Roberto Pacheco
A great work of poetry reflects the relationship between writer and muse, admirer and beloved, creation and beauty. Additionally, there frequently exists an underlying, hidden message among the eloquent trappings of the writer’s imagination. Often, the poet’s intention is to eternalize the object of desire to perpetuate the poet’s own existence. One could argue that in his sonnets, William Shakespeare’s Speaker is similarly motivated. In poems such as Sonnet 115, “Time’s tyranny” (9) will not only take the muse’s beauty and the Poet’s own mortality, but also the Poet’s ability to contain his beloved and to hoard the beauty he so enjoys. When considering the concepts of love and beauty as expressed in Plato’s Symposium, the Shakespeare’s sonnets are not about preserving the beauty of the Youth (Sonnets 1-126) or expressing disdain for his mistress (Sonnets 127-152) but are instead a much deeper search for self-contentment and, ultimately, personal immortality. The Speaker’s goal is to eternalize the beauty of his subjects while preserving the Speaker’s own memory within both his muses and in the poems.
Among the many elements of a love sonnet, one is the ultimate act of devotion and admiration, and another is a means of preserving either the muse, the work itself, or both. In Shakespeare’s sonnets, beauty and time are in constant conflict. The Poet’s muse, that is, his source of inspiration, the physical representation of what he believes is beautiful and good about the world, is in danger of fading away: “In these sonnets the poet maintains a fixed attitude towards the friend, that of formal, somewhat distant admiration, together with a concern for what in the long-range view the friend must suffer along with the rest of creation under the tyranny of time” (Kaula 46). Furthermore, the Speaker projects his own aspirations onto the Youth, who, in the Speaker’s eyes, is a deity or “the world’s fresh ornament” (1.9), a fleeting gift to the world whose beauty reminds the Poet of his own mortality. The Youth’s beauty in time will fade away, as will the Poet’s ability to enjoy it. The aging of the muse and the death of the Poet make time the chief concern of the sonnets. Therefore, poetry is the means by which the Poet overcomes both conflicts of time and beauty, as stated in Sonnet 19: “Yet do thy worst, old Time, despite thy wrong, My love shall in my verse ever live young” (13-14). The addressee of these sonnets, the Young Man, is encouraged to procreate in order to extend and preserve his beauty. Thus, the procreation sonnets, as well as sonnet 18 and 19, are commonly viewed as evidence of the Poet’s principal motive to preserve the Youth. However, although the apparent purpose of the “procreation sonnets” is to prolong the muses’ existence, the interior struggle within the Poet is also apparent.
Though the “procreation sonnets” incline the reader to believe that the Poet’s focus is the flattery and preservation of his muse, Sonnet 22, for example, reveals the Poet’s desires to be, as in Plato’s Symposium, complete, eternal, and in possession of the beautiful. In Plato’s work, Aristophanes describes “love” both as the union of souls and as “the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete” (191A-193A). This concept can be applied to the Young Man sonnets, in which the Speaker sees the Youth as his other half. Furthermore, the Speaker sees what he wants to become as the Youth exposes what he, the Speaker, lacks: “For all that beauty that doth cover thee / Is but the seemly raiment of my heart, / Which in thy breast thy live, as thine in me” (5-7). The Speaker proposes the idea of exchanging hearts in order to satiate his desires: to be young, beautiful, and eternal. Sonnet 22 reveals that he is afraid of aging, of being considered unattractive, and of losing his beloved. The Speaker reveals, “Certainly while I love you loving me, I find myself in you thinking about me, and I recover myself, lost by myself through my own negligence, in you, preserving me. You do the same in me” (Langley 73). Here, the Speaker tries to convince the Youth of an interdependence between them. He will keep the subject both young and beautiful through poetic verse; the muse in return will do the same by associating with the Speaker: “My glass shall not fade persuade me I am old, / So long as Youth and thou are of one date” (1-2). As a result, the Speaker and Youth will be of the same age if they remain one. The mutual dependence, however, depends on containing the Platonic idea of the beautiful.
Beauty is responsible for all beautiful things. In the Symposium, to love an individual’s beauty is to love all forms of the beautiful: “A lover first falls in love with a single beautiful body, which inspires him to give birth to beautiful ideas” (xx). In addition, this idea reveals that a lover is more devoted to the joys of beauty which accompany the beloved rather than the beloved himself. Plato’s discussion of forms is found within the language of Poet; he enjoys the beauty of his muse because it inspires the creation of other beautiful subjects. Therefore, in the Platonic sense, the Poet does not love the Young Man so much as the inspiration the Young Man creates in him. The child that the Youth is encouraged to have is not with a woman, but with the Poet: “The poet’s brain is the womb made fertile by his noble subject-matter, which brings forth sonnets as the subject babies” (Duncan-Jones 56); that is, the creation of the sonnets as their intellectual child links the Poet and his beloved.
However, the Poet and his muse are not connected emotionally. The Poet only utilizes his muse to create further pleasures for himself, to create more sources of the beautiful to feed upon. Their apparent mutual desire to contain the beautiful is what binds them and makes the poet-muse relationship work: “The adoption of eternalizing rhyme as the vehicle, enabling exclusive interaction between the maker and receiving subject, suggest an intensification of the protagonist’s love, as it is born of and nourished by beauty, its amorous character” (Pequigney 20). The Poet’s offer of immortalizing youth is not an exclamation of his unwavering devotion to his subject. On the contrary, it highlights the Poet’s resolve to obtain the beautiful. The muse is just a gatekeeper that separates the Poet from the beautiful. Immortalization is the Poet’s “vehicle,” a Trojan horse that allows him to invade and purge what he desires. Without a doubt, the real force within the sonnets is Beauty, not the subject, as Beauty is the principle motivation for all parties involved. The Young Man seems to possess the key to the Speaker’s contentment, but to love and possess Beauty is to long for happiness, the ultimate good for the self, not for the subjects of his poems.
Although the Speaker seeks to contain the beautiful, he is misguided in his search for beautiful objects, the Young Man being the good and the Dark Lady being a false beauty. In the Young Man the Poet searches for deeper non-sexual and everlasting love that can transcend time. In the Dark Lady, he searches for a temporal love based on immediate gratification of bodily lust, a false good. However, what the Speaker longs for is everlasting happiness; he is searching for the good. As F. C. White notes, “Socrates [asserts] that all human beings experience love in the forgoing sense of love: all desire the permanent possession of the good and they desire this for themselves” (367). Furthermore, White proposes that the search for the good clarifies the notion that carnal pleasure is the goal of the lover. Physical beauty that leads to carnal desire is a false good because it is only temporary. Sonnet 137 demonstrates that the Speaker claims to know what beauty is, but also admits that his eyes may deceive him. The Speaker recognizes that her beauty, which germinates lust and envy, will only hurt him. He longs for extended happiness that is not only everlasting but also independent of external factors. Therefore, the Speaker seeks love in all the wrong places with the Dark Lady.
What the Poet seeks is true happiness for himself, not eternal life for his vain muse or fidelity from his mistress. White’s interpretation of Diatoma’s idea of love supports this claim: “Love, she explains, is not what some have suggested, not the seeking of one’s half, since the good is what human beings love. […] More properly, what human beings love is that the good be in their possession forever: the object of their love, what their love is ‘of,’ is the permanent possession for themselves of the good” (367). Furthermore, a person who has complete “possession” of the good has achieved self-mastery. He has escaped the mortal shackles of the living and has entered into the realm of the immortals. In the case of the Sonnets, the search for immortality is the ultimate goal of the Speaker.
The reader is led to believe that the Poet longs for the Youth. Unlike the love, or lust, he feels for the Dark Lady, the Poet does not demonstrate a sexual longing for the Young Man. Instead, he feels admiration because in the eyes of the Poet the subject possesses beauty, the good. In the Platonic sense, the Speaker is hoarding the beautiful, the good, with the hidden desire to be complete and eternal, using “earthly” bodies as building blocks to obtain a more divine form of beauty, an absolute beauty. Therefore, the Young Man sonnets are written to secure the love of the beautiful, the good—everlasting happiness that centers on the self. The Dark Lady sonnets, on the other hand, represent the opposite side of the good—false, insatiable, and temporal desires. Beauty is a longing for immortality, and poetry is the means by which the Speaker obtains immortality and contains the beautiful. Though the Speaker never succeeds in conquering both his muses, he manages to steal their essence in the poetry, eternalizing himself in verse.
Works Cited
Duncan-Jones, Katherine, editor. Shakespeare’s Sonnets by William Shakespeare. Arden 3rd Series, Revised Edition, The Arden Shakespeare, 2010.
Kaula, David. “‘In War with Time’: Temporal Perspectives in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 3, no. 1, 1963, pp. 45–57. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/449544.
Langley, Eric Francis. Narcissism and Suicide in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries. Oxford UP, 2009.
Pequigney, Joseph. “Critical Views on Sonnet 19.” Shakespeare’s Poems and Sonnets, edited by Harold Bloom, Chelsea,1999, pp. 19-20.
Plato. Symposium. Translated by Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, Hackett Publishing Co., 1989.
Stockard, Emely. “Patterns of Consolation in Shakespeare’s Sonnets 1-126.” Studies in Philology, vol. 94, no. 4, 1997, pp. 465–493. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4174591.
White, F. C. “Virtue in Plato’s ‘Symposium.’” The Classical Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 2, 2004, pp. 366–378. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3556369.