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Here
in Rune 142, a truncated line (5) and “erroneously”
attenuated one (6) merge to create iambic regularity (and a mea
culpa). In trying to figure out the text, we pick up on the primary allusions
to Cupid and Diana, both arrow-shooters. A cryptic prepositioned pronoun
(in 3) gets clarified later: “A maid of Dian’s” (13)
and “[Love’s] heart-inflaming brand [i.e., his arrow]”
(14) show that line 3 can mean “one of Diana’s arrows…,”
ironically a phallic dart stolen from Cupid.
The
mythic Diana (or Artemis) presides over maidenly nymphs. She is the twin
sister of Apollo, that supreme archer, and often appears as a huntress
engaged in the chase.
Without naming Cupid, line 14 implies his presence, equivalent
to Love, named in 11.The pun in errors (1) suggests Eros—Cupid’s
other name—in a poem about arrows.
Diana’s arrow, the “feathered creature” here (3), is
also an emblem of Will’s “breathing” quill (see 5).
This errant arrow—Will’s pen—“whispers”
a diatribe against “sinful loving” (see 1-2) but delivers
the moral that “conscience is born(e) of love” (11).
The
drama in which the “twice forsworn” (12) auditor
and Will interact seems vague. However, “twice forsworn” (12)
echoes “two spirits” (4) and means partly that Will is equivocating
as the writer of two concurrent texts. His “errors” (1) and
the “insufficiency” that “sways my art” (10) in
fact establish the rune’s main motif—imperfection, evil, and
immorality. Some diction treats warfare and (of course) writing.
Authorized confusions that add to the riddlic effect
here include the for / fore / four puns (1, 7); the alternating
“two spirits” (4) of the rune (making 2 and 4 seem like asides);
and closing phallic bawdry about a “hard, inflaming brand”
(14).
Much of the humor is also “numeric”—triggered by the
phrase “a thousand errors” in line 1. To understand
this wit, which may seem tedious and puerile to modern readers, we must
observe that this particular poem is built partly on a unique numeric
joke in Q: Here an 8-syllable line (i.e., line 5) links up with a 12-syllable
line (line 6) to generate metrical “normalcy” in the form
of two pentameter lines that conform to the usual length of the lines
in Q.
To understand Will’s numeric wit we must also remember
that in the poet’s day “numbers” means “metrics.”
A poet was a “numbers man” and, punningly, an “adder.”
The first line here in Rune 142 puns on “41 ended” and thus
points to Rune 141, which Will has just completed. Line 7 here
opens with the encoded pun “Forty two” (code For that
w...). Numeric wit continues with a “two / to”
pun in line 4, with the pun “fourth” in line 5, and with the
pun “twice fours...” in line 12. Other lines open with numeric
puns that expand the poet’s gamy focus: e.g., One (3);
10 (as W in line 4, 8, and 9 and as VV in 10, with “wide
w...” an opening pun in 11); and 8 (encoded as B in 5 and 12). The
pun “I made deux’s [i.e., 2s] dance t’hiss
adieu...” (13) is in this same loop of tediously crafted
wit.
Regular
rhyme is technically impossible in the Runes, given the overall
scheme that Will employs in Q to generate the two concurrent cycles. The
poet, as he does here, often makes up for this lack by careful selection
of terminal words. Crafty design shows, e.g., in end-rhymes (away
/ array / sway); in terminal assonance; in echoic pairs (loving
and love, sway and swearing); and in half-rhymes
(found / brand, here a kind of closing couplet). Echoic or repeated
terms inside the lines also show artful linkages: e.g., maid
/ laid; heart / art; hate, which recurs; and the punning play on
errors / arrows / Eros / E-rows (i.e., 5th lines).
Craftily, the poet’s “E-row” (i.e., line 5) is about
an “arrow” and has an “error” because it is metrically
short. Linked with this wordplay, in a poem implicitly about Cupid, is
the pun “Eros.”
The pun on “farty” in “For they...” (1)
overlays the poem with another crude possibility for what the poet means
when he speaks of “breathing forth the sound...” (5). Other
“low” puns further typify the buried but surely authorized
wit here, intended to entertain a private male audience to whom (as Sonnets
editors before me have noted) a broad pun in “conscience”
would have been routine. One form of such wit is this: “...who knows
not cunt-science is born of low butt, whored twice, force-worn...”
(11-12).
Another deeply buried pun in the opening lines is “classically”
provocative: “Forty-one in Thetis and Eros note hiatus, missing
ground...” (1-2). Thetis, a mythical sea-goddess, was the husband
of Peleus and mother of Achilles.
Sample Puns
1)
Sortie eye, India tough endures Anne (endorsing ode); Eros,
arrows, “E-row’s” an ode; Farting Thetis eye; heat heaven,
dear whore; into heath Evander roars not; Farty indeed, you fanned her
(our) arse node (note, in ode); in the ethos, Anne-terrors note
1-2)
note [as end of line occurs] hiatus; no Deity owes my sin; Sortie ye,
India to half, end, a roar is noted; Farty Anne, that huss Anne dear,
roars an oath; Forty-one [i.e., Rune 141] ended, housing D [500] errors
noted; note Hat., oaf, Miss Anne; our snotty hate owe some; in O, tea
is missing; synod hates my heaven
2) G-row
needed incense; ’tis missing ground, Eden, seen; my fine Negro you
ended on his end; don, Finn of Hull, lo, you join; oaf, miss an edge (egg),
Rune D, Ed, (rune dead) wants Anne, fool, lowing
2-3) G-rune
did on sensual loin go; fellow Hugh-John, Jonah fears; Jonah’s hearsed
Hera, Ed; Jonah, of Hereford he read
3) Wan
offer is ether, Ed., see, read (see red) your sub-row A, queue eye; hear,
Ed, Creator’s brogue; serried, you erase B-row, a queue
3-4)
a queue aye you heckled
4) W.H.,
I see, heckled wolf; f--k I Ass Tommy’s till
4-5)
if pirates do f--k ass, Tommy still bared it forth (…bearded, farty);
Witchlike, two spirits, deux, f--k aye Shakespeare, me still
(mess till), bared head for Th. T., he found it; Witch-licked woe-spirits
dose you, gusty miss, t’ ill bared; Tommy’s till buried hid
fart
5) fey,
eye date; Hat. sedate
5-6) that
fated (fetid, faded) ms. eye; that’s idiot missing, if you Lear tied;
sound that seedy item wise; I hate ms. insular, Titus; Is idiot missing,
Fuller th’ thief?
6) My
finis you’ll hear; Miss John Fuller, that heavy rebel, poor
is; Muffin of Hull leered; the cereb[r]al power is thought
6-7) lip
arrested, theories hoarded W.H.; earthy, the verbal powers t’ Hat.,
t’ Harry farted
7) W.H.
edge longer inures Edith; Fart, Hat-way, chill “O,” injuring
your faith, that is easy
7-8) in
your Seth, Thetis, Eve, W.H., I see; Thetis’ witch-heaven owe; “I
see a f--kin’ ‘O’,” chorus punned
8) John,
Huchown (Hugh-John) owe, see Horace pun, dense-witted ruse (witty truce)
I jet; Witch heaven owes our ass; suited, rough, I jet; W.H., eye coven
o’ coarse pundits
8-9) spawn
dense, wet header, you f--ked W.H. in leg and steamy ass (…anal,
aging, stemmy); an ocher aspen, dense with terror, f--ked W.H. anally
8-10) Witch
Have-no-Core (Heaven Ogre) is pawing, dense wit, rue f--ked W., Hen.,
eye a gay Anne Shakespeare, missiles you eyed help her t’ ache with
insufficiency, my heart to sway (my Hard-to-sway, my “hard”
toss away)
9)
We neige eye in fit [i.e., stanza]; Lucian’s Tommy’s
elf witty
9-10) W.H.,
in legend, is Tommy’s elf—witty, pretty, acute Hen. S.; with
the party acute [i.e., erect], Hen’s hussy see
10) Wedding
Sue, asses eye science; Witness uses eyes; Witness you face, antsy; Wit,
insouciance, (science) ye may hear, T.T.; …Hen. S. uses antsy
merd to ’suade who-knows
10-11) semi-hard,
tough wight W.H., O knows not; “sciency” my art to Ass Wyatt;
merdy, tough Wyatt W.H. oaken owes not
11) Why Anne
[et]? Who knows. Knotty cunt-science is born of love; Ye et hawk
(hog) in O-snot (O’s knot); we snotty-cunt-science ease by horn of
low butt
11-12) see
in seas Borneo’s low beauty; sea’s bourne [destination] Oslo
be
12) Be you,
T.T., Howard, twice forsworn Tommy; twice forsworn tome low swearing;
Bawdy Howard, too, I see forsworn; Worn, Tommy loves W.-earring; T.T.
wise is our sewer (wise sorcerer) in a tome low
12-13) see
sore few horny Tommy low, swearing “I’m a Deus”;
Tommy loves wearing a Midas dye; John gamy, eye Deo, sudden as
this
13) Eye meadow’s
dye, Anne’s thighs odd; I, sad, want a Jesu-end
13-14) I sad
wand-tag found laid by; a Jesu-end delayed by hisses, ideas, art, end’s
lame inch barren; eye Jesu-end, lady by his ass
14) Lady buys
fetus’s heart, inflaming bare Anne (be her hand); inflaming be Rune
D; John, slay my inch-brand (bare-hand); eye shirt, John’s lame [i.e.,
thin plate of armor]; dais [i.e., bench], hurting ass, [wi]ll amend jabbering;
hear a tennis lay, my inch barren; eye sheer tinsel
Acrostic Wit
The
downward emphatic acrostic code—FHOW B M FWWV[V]YBAL—suggests
various decodings, with the letterstring BM as a clue that the meanings
may be scatological. Possible readings include, e.g., “Foe, be my
foible,” “Fou be my fable?” “Show [F=S]
B.M. of you (of W.), wavy ball,” “Show wight (Wyatt) [B=8]
my foible,” “Shoat, Miss Whitehall [B=8],” “Avowed
hymn fetal (...feudal, futile, fatal, subtle),” “Of hope my
fable,” “S.H., O, you be m’ Sibyl (...syllable),”
and “S.H., who be my Sue, you be Hall.”
The
upward (reverse) code—LABYV[V] WWF M BWOHF—suggests,
e.g., “Labia-whiff, hymn buff [i.e., cause to burst out by sudden
force],” “Labia-wife [Libbie, y’ wife] may be wolf,”
and “Lay [i.e., a poem, with bawdy overtones] by 25 or 30 femmes
be wove.” The down/up hairpin letterstring encodes other strained
possibilities. As a pictographic detail, the string VVWW suggests fangs
that, by depicting a ravenous orifice, seem to link with “labia,”
“wolf,” and “foe.”
The down/up hairpin
encodes “Foe [Faux] B.M. few wipe, awl, labia whiff—maybe
wolf [down].” The string VVWW suggests fangs and links with “labia,”
“wolf,” and “foe” to depict a ravenous orifice.
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