’m no bird, certainly not a Crow) in your awakened displeasure,
     which, rank with self-righteousness, might see itself likely to be cured by unpleasantness.
     More attractive than earlier—stronger, more beneficial—appears
  8 the lowly medicine (a modest greeting, maybe?) fit for wounded hearts.
     Tasteless thoughts or concern with status must not make me appear
     to overvalue the tables you visit most often,
     sometimes here, sometimes there, in a continual haste
12 unaffected by passion, anger, tears, or weather.
     Equitably, rather, my actions should render only total servitude;
     any break in your zigzagging gluttony will render you without my help.

      125. Love Is a Babe

     Satisfied, fulfilled, with you—
     if it should be poisoned, that’s one of your smaller crimes—
     love is a babe. Why shouldn’t I say so then?
  4 If I’m wrong and proven wrong,
     since in my defense I can say that I’ve tried to prove my position
     but have learned from that process and seen the truth,
     I’ll return to my subject, chastened, staying within my range, and as happy as a baby
  8 except for the fact that your sinning now threatens to become a penalty to bear, indeed a whole province for exploration, and people are accusing you of bribery, too:
     To keep people from maintaining the aforementioned “General Evil”
     as the ready epithet when your name comes up,
     I swear this, and always will—
12 and call every fool who ever lived to set his signature to this in the blank provided below:
     Henceforth, and from this point, you underhanded undercover man, you are an honest soul!
    (Witness: _________________________________ )
     

     126. What I Never Writ

     My highest reason—your rational spirit—naturally makes my limited mind seem faulty,
     preoccupying my vision, which makes a start
     at complete creation of something that is still growing.
  4 I have never captured in my writing (and no man in love has ever experienced)
     the constant virtue of your affection.
     One afflicted with loving you is poisoned by soporifics,
     an illness effecting triple gains; thus I have paid
  8 my price—for you—and you must return the favor and gain my release.
     Given that all men are bad, the immaterial sway of your love
     would bring me forgetfulness.
     I, Will, will remain true despite the way you lay me low. And you?
12 What color is perfection? One (like this Rune-writer) who has spent half his efforts wrongly
      stands least under your influence when he is charged most directly with his deviancy.
     [Here where I “never writ” you may find room for further growth; or evidence of my own “forgetfulness” and aberrant tendencies; or a ready sample of pure white, the “dye for goodness”; or even, maybe, your “cunt-roll,” “leafed”—like a cigarro.]