SHAKESPEARE'S LYRIC

HELEN VENDLER PUZZLES OUT THE DISTINCTIVE MUSIC OF THE SONNETS

Author: By William H. Pritchard

Date: SUNDAY, November 30, 1997

Page: G1

Section: Books

In her valuable introduction, Vendler declares that the sonnets represent ``the largest tract of unexamined Shakespearean lines left open to scrutiny.'' Readers like me, who thought they were relatively familiar with these poems, will discover just how unfamiliar their various sequences turn out to be. Vendler warns in the introduction that her commentary is of course not to be read straight through, and she admits that ``total immersion'' in the sonnets is ``a mildly deranging experience.'' Since over the last few weeks I have disregarded her caveat and read the book through, I can say that, if not deranging, the experience was incredibly demanding and frequently exhausting. Like the sonnets themselves, Vendler's book is quite possible to put down from time to time: Perusal of it should alternate with nourishing meals and strolls in the out-of-doors.

Vendler's assumptions are the same ones that lie behind her earlier books on Wallace Stevens, George Herbert and John Keats: that ``life'' in lyric poetry cannot be accounted for, or taken the measure of, by social or psychological or political readings. Since, she argues, lyric is intended to be ``voiceable'' by anyone who reads it, ``it deliberately strips away most social specification (age, regional location, sex, class, even race).'' The motive of lyric is aesthetic; its essential organization is grammatical, tonal, structural; and it is made interesting -- especially in Shakespeare's hands -- through the moves of witty, often self-corrective argument, of changes in direction of address and syntactical behavior. It will not do, she warns us, ``to act as if these lyrics were either a novel or a documentary of a lived life.'' They are rather, she believes, consummate exercises in internal logic, written in the ``old finery'' of an Elizabethan lyric mode that, 400 years later, isn't easily available to us.

Vendler's writing about lyric has always been distinguished for its inventive and daring ways of dealing with poetic structure. For example, she loves to diagram poems, and while assuring readers they needn't bother pursuing all the diagrams (I passed up a few), she has been provoked by the sonnets into her most adventurous excursions in the diagrammatic mode. She likes to take apart a poem, a quatrain, a pair of lines, by rewriting them, showing by contrast how interesting and satisfying is Shakespeare's ordering. She is adept at imagining ``antecedent scenarios,'' such as lie behind the opening question of sonnet 76 (``Why is my verse so barren of new pride?''), making the poem more dialectical and dramatic. She is equally adept at paraphrasing the ``plain sense'' of lines, then showing how much more than plain sense Shakespeare has achieved in them. Often she will tease out what she calls ``aural doodles'' -- the way, for example, words get encapsulated in other words -- in order to describe the ``anagrammatic and graphic games'' Shakespeare has set himself to play. These games may be truly imaginative or merely fanciful, but they constitute ``slippages'' of expression that make for interesting writing.

To cite but a single example of such writing, she says about sonnet 87 (``Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing''), whose final couplet is ``Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter, / In sleep a king, but waking no such matter'':

``The deposed-by-daylight king of the last line generates the several puns of the closing: mist-a-king, m-a-king, w-a-king, the `nutshells' hiding the nut, a king, which is, phonetically speaking, close to `aching.' Ten of the fourteen rhyme-words end in -ing, so that the rhyme internally present in a king and waking (the only internal words in the poem ending in -ing) is therefore necessarily foregrounded, rendering the pun noticeable.''

Although, she adds, it has not been previously noticed. Having never noticed this wordplay myself, I felt slightly dense if not seriously abashed.

At other times, the wakeup call is stronger, as when, with reference to sonnet 64 (``When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced''), she says about the last two lines of the third quatrain (``Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate: / That Time will come and take my love away''):

``After the philosophical Latinity of Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, we expect something equally Latinate, like [Corruption and mortality prevail]. Instead, we see the naked primary defenselessness of Shakespeare's helpless monosyllables: Time will come and take my love away. In its collapse, its unprotected vulnerability, and its dismayed adolescent simplicity of rhythm, this line feels like a death.''

Here she has found the exact words to express what we knew, but never knew we knew.

It is consistent with Vendler's total immersion in the sonnets that she learned them all by heart, as an enabling means of support for the ``evidential'' criticism -- in which ``instant and sufficient linguistic evidence'' is produced to back up every critical remark -- she so unfailingly and brilliantly practices. Yet many good poets and critics have not shared her high admiration and passionate love for these sonnets. William Hazlitt thought that Shakespeare, if judged on their basis alone, would be thought of as a cold, artificial writer; Wordsworth found their chief faults to be ``sameness, tediousness, quaintness, and elaborate obscurity''; and Auden, who wrote searchingly and sympathetically about them, conceded their ``extremely uneven poetic value.'' As one who learned to admire the poetry of John Donne and Ben Jonson in part for the way it liberated us from a moribund literary form -- the Elizabethan sonnet and its courtly procedures -- I remain an imperfect lover of Shakespeare's poems, despite Vendler's immense resourcefulness and passionate advocacy. Twenty or 25 of the sonnets are surely matchless, and if (as Randall Jarrell once claimed) most of even a great poet's work is not so great, then 25 out of 154 is a genius percentage.

Vendler apologizes in her book for what she terms ``an absence of metrical commentary.'' Maybe more of it would have convinced me that what often feels, in the less interesting sonnets, like the predictable, all-too-regular movement of Shakespeare's verse line is in fact more varied and powerful than I hear it to be; that what the critic L. C. Knights called ``the subtly varied replay of the speech rhythm against the formal pattern of the verse'' occurs more often than I think it does. At any rate, after Vendler's book it cannot be said that the sonnets constitute ``the largest tract of unexamined Shakespearean lines left open to scrutiny.'' Just how many of those lines may be judged to combine in poems that touch the heart, as well as the head, remains an open question.