SOURCE: “Vendler Reads the Sonnets,” in Salmagundi, Nos. 121-122, Winter-Spring, 1999, pp. 256-66.

[In the following review of The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Rogoff commends Vendler's perceptive, critical analysis, and explication of Shakespeare's verse.]

An odd thing about the Shakespearean sonnet is how few great poets—and how few great poems—have exploited it since Shakespeare. Surrey most likely invented the form to make the job easier in rhyme-scarce English （Wyatt also experimented in this direction but never quite nailed it down）, and since it allows the greater flexibility of seven different rhymes, as opposed to the Italian form’s four or five, you would think that most poets writing in English would jump on the bandwagon. But ask any poet, any reader, any critic to identify great sonneteers and sonnets in English after 1600, and the poets named will have overwhelmingly chosen the Italian over the English form. A highly informal poll I took yielded the following, listed here in order of decreasing frequency: Wordsworth, Donne, Keats, Milton, Millay, Hopkins, Frost, Yeats, Berryman, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Lowell, Cummings, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. With the exceptions of Keats, Frost, and Cummings, who all worked elegantly in both forms and introduced some signal innovations of their own, this is quite a Petrarchan group （Lowell, of course, working mostly in blank verse）. Why should this be?

One possibility is that we have had it wrong all along, and that in spite of its greater generosity with rhymes, the Shakespearean form is actually more difficult to master. The juicy temptation of two new rhyme sounds for each quatrain smells too good for poets to pass up, until they confront the brevity of those quatrains and realize how much must get crammed into each—not to mention the daunting task of trying to conclude in a couplet without sounding trite. Certainly the Italian sonnet, despite the headaches of juggling a mere two rhymes for eight lines, offers in its octave and sestet more room to maneuver, to develop, to show off, giving the poet a freer hand in creating the illusion of felt life.

Another reason, of course, is the excellence with which Shakespeare manipulated the form, taking Surrey’s contraption of convenience, previously adopted by no poet of genius save Sidney in sonnets like “Leave Me, Oh Love,” and carving his powerful rhyme, a sequence varied in quality but reaching great pinnacles and profundities of poetic craft and feeling. Given Shakespeare’s lyric monument, we can understand why most later poets would shy from the sonnet renamed in his honor; after all, playwrights make no attempt to improve on Hamlet or Lear.

Shakespeare’s place in literary history creates even more problems for the later sonneteer because of the formal legacy of the English form. It combines, as Rosalie Colie noted, the mel, or honey, of love poetry with the sal, or salt, of epigram, and that epigrammatic nature of Shakespeare’s couplets gives most modern poets fits. Howard Nemerov, who wrote a number of first-rate English sonnets himself, liked to imagine Shakespeare regularly turning his three quatrains over to an apprentice: “Okay, now let’s see what you can do with that.” Ironically, the couplet, with its tight rhyme and syntactical wholeness, feels most unpoetical, most distractingly artificial to poets in our very-late-Romantic period, the part of the sonnet that refuses to hide the art. It may not be an exaggeration to say that the wit of Shakespeare’s couplets ultimately inspired eighteenth century prosody, a poetics that mined salt and a host of other spices, often to the neglect of the honeycomb. If so, the Romantic rebellion against Enlightenment practice might also have precipitated a two hundred-year reaction against the epigrammatic and proverbial feel of the Shakespearean sonnet.

Rarely since Shakespeare, in the hands of someone like Keats, does the English form open out melodically and imagistically, instead of hemming in. The way “When I Have Fears,” perhaps the greatest post-Shakespeare example, begins the couplet’s thematic material early, a at the end of the third quatrain, in order to achieve a moment of cosmic rapture before hauling the world back in, is both innovative and thrilling:

                                         then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Keats here provides something of an exception that proves the rule. Although strict construction marks both traditional sonnet forms, the larger space of the Italian sonnet’s units, as well as the rhyme scheme’s greater freedom in its sestet, makes the form’s dictation of feeling less obvious and gives the Italian form the illusion of greater spontaneity. All the more reason, then, that Shakespeare’s accomplishment fills us with awe.

Helen Vendler’s new book, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, nine years in the making, arrives as a commentary on our chief poetic god from the critic most often dubbed our god of interpretation. In fact, the book itself comically played a sort of savior when it made its stage debut at the age of three months in John Guare’s The General of Hot Desire, far and away the best of seven commissioned short plays inspired by Shakespeare sonnets, produced under the collective title Love’s Fire （New York: Morrow, 1998）. In Guare’s play, a theatrical company assigned to create a play out of the Cupid sonnets, 153 and 154 （Guare’s own task, of course）, encounter frustration after frustration in puzzling out the poems, until one actress arrives with a copy of Vendler’s book: “Helen Vendler!” they cry, as they begin to read her commentary; “I love Helen Vendler!”

The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets does give us much reason to love Helen Vendler, particularly if we revere the Sonnets as living, breathing poems, rather than as skeleton keys to Shakespeare’s life, sexuality, and personal attitudes, or to the secret identities of the young man, the rival poet, the dark lady, or Mr. W. H. Vendler undertakes to show the sonnets in their considerable, if not infinite, variety, keeping in sight at all times the continual turns of thought and feeling in each poem that make it “a system in motion” and “a trajectory of changing feelings,” and “trying to see the chief aesthetic ‘game’ being played in each sonnet.” She also argues—contrary to what I have suggested above—that Shakespeare, by “constantly inventing new permutations of internal form,” proves the English sonnet “far more flexible than the two-part Italian sonnet.” Most of all, she investigates the sonnets “from the viewpoint of the poet who wrote them,” asking “what was the aesthetic challenge for Shakespeare in writing these poems?” By attempting to reconstruct Shakespeare’s mind in the process of composition, she tries to construct our aesthetic experience in reading them.

Vendler, then, offers a flexible kind of reception theory approach to the Sonnets, and when she examines the poems’ use of overlapping structures—rhetorical, syntactic, formal, affective, and so on—she is indebted to Stephen Booth, who introduced these ideas in his Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets nearly thirty years ago. Likewise, Vendler takes her inspiration from Booth and others in discussing how shifts of feeling in the Sonnets seldom coincide with the formal divisions of 4, 4, 4, 2; rather, in Shakespeare’s hands the form more often works like an Italian sonnet, or in units of 8, 4, 2, or 4, 8, 2, or 12, 2, or 5, 7, 2, and onward almost to the limits of mathematical possibility. Vendler surpasses her predecessors in her sensitivity to Shakespeare’s language, and in the astonishing thoroughness and even obsessiveness with which she considers these issues of form and feeling in every Shakespeare sonnet. The result feels truly encyclopedic, and readers should therefore take under advisement her caveat that “this Commentary is not intended to be read straight through,” lest they feel inundated by her flood of structures, diagrams, and close attention to words, puns, and even meaningful anagrams. As with an encyclopedia, the book works better as a reference—a great browse—than as a good read, a characteristic that differentiates it markedly from her books on Herbert and Keats, for example.

Vendler also departs from Booth and the other reception theorists in her insistence that the Sonnets finally mean something, and she thus rejects Booth’s conclusion “that the critic, helpless before the plurisignification of language and overlapping of multiple structures visible in a Shakespeare sonnet, must be satisfied with irresolution with respect to its fundamental gestalt.” On the contrary, Vendler not only finds the individual poems comprehensible, despite the difficulties so many of them present, but she calls the richly complex, often self-contradictory, but finally coherent presentation of “Shakespeare’s speaker, alone with his thoughts … the greatest achievement, imaginatively speaking, of the sequence.” Throughout her commentary, she makes good on this encouraging thesis, demonstrating that art can triumph, as Shakespeare’s speaker so often brags to his young man, and that at least some major aspects of the Sonnets as a whirling virtual experience are not necessarily damned to indeterminacy.

Reviewers have complained that Vendler gives no account of the overall structure of the Sonnets （a charge justly leveled at Vendler’s otherwise marvelous book on George Herbert, which never explores The Temple’s architecture）, but in fact, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets accomplishes this somewhat—not in an individual introductory section, but in passing. We tack through the Sonnets periplum, navigating the coastline, striking strange shores and making key discoveries along the way about its overall concerns and shape, the unfolding of the speaker’s personality, and the messy progress of his attachments to first the young man and then the dark lady. Thus, early in the sequence, she notes the introduction of an “I,” the first address to the young man as “love,” the first mention of art as a defense against death, the first identification of the speaker as a poet, the first travel sonnet, the first instance of insomnia, the first comment on the young man’s flaws, and on and on, sounding a bit like MGM proclaiming, “Garbo talks!” “Garbo laughs!” Far more valuably, however, Vendler’s discussion of the sonnets of disillusionment that close the young man subsequence, ending with the six-couplet “sonnet” 126, and those that round off the dark lady subsequence, create a convincing understanding of how these Sonnets plausibly operate as a whole. Unfortunately, the reader can only glean this sense of overall structure by plowing straight through, not, as I have mentioned, the most profitable way to experience the book.

To help focus the formal structure of individual sonnets, Vendler introduces the concepts of the Couplet Tie, the Key Word, and the Defective Key Word. All fruitfully remind us how Shakespeare makes a poem cohere partly by the simple device of apt repetition of important words, word roots, or even punning parts of words in its different sections. The Key Word—a word that appears in each of the three quatrains and the couplet—is a particularly welcome study aid, although Vendler succumbs to the temptation to stretch things now and then, as in Sonnet 52, where the Key Word “blessèd” masquerades as “placèd” in the second quatrain, or, worse, in 53, where “one” constitutes the Key Word, but only “if one is prepared to find it orthographically hiding, as well as phonetically present” in such guises as “milliONs （2）,.. AdONis （5）, .. foisON （9）,.. cONstant （14）.” The reconstruction of Shakespeare’s thought process as he writes a sonnet surely engages a significant amount of presumed wordplay, but some readers might find Vendler’s pun-and-anagram-hunting punishing. Nevertheless, one of the book’s pleasures comes from learning how Vendler’s thought process works as she reads Shakespeare—the anticipation, for example, when we reach Sonnet 100 （“Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget’st so long”） that her ear and alertness to puns and transformations will lead her to identify “time” and “might” as a “possible （anagrammatic） key word.”

Of these three tools, perhaps the keenest insights into Shakespeare’s binding together the English form come from Vendler’s Defective Key Words, words appearing in all but one of a sonnet’s formal units. For example, in Sonnet 85 （“My tongue-tied Muse in manners holds her still”）, the Defective Key Words “words” and “thought” appear in every formal section except the first quatrain, where “the poet’s Muse’s tongue-tied still[ness]” suppresses them. Even better, in Sonnet 143 （“Lo, as a careful huswife runs to catch”）, a round in which the allegorical housewife chases a chicken while her “neglected child” chases her, the word “catch” appears in each quatrain but not in the couplet, since “the mistress never catches her lover,” the fowl the dark lady is here pursuing.

Vendler in pursuit of a sonnet’s mysteries is usually a splendid thing to witness, and she brings considerable wit and intelligence to her reading. She sorts the poems into helpful categories, as when she identifies Sonnet 20 （“A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted”）, the speaker’s frustrated dissertation on his doting over the androgynous young man, as a “little myth of origin”:

The speaker’s sterile play of the master/mistress against the putative falsity of women can be explained by his anger at women for not being the young man, at the young man for not being a （sexually available） woman. … Though Galen thought all embryos were originally female. ., it is Shakespeare who creates the causal myth that the change to maleness in this case arises from Nature’s falling in love with the projected female, and therefore rendering her male. Under all the play, one is only sure that the speaker, too, has fallen a-doting; and the rather bitter wit—on acquainted [cunt], “one thing”/“no-thing,” and prick （Nature’s joke on the speaker）—is the last flicker of the helplessness of one who cannot play fast and loose, as he would like to, with a physical body.

Vendler here takes what she calls a jeu d’esprit and shows how its lascivious punning barely masks erotic despair, letting us enjoy the jokes but also making us take them seriously as entrees into complex psychological states. Her commentary, in fact, is so rich that sometimes her finest critical points arrive almost as afterthoughts, reinforcing our illusion of watching her mind work through a poem, Sonnet 71, for example （“No longer mourn for me when I am dead”）: “We may read this poem, then, in a second, and truer, way—as a defensive construct hoping to awaken in the shallow young man the very depths of mourning that it affects to prohibit. This in fact seems to me the most probable reading. …”

Vendler is so good at showing us things in the Sonnets that, while she of course cannot show us everything, reading her trains us to see more for ourselves. In Sonnet 104 （“To me, fair friend, you never can be old”）, the poem’s “acceleration in the pace of transience” belies the young man’s apparent eternal youth—so much so that the sonnet pulls off an aesthetic shock in its couplet, where the speaker addresses “thou age unbred: / Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.” “The stunning ‘turn’ by which the young man ‘dies’ in the space between Q₃ [the third quatrain] and C [the couplet] is in fact the major aesthetic achievement （along with the speedup of change which caused it） of the poem.” Yet reading along we also notice for ourselves the poem’s insistent subjectivity regarding the young man: “To me, .. you never can be old”; “Such seems your beauty still”; “the seasons I have seen”; “Since first I saw you fresh”; “your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand”; until finally breaking down just before the couplet: “mine eye may be deceived.” We augment Vendler’s commentary by seeing how the poem attempts to balance the speaker’s urgent, subjective need to keep his beloved young by force of will against the sure knowledge that such a task is impossible. The speaker futilely tries to make the poem a safe haven, a world in which youth and love can endure, his failure making the release of the young man to the processes of mortality all the more poignant.

In becoming better readers, in seeing more for ourselves, we also become better prepared to argue with Vendler’s interpretations now and again. “I have often wished, as I was reading a poem,” she says in her preface, “that I could know what another reader had noticed in it; and I leave a record here of what one person has remarked so that others can compare their own noticings with mine. In such a way, we may advance our understanding of Shakespeare’s procedures as a working poet—that is, as a master of aesthetic strategy.” At times Vendler becomes so excited by her discoveries about a sonnet’s strategy that key features of the poem that might further complicate our understanding fall by the wayside. In the great Sonnet 73 （“That time of year thou mayst in me behold”）, she identifies the “glowing of such fire” in the third quatrain as the most vital part of the poem: “He is not the ashes of a fire, or the embers of a fire—he is no longer （as he was in the first two quatrains） a noun, but rather a verbal, an action, a glowing （not a dying）. … [W]hen the speaker reads the erotic text of his emotional life, he sees a glowing. It is certainly easier to ask someone to love a glowing rather than a ruin or a fad[ing]. …” But while Vendler makes a strong case that the poem’s quatrains successively correct each other, she ignores the psychological activity that makes the first two quatrains just as affectively—and aesthetically—active. In the opening quatrain, particularly, “When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang,” looks perfectly straightforward until we notice the illogical progression of “leaves, none, few.” The line’s disorder surely enacts the speaker’s resistance to aging: he depicts the leaves, then their disappearance, but immediately finds the bare branches too devastating and so restores a “few” as a momentary stay and comfort. Those few leaves express a vitality and desire to hang onto life as urgent and plaintive as the glowing of the third quatrain.

Though Vendler apologizes for “the absence, except in occasional cases below, of metrical commentary,” some scansions she does include feel idiosyncratic. The ninth line of Sonnet 39 （“O how thy worth with manners may I sing”）, which she hears as

O ábsence ❙ what a ❙ tórment ❙
wouldst thou ❙ próve,

and whose irregularity she notes, strikes me as a virtually orthodox iambic pentameter. And a line from Sonnet 108 she describes as regular, in order to reinforce the speaker’s feeling of monotony,

I múst each dáy say o’ér the véry
sáme,

might more tellingly—and accurately—be scanned with four consecutive stresses on “eách dáy sáy o’ér,” emphasizing the speaker’s rebellion against the young man’s accusation of monotony in his poems. Her brilliant reading of Sonnet 126, the last of the young man subsequence （“O thou my lovely boy, who in thy power”） is marred by her insistence that the poem scans largely into trochees and amphibrachs. While this peculiar scansion conveys her strong understanding of the poem’s rhythms, she bases it on a false prosodic premise: “I prefer the [scansion option] which keeps words intact.” But scansion necessarily allows for the split word: we practice it to establish a poem’s regular metrical model so we can observe the poem’s metrical variations and better evaluate the poet’s rhythmic skill. To disdain divided words in scanning a poem seems as absurd as disallowing notes held over a bar line in music.

Further, some of the Sonnets move us most effectively through their rhythmic cruxes and cry out for more prosodic attention. In discussing Sonnet 130 （“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”）, though Vendler troubles to construct an imaginary sonnet out of the conventions Shakespeare’s anti-Petrarchan gem satirizes—“My mistress’ eyes are brilliant as the sun, / And coral’s colour matches her lips’ red,” and so on—she seems oddly uninterested in that wonderful poem, perhaps because she doesn’t focus on its simple but brilliant prosodic climax. The third quatrain opens with three lines of perfect iambic pentameter, confessing with completely blasé regularity, “I grant I never saw a goddess go,” in order to set up a single delicious substitution in line twelve:

My mís ❙ tress, whén ❙ she wálks, ❙
tréads on ❙ the gróund,

That trochee in the fourth position enacts precisely how the mistress does not travel like a goddess but is more prone to tripping over curbs.

Vendler announces straight off that she has planned The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets “for those who already know the Sonnets, or who have beside them the sort of lexical annotation found in the current editions.” This sensible strategy allows her to dive right into some of the poems’ complexities without wrangling over archaic vocabulary or paraphrasing on the most basic level. Still, in recreating Shakespeare’s mind and aesthetic choices, Vendler could have more diligently historicized vocabulary, frames of reference, and especially literary usages and allusions, and for all these purposes, as Vendler recommends, an edition of the Sonnets such as Booth’s （New Haven and London: Yale, 1977, rev. 1978） provides invaluable aid in evaluating her arguments. The relative absence of discussion of parallel vocabulary and language in Shakespeare’s plays, especially the “lyrical” plays of the mid-1590s, his presumed sonneteering period, is especially surprising. （Her helpful invocation of language from Love’s Labour’s Lost to illuminate Sonnet 127 is the exception rather than the rule.）

Certainly our appreciation of several other sonnets would be considerably enriched by comparisons with language from the plays. For example, Sonnet 27’s “jewel” simile for the beloved glimpsed in a dream—“my soul’s imaginary sight / Presents thy shadow to my sightless view, / Which like a jewel （hung in ghastly night） / Makes black night beauteous”—makes this night vision, as Vendler astutely says, resemble a religious rapture, but it also reminds us of Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who, when the lovers are re-paired, finds “Demetrius like a jewel, / Mine own and not mine own,” reinforcing the Sonnet speaker’s dream as dream, and underscoring his uncertain possession of his love. Sonnet 119’s couplet presents a more complex example: after straying from fidelity to the young man, thanks to “potions … of Siren tears,” the speaker comes to his senses from “the distraction of this madding fever”:

So I return rebuked to my content,
And gain by ills thrice more than I have spent.

Vendler reads the poem as a “post-facto description of infatuations which have led one away from true love” and sees in the couplet “No irony … attached, I think, to this acquiescence.” But given our growing understanding throughout the young man subsequence of the speaker’s suffering at his beloved’s aloofness, hauteur, and infidelity, it seems impossible not to hear in the couplet Shylock’s bitter “I am content,” a literary echo so strong it even suffuses Yeats’s “I am content to live it all again.” The speaker’s triple recovery of his losses also recalls the Trinity Shylock accepts only under pain of death, as the speaker returns helplessly to his young man, presumably for more ill treatment, because the pains of love give him no alternative.

I intend all these quibbles with Vendler in the spirit in which she wrote The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets—that of a reader who has found some things in the Sonnets and is curious about what others have found there. Her book adds enormously to our understanding and prods us to continue to make our own discoveries. Even the accompanying compact disc of Vendler reading sixty-five of the poems deepens her interpretations of some sonnets while raising new issues concerning others. Her subtle pauses in Sonnet 76—“Why is my verse so … barren of new pride? / So … far from variation or quick change?”—reinforce her argument that the speaker here replies to the young man’s complaint of monotony in the Sonnets. On the other hand, hearing Sonnet 35 aloud （“No more be grieved at that which thou hast done”） forces our attention on the uncharacteristic accumulation of four “uh” rhymes in the first quatrain—“done,” “mud,” “sun,” “bud”—a vowel sound surely intended to convey the speaker’s disgust at both the young man’s corruption and himself; but Vendler does not mention this charged handling of rhyme at all. Still, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets grafts new feathers onto the wings of our understanding, lifting us a little closer to Heaven’s gate, and it once more confirms Vendler’s status as one of the smartest critics around. If it has occasional omissions and lapses, if there remains more to be said about the Sonnets, that’s not a judgement on Vendler, only evidence that Shakespeare, in his nearly infinite variety, surpasses later poets, readers, and critics, and remains smarter than us all.