The English Lyric Tradition by R. James Goldstein

Author:R. James Goldstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2017-03-22T16:00:00+00:00

This poem clearly demonstrates Shakespeare’s mastery of the English sonnet. Each quatrain is syntactically independent while the couplet comments on the previous reflections. Both the opening and the reference to the Last Judgment in line twelve allude to the marriage service in the Book of Common Prayer, when the minister warns: “I require and charge you (as you will answer at the dreadful day of judgment, when the secrets of all hearts shall be disclosed) that if either of you know any impediment, why ye may not lawfully be joined in matrimony, that ye confess it.”

Although this poem is often recited nowadays during wedding vows, its placement within the first subsequence of Q strongly suggests that it is about something other than heterosexual love leading to marriage and lawful issue. Kerrigan suggests that lines 2–12 resemble “a secular variation on St. Paul’s account of love in 1 Corinthians 13,” but he offers a substantially darker reading, interpreting the poem as “about what cannot be attained,” an absolute goal so lofty as to be out of the reach of ordinary mortals.96 After the absolutism variously expressed in the previous sonnets, this would be a bracing admission indeed for the poet to make.

In his General Note on the poem, Booth suggests that “its first clause aside, it is one of the few Shakespeare sonnets that can be paraphrased without brutality.”97 We may test this idea by attempting to translate the poem’s reasonably plain sense into prose: “I do not wish to allow any obstacles (or even concede that they may exist) that might prevent the permanent union of two minds that share absolute integrity. It is not true love if a lover responds to changes in the beloved (or external circumstances) by changing accordingly. It is not true love if a lover shows a willingness to shift ground by joining the beloved in a new location, emotionally speaking. Absolutely not: real love is established forever in one place, a beacon or lighthouse that faces storms and does not totter. It is the distant, mysterious North Star that every lost vessel can use to navigate by measuring how many degrees it appears above the horizon. True love is not the laughing stock of Father Time, even though the bloom of youth lies within his destructive reach. True love does not change over the course of time but endures as long as the world itself shall last. If anything I have just said can be found to be a mistake (or a heretical belief) in a court of law, I will stop claiming to be a poet and will accept the idea that there’s no such thing as a true lover.”

That seems to be more or less what the poem “says.” Yet any prose paraphrase must fall short of the incomparable grandeur of Shakespeare’s poetic language. Its careful organization of a complex but coherent line of thought, its apt metaphors and personifications, its persuasive and insistent tone, and its sonorous cadences: all these combine to make the poetic argument highly compelling and memorable.

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