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Notes on Set II: Your Painted Counterfeit
Set
II houses the first famous sonnet, No. 18, “Shall I compare
thee to a summer’s day?” Seeing its familiar lines sharing
space with new siblings is unsettling and may even generate a sort of
anger—as if a teenage daughter in some household down our street
were uprooted from her home and forced against everybody’s will
to take lodgings with some alien family.
Critics have noted
that the first several overt texts here segue into the theme of immortality
through art and downplay the exhortation to marry, but I believe that
no one has detected in Sonnets 15-28 any especial thematic consistency.
I can’t say for certain that I do, either. Now that we understand
how each line in Q carries a double weight of meaning, we can see that
keeping topical unity or telling any progressive story would have been
more than doubly hard in Q.
Though
any generalization (except about rhyme) on the absolute difference
between the Sonnets and the Runes is beset with problems, the poet does
seem to give each sonnet a kind of topical unity that any given rune may
lack. Still, the Runes typically cohere as texts in all kinds of ways—through
figures, puns, echoic language, and even in many cases by the logic of
octave, quatrain, sestet, and couplet; more so than the Sonnets, the Runes
seem to me to progress by add-on association, meandering through a range
of ideas and holding onto logic and sense somewhat more precariously and
incrementally. The missing punch of rhyme is also a part of what they
“don’t have.” As riddlic texts, the runes thrive on
vague and prepositioned pronouns, a shifting point of view, and strained
syntax. And Q’s punctuation, already unreliable in the Sonnets,
becomes mostly irrelevant in the Runes—except on special occasions,
where it works.
Particularly the
materials of personal lament in Sonnets 27-28—which function like
a closed couplet to Set II—color all 14 runes with “how hard
this is,” so that that complaint, finally, may be what each rune
seems to add up to, whatever has come earlier—a mix of material
representing the muse and discussing the poet’s struggle to memorialize
that figure. Whether or not Will composed Q in sequence, Set II seems,
at an early stage in the cycle, to say, “What have I gotten myself
into? What can I hope to get out of this hopeless undertaking?”
The runes make that complaint continually clear from 15 onward, while
Sonnets 15-28 do not do so.
Whatever
thematic consistency can be found in the set, the unique variations
of implicit dramatic situations and conceits are what make the runes
vital. Three runes that show how a strong conceit can make a text memorable
are 21, where the muse is a “man of hues” hanging in the poet’s
“bosom shop”; 26, where the auditor is a “babe in the
dark” and the poet is his nurse; and 28, where the poet is trapped
like a pregnant animal in the “lair” of his art.
Set II has much
else that is memorable: e.g., The poet’s struggle for conceits in
15; the theatrical imagery (always suggesting The Globe) in 17; and Will
as “best painter” in 18 and 19. The imagined situation closing
20—where the poet envisions himself meeting the “friend”
at last and being effectively dismissed, after all his efforts, with a
polite handshake—evokes genuine pathos, especially after we know
about the excruciating, self-isolating work he has undertaken.
Three runes
in Set II seem heavily influenced by familiarly problematic lines—all
from Sonnet 20, “A Woman’s face with nature’s own hand
painted”—where the first-line pun on “Onan” is
just as much at work in the Sonnet 20 as in Rune 15! Offshoots of this
Sonnet are Runes 16, 21, and 27, where we hear anew the famous address
to “the Master Mistress of my passion” (Rune 16.6); the problematic
line A man in hew all Hews in his controwling (Q Rune 21.6);
and the suggestively bawdy comment “…she [Time] prickt
thee out for women’s pleasure” (Rune 27.6)
As in Set I, Runes
15-28 often call into question the “reality” of the auditor
by hinting that the “increase” the poet speaks of may be that
of his own poetry—with the implication that the “fairest creature”
he addresses may be his own cycle or Beauty itself. Set II keeps this
conundrum active by variously making us think the poet is talking to Sue
and/or John Hall, to Anne, to Southampton, to the texts themselves, to
Beauty, to himself, or to his own “dark ms.”
On the
leaf, Set II houses the first of several lines in Q that are
long enough to require parenthetical “doubling back” to make
them fit the margins of the small-format page in the 1609 book. The couplet
at Sonnet 28.13-14, punning “…draw my furrows longer”
(28.13) and “…make grief’s length seem stronger”
(28.14) invites us to start looking for such “long-line wit.”
Except for contiguous “WS” strings (Sonnets 17/21, 17/18)
and “WH” strings (Sonnets 27/28), acrostic alignments of the
bold, oversized letters on the leaf do not particularly strike the eye.
The vertical code WDA B A M VVS LH SML suggests “Witty be
aye m’ W.S. lay [poem] small.” The reverse letterstring SVVMA
BAD suggests “Swami Bad.”
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