The Idea of the Book and the Creation of Literature by Stephen Orgel

Author:Stephen Orgel [Orgel, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192699404
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2022-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

But instead of setting up any solutions, the rhetorical questions simply clear the space for the rationalization that follows: “O benefit of ill, now I find true / That better is by evil still made better” (9–10). These lines, in light of the suffering expressed in the beginning, appear a piece of sophistry designed to make good of the ill. In other sonnets, the recognition expressed by the question also seems to seek no solution; it functions as a rhetoric to express conclusions already decided, as in the opening of sonnet 97: “How like a winter hath my absence been / From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! / What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen! / What old December’s bareness everywhere!” (1–4). As the modern punctuation recognizes, in all these cases the questions are not really questions; their exclamatory mode avoids probing the only painful solution, as if that is already known: break off the love affair. Instead of acting as mimetic moments of indecision, they act more like deferrals of action and decision. They are escapes: the articulation of the recognition, the formalization of painful truth into question or complaint, allows the speaker to keep the truths at bay or in question.

A similar mechanism is at work in the sonnets’ many chains of alternatives, usually hinging on an important “or.” The opening of sonnet 148 is a good example.

O me, what eyes hath love put in my head,

Which have no correspondence with true sight;

Or, if they have, where is my judgment fled,

That censures falsely what they see aright?

(1–4)

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