[In the following essay, Everett examines the meter and rhyme of The Phoenix and Turtle, and finds that “Shakespeare writes nowhere else—not even in his last plays—quite like this.”]

Shakespeare wrote rather few poems. If we think of the Sonnets as a sequence rather than an amassment (and many scholars do, though there are arguments against it), then the number of short poems dwindles pointedly. Among them, “The Phoenix and Turtle” stands out, and even has a claim to be called Shakespeare's best poem. And yet it is little known. Its admirers are agreed above all on the poem's problems, its quality of the cryptic and enigmatic.

That this remarkable love poem should be little read, and when read found odd, is not in itself surprising. Many of Shakespeare's finest Sonnets exist in a thicket of scholarly dispute; they are not easy poems. English Renaissance poetry could be difficult long before it deserved to be called “Metaphysical”; this was the reason why so much of it, including the Sonnets themselves, met only sporadic understanding and enjoyment through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the twentieth century, modernistic readers turned back to Renaissance poetry for what was difficult in it. In this, “The Phoenix and Turtle” is not exceptional. A poet as highly intelligent and also, perhaps, as reticent as Shakespeare (for so the Sonnets sometimes make him seem) should not be expected to be transparent in his non-dramatic verse. Even the very late work for the public theatre, directed towards an audience now conceived of as in part specialized and aristocratic, can be stylistically hard going.

“The Phoenix and Turtle” is not quite like this. It is brilliant and beautiful, but its extravagant rhetorics and unusual formality bring about a real opacity; the reader halts, never quite sure what it is, to read this poem. We seem, even while finding it exquisite, to lack some expertise, some password. Criticism is, like patriotism, not quite enough here. Much discussion has assumed the poem to be a dark allegory of its presumed historical circumstances. There have developed, that is to say, two different kinds of explanation, the one interlinked with the other. They may be called the historical and the philosophical. Both are finally unhelpful, but they need to be outlined.

The historical approach begins from the context of the poem's first publication. Without our current title (which is sometimes modernized into “The Phoenix and the Turtle”) but over Shakespeare's name, it first appeared in 1601, in a volume published by “R. C.” entitled Loves Martyr. The major item in this book of poems is a long and rambling piece of verse, various in contents, but nominally concerned with the fate of two lovers given the emblems of Phoenix and Turtle (which is to say, turtle dove). The first is female, the second male. The female gender of the Phoenix here is common in Elizabethan literature, but the Turtle is much more unconventional in being male. This opening poem is followed by a handful of shorter pieces, all treating in different ways the love of the two birds. Among verses by Jonson, Chapman and Marston are to be found Shakespeare's lines.

Scholars have made available both information and hypotheses about this publication and its background. Chief among them is Carleton Brown in his edition Poems of Sir John Salusbury and Robert Chester (1914). The moving spirit in the enterprise, and presumably the author of the long poem, was Robert Chester, Chaplain to Sir John Salusbury of Denbighshire, North Wales, who was cousin to the Queen and, during the later 1590s, a figure of some standing in Elizabeth's court. The usual assumption is that, through his own poem and the other more professional efforts, perhaps collected together by Ben Jonson, Chester sought to pay tribute to Salusbury in a form that makes allusion to his marital or at least amatory affairs.

Carleton Brown concluded that “The Phoenix and Turtle” reflects little familiarity with the Salusbury family, that Shakespeare's social relations with Sir John were “less close than those of Jonson, Marston, and Chapman”. Given our current politicizing of the literary, it is unsurprising that this conclusion has been contested more recently: for instance, by Ernst Honigmann and others who wish to locate Shakespeare within the whole Lancastrian and Catholic nexus of the time, arguing that the poet was in some way connected with the Stanley family.

This debate can lead to dating the poem unfeasibly early—and indeed as such historical scholarship sometimes does, to existing at a distance from what Shakespeare actually wrote. The fact is that “The Phoenix and Turtle” seems quietly to ignore any known data bearing on the Salusbury family. The poet goes further and contradicts: he makes the plain point that his Phoenix and Turtle died “leaving no posterity”; they lived in “married chastity”. “Chastity” in this context and period could, of course, mean merely “fidelity”. But the poem as a whole hardly gives the sense of crowded nurseries. The whole tendency of its high abstractions is towards loneliness, purity, extremity: almost, one might add, a denial of the historical and political.

It would be interesting to have more information about the Salusbury family. But not much is to be gained from expecting to explain “The Phoenix and Turtle” in historical terms: whether we try to locate the poem's meaning with the family itself or try, as some have, to make other Elizabethan dignitaries—the Queen herself, for instance—embody the Phoenix. As a result, foiled scholars have turned sympathetically to the central stanzas of the poem, struck by what they believe to be a love philosophy that resembles John Donne in its wit and extremity. Certainly no reader could miss, or find less than remarkable, the surreal (and very beautiful, if sometimes almost mocking) intellectuality of the middle stanzas:

So they lov'd as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none:
Number there in love was slain.
Hearts remote, yet not asunder;
Distance, and no space was seen
'Twixt this turtle and his queen;
But in them it were a wonder.

Without doubt this discourse, a fine fusion of the mentally sturdy with the ecstatically exalted, is central to the work's character. But objections do hover, like the rhythms of the lines. I have just suggested that historical contexts give no purchase on the poem, or too little, because there are so few areas of real interaction. The problem with allegorical readings or philosophical statements is equal if (so to speak) reversed. Any extractable belief is too commonplace. Though the parallel has not (I think) been hitherto made, something like enough to this thought-mode can be found, oddly enough, in Carleton Brown's other edition, Religious Lyrics of the Fifteenth Century. In the section he calls “The Mysteries of the Faith”, there occurs this hardly original small poem, called by the editor “The Divine Paradox”:

A God and yet a man?
          A mayde and yet a mother?
Witt wonders what witt Can
          Conceave this or the other.
A god, and Can he die?
          A dead man, can he live?
What witt can well replie?
          What reason reason give?
God, truth itself, doth teach it;
          Mans witt senckis too farr under
By reasons power to reach it.
          Beleeve and leave to wonder!

This is not to offer these lines as any kind of source for “The Phoenix and Turtle”. But it might be useful to suppose that Shakespeare, like most of his contemporaries, had somewhere at the back of his huge verbal memory many examples of rhythms and cadences of thought like these, simple pre-Reformation theological resources. To quote these stanzas is useful in another way too. Some would object that such anonymous religious verses are worlds away from Shakespeare's poem. What removes “The Phoenix and Turtle” is the fact that archaic paradoxes have undergone a great act of making: Shakespeare has complicated, humanized and civilized, crafting always towards a sophisticated love poetry of and fit for the court of his time. And even the ideology of that end in itself, what we may call the “love ideas”, gets its own detachment in the poem, which is pervaded from first to last by formalities which hint irony, though they never prove it.

Neither the historical nor the philosophical critique gets far into Shakespeare's poem. I want rather to consider one aspect of this act of making, in the hope that it might lead to a fuller understanding.

“The Phoenix and Turtle” is constructed in three sections, like a nest of boxes—it might even be said to earn itself the phrase found in the “Threnos” here, and elsewhere in Elizabethan court poetry as the title of a collection, “The Phoenix' Nest”. Its second section is an inset of its first, and its third an inset of its second. But the whole avoids any metallic regularity. The first section, or Invocation, runs to five stanzas, the second or Anthem to eight, the third or Threnos (“Lament”) to five again; of these, the Anthem flows out of the Invocation, which uses the first line of the sixth stanza as introduction, a fine irregular ripple-effect which gives liquidity. Again, the poem is metrically divided, and with almost baroque imbalance: the first thirteen stanzas are quatrains, the last five are three-lined verses. The quatrains rhyme ABBA, the three-lined stanzas AAA. Where the Invocation moves silently into the Anthem, the Lament is made separate in the text and given a formal title, “Threnos”. The poem begins with an Invocation at once grand and shadowy, marches into a singing but supra-rational rationality, and ends with a finale that is luminously simple.

This is a poem that surpasses its Elizabethan context in Loves Martyr to an almost grotesque degree. In a critical climate essentially political and historical, the reasons are not easy to state convincingly. Very various resources have got into “The Phoenix and Turtle” (the classical bird-elegy, medieval and Skeltonic addresses to birds and children, popular Christian verse and Neoplatonic debates, marble tomb inscriptions from Greece and Rome to the Renaissance). If they cohabit peacefully, this is because they are harmonized by a rhetorical gift in itself extreme. The writing goes beyond rhetoric. The poem is in fact neither an event (“history”) nor an idea (“philosophy”) but something that begins with what has to be called a music, an extremely original sound heard nowhere else in the Renaissance. Once invented, it was, however, noted, remembered and imitated by a series of English poets, the last of them probably Tennyson, and all very different from each other except perhaps in the fineness of their ear.

Metrical studies are usually tedious. But many poets have recognized that rhythm is near the heart of poetry. Moreover, the late sixteenth century was a moment of exceptional inventiveness in the technique of verse. In the year of Loves Martyr, Hamlet first held the stage, its author recognized as master of the public theatre but still open to dismissal by well-born or university-trained writers. But Hamlet is a court tragedy. And in “The Phoenix and Turtle” the poet is perhaps making plain that he can equal or outdo the court makers of his time in their own mode.

This poem is above all an artefact. Yet the admirable if few critical discussions of it show little or no interest in its peculiarly haunting and original rhythm, or in that systematization of rhythm, metre. It begins, “Let the bird of loudest lay, / On the sole Arabian tree, / Herald sad and trumpet be …”. A fair amount of the academic energy given to the work has been devoted to trying to gloss the poetic kenning of the first line: to say, in short, which is the bird of loudest lay.

Certainly the distance from ornithology in these opening stanzas is vital to the effect. The obliquity, the opaque formality, the rich, elaborate, archaic texture all diminish distinction of creatures into what is “sole” or solitary, “sad” and serious, matter for bird-cry rather than speech, “lay” rather than utterance. But Shakespeare may have had a further reason for the antique-sounding dialect of his first line. He wanted, I would guess, by his unmissable alliteration (“Let … loudest … lay”) to establish and draw to attention, especially in his first and last syllables, the original rhythm he was creating.

As a theatre poet, Shakespeare had brought the iambic pentameter to a formidable transparency and yet complexity: serving English speech, especially in its courtly as well as its colloquial forms, nowhere more richly than in Hamlet itself. Beginning as “Marlowe's mighty line”, an index of power, the blank-verse line will throughout Shakespeare's career reach towards a more and more inward rhythm of thought itself. But even at its subtlest and most musical (say, in The Tempest), blank verse is a music for princes, the sound of authority.

“Let the bird of loudest lay” initiates a poem written in a metre much rarer than blank verse (and the Invocation bans, in a Virgilian fashion, the “shrieking”, the “bird of tyrant wing”, in favour of the swan that sings only when it knows itself dying). A few lines have eight syllables, in each case with an effect not entirely artless. But the character of the whole depends on its norm, each line of both the quatrains and the three-lined stanzas taking as its measure seven syllables. The poem is one of the rare works of Elizabethan verse written not in iambic but in trochaic metre, a rhythm, that is, in which in each foot a strong or stressed first syllable is followed by a weak second. Moreover, “The Phoenix and Turtle” complicates where there is already some deviance, by inventing its own variation on this metrical norm. Its lines have to be named something like “broken trochaics”, in that each ends with an abbreviated foot of one stressed syllable (not “loudest music” but “loudest lay”).

Most Elizabethan attempts at rare or classical metres, even by the exceptionally gifted Campion, did not prove easily assimilable: theoretically interesting, they can't be remembered. The music of Shakespeare's poem has been an exception. “Love and constancy is dead; / Phoenix and the turtle fled” can linger on the mind of succeeding poets and ordinary readers alike. The reasons are subtle, and have to do with a peculiar mastery of materials in the writer, a mix of detachment and humanity. But there is also perhaps a simpler reason that evidences the poet's extreme, even where reticent, technical powers. The pattern of first-and-last stress within the line (“Let the bird of loudest lay”) is given its own echo, almost like a mnemonic system, by the rhyme scheme met in the quatrains. The first two movements of the poem are ruled by a rhyme scheme in which each quatrain runs ABBA. Every self-framing seven-syllabled line is therefore echoed by the rhymes of every quatrain that, always departing and always homing, holds to its beginning, an emblem of fidelity. This might even be called an “enfolding” scansion, a Phoenix' Nest that encircles through the line, through the stanza, through the poem:

So between them love did shine
That the turtle saw his right
Flaming in the phoenix' sight:
Either was the other's mine.

This last is, theoretically, a difficult stanza, in the metaphysical mode. What makes it quite unlike Donne is a singing quality that undercuts the difficulty. The tricky mirror images are only playfully, serenely consonant with the whole system of echoes and reflections formally at work in the poem. Even that last monosyllable with its fused division (“Two distincts, division none”: “mine” as in underground workings holding treasure, and “mine” as in belonging to me) contains compactly in itself the structure and the significance of the whole poem.

Many shorter Renaissance poems are technically very fine, works like the toy that Yeats envisaged, “set upon a golden bough to sing / To lords and ladies of Byzantium”. But it is rare for their expertise to be matched by a comparably rich human quality. Shakespeare regularly goes beyond even the art of Campion, Sidney and Jonson in human expressiveness (a line from “Full fathom five” can move into The Waste Land). This can make his always impassive achievements even harder to analyse, given the amount impacted into artifice. Here, for instance, the bird convention makes miniature what the high paradoxes of love and grief endow with a tacit scale, and these processes are simultaneous, unitary. The effect is harmonized by the poet's having discovered a music he uses nowhere else. It must be worth asking: where did it come from?

The history of Shakespeare's rhythmic, metric and structural patterns in “The Phoenix and Turtle” seems never to have been traced, and indeed to have aroused no interest. In his History of Prosody (1909), George Saintsbury gave some respectful attention to this metrical structure in itself, calling it “the In Memoriam inclusion [that is, ABBA] with trochaic form”. Regarding “The Phoenix and Turtle” as only “doubtfully Shakespeare's”, he gives it little notice, appearing to believe that the new form originated with Ben Jonson—who certainly used it, or its approximates, in later elegies. But that Jonson invented it and Shakespeare copied him is hard to credit. One of the final handful of tributes in Loves Martyr, just after “The Phoenix and Turtle”, is Jonson's “The Phoenix Analysde”:

Now, after all, let no man
          Receive it for a Fable
          If a bird so amiable
Do turn into a woman.
Or (by your Turtles Augure)
          That Natures fairest Creature,
          Prove of his Mistress Feature,
But a bare Type and Figure.

Jonson is imitating Shakespeare here, and doing it surprisingly badly; and to suppose some friendly parodistical purpose does not much improve the effect. In “The Phoenix Analysde”, a usually strong rhetorician is weak and hobbling. This may prove that Shakespeare's broken trochaics, held in a rhyme scheme at once steady and soaring, are peculiarly difficult to carry out, except by the poet who had chosen to invent them. Shakespeare's calm ease, by contrast, may suggest that “The Phoenix and Turtle” is the beginning and end of a new form, a form that found itself in expressing—as Jonson's parodic or joltingly admiring cadences did not—experiences concerning love and death and art in themselves individual.

Even when most original, Shakespeare educates himself through a profession, a tradition. “The Phoenix and Turtle” is in fact not the only poem he wrote in lines of seven syllables. In Love's Labour's Lost (possibly first staged in 1595, some half-dozen years earlier), the courtier Dumaine reads aloud his “Sonnet” or love poem. It begins,

On a day, alack the day:
Love, whose Month is ever May,
Spied a blossome passing faire,
Playing in the wanton ayre …

The broken trochaics are much more uncertainly handled here, which at least suggests a date that is not early for the elegiac poem. But the mood and manner of “On a day” do provide a provenance for Shakespeare's metrical idea. Far from the ethereal and ironic paradoxicality of the later poem, the comedy's “Sonnet” is lordly, glamorous, erotic, sensuous, shrugging. This suggests a source. Before Shakespeare, the real master of the seven-syllabled line—as of much else in the metrics of the period's court love poetry—was Sir Philip Sidney. His Astrophel and Stella, one of the seminal poetic works of its time, was probably written (so his editor W. A. Ringler argues) in 1581-3, though not published until 1591. What has been little recognized by Sidney scholars is that its eleven Songs were as influential as its Sonnets, using that word here in its modern technical sense. The Songs all explore the possibilities of lines in patterns of seven and eight syllables. And the most beautiful of them, and probably the most influential, is the Eighth, beginning “In a grove most rich of shade”.

This is a poem of strong Sidneian character, peculiarly charming, aristocratically sexy (albeit inhibited), gracious and gifted and slightly hard, whose very atmosphere of summer shade may have affected Shakespeares's “On a day”. In addition, the poem takes the form of quatrains made up of seven-syllabled couplets followed by eight-syllabled. A brief quotation will give some sense of this poet's world, lilting, sumptuous, constrained, honourable:

Wept they had, alas the while,
But now teares themselves did smile,
While their eyes by love directed,
Interchangeably reflected.
Sigh they did, but now betwixt
Sighs of woe were glad sighs mixt,
With armes crost, yet testifying
Restlesse rest, and living dying. …
But when their tongue could not speake,
Love it selfe did silence breake;
Love did set his lips asunder,
Thus did speake in love and wonder …

Sidney's high aristocratic talents nourished Shakespeare throughout his career. There are perhaps symptoms of verbal memory in the echo of these last two lines in the later poet's “Hearts remote, yet not asunder … / But in them it were a wonder”. To begin from the metre of “On a day …”, to put side by side Sidney's “In a grove”, a poem of love reciprocal but defeated, with Shakespeare's “Phoenix and Turtle”, a mysterious love elegy, is to be in presence of a larger literary context of genre.

It is now generally accepted that Hamlet inherits a whole theatrical tradition of revenge tragedies. But the play also so changes the form that it was never the same again. “The Phoenix and Turtle” has something of the same relation to Sidney's Eighth Song: here too, Shakespeare both inherited and completely transformed a tradition.

Sidney's “In a grove most rich of shade” is now recognized as the beginning of a tradition of “ecstasy” poems. Sidney has two well-known successors in this tradition. The first is John Donne in “The Extasie”, a remarkable achievement if not altogether characteristic of its writer in form and tone:

As 'twixt two equal Armies, Fate
          Suspends uncertaine victorie,
Our soules (which to advance their state,
          Were gone out,) hung 'twixt her, and mee.
And whil'st our soules negotiate there,
          Wee like sepulchral statues lay;
All day, the same our postures, were,
          And wee said nothing, all the day.

The other is Lord Herbert of Cherbury, in “An Ode upon a question moved, Whether Love should continue for ever?”:

So when one wing can make no way,
          Two joyned can themselves dilate,
          So can two persons propagate,
When singly either would decay.
So when from hence we shall be gone,
          And be no more, nor you, nor I,
As one another's mystery,
Each shall be both, yet both but one.

The conventional account of the “ecstasy” tradition assumes both Donne and Lord Herbert to be writing under the immediate influence of Sidney's Eighth Song. Lord Herbert has also evidently taken Donne himself as model, his word “propagate” being a clue to this. Necessarily using conjecture of the kind often entailed by Renaissance literary history (dating being often so unclear), it is possible to suggest a radical change to this account.

“The Phoenix and Turtle” has a vital place in the whole “ecstasy” tradition. Debts of metre and debts of substance may be “two distincts, division none”. Lord Herbert's graceful Ode may take as much from Shakespeare as from Donne, may even take more. And (further) Donne himself may be writing after “The Phoenix and Turtle” in his Extasie (which would usefully seem to date Donne's poem after 1601). For Shakespeare's poem is surely a kind of medium, a vital Missing Link, between Sidney and Donne-and-Lord-Herbert, transitional and strongly formative. Somewhere on the road between the court poet Sidney and the two Jacobeans, an intense charm, a worldly trance of high if inhibited love, has toughened, darkened, ironized. The paradoxes of love are fine but not quite comforting; death has come to stay. Above all, what is urbanely and wonderfully external in Sidney has somehow turned inward. That interiority is surely Shakespeare's hallmark. If the first stanza of “The Phoenix and Turtle” doesn't name the bird but hears its cry as “sad”, from a tree that is “sole”, some such note is entering here, as we hear in the late Sonnets, of the loneliness of love, of its betrayals and deaths, of its survival none the less. Sidney does not go that deep.

Shakespeare made his own use of facts known about his nominal subject, the Salusbury family. The other poems in Loves Martyr give Salusbury the children his wife actually bore him. Shakespeare ends his poem by leaving us with the impression that his Phoenix and Turtle are absolute in death as in love—they die childless: “It was married chastity.” William Empson's rich essay on the poem tartly mocks critical approaches that seem to him to suggest a poet flagrantly ignoring the terms of his commission. But perhaps Shakespeares's obscurity left many aristocratic readers safely uncertain as to what the poet actually meant. What does seem clear is that Shakespeare wrote about what he chose to write about, in the way that he wanted to write it.

Given this literary context, some guess may be hazarded at the actual process by which the poet wrote his “Phoenix and Turtle”. Knowing him as a man who could and would make something lasting out of a trivial occasion, Shakespeare's friend and colleague Jonson (it may be presumed) invites him to contribute—for a fee that is satisfactory and for an audience that is both aristocratic and distant—some lines on the love of two persons fondly emblematized as Phoenix and Turtle (the first, an ancient myth of life through self-loss, the second, a blazon of fidelity).

The Northern Catholicism of the milieu, working together with idealizing emblems, would have brought first to the poet's mind verse of the innocent and archaic “A God and yet a man?” kind. But this churchy simplicity would have complicated under the pressure of the word “Phoenix”. The brilliant and influential if dead-too-young courtier Philip Sidney was frequently symbolized as the Phoenix by other poets of the time. Scholars working on Shakespeare's poem have already seen it as indebted for its opening, the summoning of the birds, to two poems which open the contemporary anthology, The Phoenix Nest. Each is a memorial to Sidney. And the second (a point not hitherto noted) uses the ABBA rhyme scheme for its grave iambic pentameters. Thus, the word “Phoenix” could well bring flooding into Shakespeare's mind (already, after Hamlet, deep into court tragedy), Sidneian literary resources: not merely the poetic experiments in metres and rhythms, but the aristocratic styles, the stances of court love both erotic and idealized, such as both Sidney's poems and the exalted prose of the Arcadia had celebrated.

The arcanely beautiful court dialect of love in “The Phoenix and Turtle” never entirely dispels something purely Shakespearian, a tenderness, pain and pathos: a sadness, or at least seriousness, intrinsic to the poet's thinking about love from his earliest plays. But this human deepening has, as always in Shakespeare, its balance and contrast. The sweetly dated bird convention makes a miniature world and produces a comic detachment. The preciosity, the ambiguity of a male dove contributes something here. Shakespeare avoids the grotesqueries of Elizabethan hermaphrodite literary experiments; there is merely a light flight of “chaste wings”, a “mutual flame” hardly even bisexual: “Either was the other's mine”.

The gently sophisticated games being played here bring the poem close to those conventions to which Shakespeare was to devote himself in his last plays—and “The Phoenix and Turtle” has a rhetoric and feeling perhaps closest, in all the poet's work, to Cymbeline (it is interesting that Tennyson seems to have loved both that play and the poem with equal intensity). In Cymbeline, Shakespeare took an aristocratic form, the heroic love epic of earlier courtly Elizabethans, which had been in each case left unfinished by his two predecessors, Sidney in his Arcadia and Spenser in his Faerie Queene: as if the backward-looking nostalgias of Elizabeth's sometimes medievalizing court produced an idealism of art not really commensurate with the experience of its most talented writers. Shakespeare finished his heroic romance, Cymbeline. He did it by writing a generation later; by not writing, in fact, for a court audience; and by reducing his fine fictions to the controllable by an astringent unbelief. In the play's most moving scene before its last, that of Imogen's apparent death, her brothers speak over her an exquisite trochaic song, its seven-syllabled lines alternating with eight-syllabled, “Feare no more the heate o' th' Sun”. But when the “peasant” prince first carries in the supposedly dead princess, he says roughly: “The Bird is dead / That we have made so much on.” Although the princess revives, one kind of love dream dies here.

“The Phoenix and Turtle” ends with its own complex tone: “For these dead birds sigh a prayer”. This may be brisk or tender or smiling or sad. The poem is, perhaps, in short, a foreshadowing of the kind of tragicomic fusions of feeling to be afterwards fully dramatized in the late Romances. Here, as later, the dramatist has brought to Sidney's courtly code not merely a deeper wit and a harder sense of loss, but overtones of experience not merely inward but solitary; not merely tragic but comic. It is this balance of opposed qualities, harmonized into music, that makes up the character and value of “The Phoenix and Turtle”: “The contradictions cover such a range” (a memorable line from a poem by William Empson). This is both a great poem and a toy—and these contradictions say something too about the poet's sense of love, and death, and art, and of the world he was here being paid to write for.

Partly sublime and partly silly, Shakespeare's “dead birds” so harmonize oppositions as to seem to prove the poem's thesis, where unlikes marry in bliss though without breed. The writing throughout is in style, syntax and word-order so elaborately formal as to transform energy into effect. It is impossible, for instance, to know whether the “obey” which closes the fourth line of the first stanza is (as the syntax directs) an imperative like the parallel “come” of the eighth line; or merely (as it sounds) an indicative. But this doubt is not a difficulty, only an advantage. Everything in the ordonnance of these opening lines unmakes imperatives, the mood of power. The poem begins with the sound of a summoning trumpet; the diminishment of that court sound to the voice of a bird initiates a reign of harmlessness.

If Shakespeare was paid to commemorate the Salusbury family, and to preach love, then he earned his money. But these now forgotten people, and moribund ideas are the context, the “phoenix' nest”, of a new linguistic life, a poetry faint and strange but extremely valuable. These comical but half-holy birds take flight in the course of the poem, moving beyond the rituals of Invocation and the paradoxes of the Anthem into the enigmatic lucidities of the Lament, where they stay:

Beauty, truth, and rarity,
Grace in all simplicity,
Here enclos'd in cinders lie.
Death is now the phoenix' nest;
And the turtle's loyal breast
To eternity doth rest.

As with all Shakespeare's shorter poems, “The Phoenix and Turtle” can make a reader feel even by its excellence how unalterably the poet was a dramatist; how much he needed to make larger, deeper human structures presentable on stages. The Sonnets are often obscure because they confine him. “The Phoenix and Turtle” is a Renaissance jewel, beautiful but (compared to Hamlet) troublingly unvoiced, relatively toneless, unchangeably small. All the same, the poet shows in it his usual illimitable originality. There are intimations of Mallarmé in these last stanzas. Shakespeare is led by his brief and luminous fourth line here to use an “is” on which Death rocks, ambiguously, subject or predicate of the phoenix' nest; and the turtle's breast rests to eternity with an absoluteness that makes dying the most active experience of a life-time, a wordless reversal of that calming with which the poem begins. The first Symbolist in Europe, Shakespeare writes nowhere else—not even in his last plays—quite like this.