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Notes on Set VII (Sonnets 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 (cf. 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 (cf., 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,
cf. 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 (cf., 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 (cf., 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 Chatter (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 (cf. 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.
The
vertical acrostic code on the set page—MSS VVTTH F SH
F VVBS—suggests such readings as “Mss. witty, evasive
webs” and “Mss. witty, this sheaf W.- ‘B.S.’ [F=S].”
The strings SVV (cf. Sue, WS reversed) and TT (cf. Thomas
Thorpe) emerge in this codeline, along with BS, suggesting “Bess.”
This string, of course, is visible only on the composite leaf and is not
apparent in the acrostic of Rune 85, which proceeds numerically and horizontally.
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