SOURCE: “Shakespeare at Sonnets,” in Singing Masters: Poets in English 1500 to the Present, University of Michigan Press, 1999, pp. 3-19.

[In the following essay, Fraser analyzes Shakespeare's departures from standard sonnet form and argues that such deviations were intentional and serve to enhance the quality of the poetry.]

I take my title from an essay of John Crowe Ransom's, collected in The World's Body (1938). “Shakespeare at Sonnets,” Ransom decided, wasn't up to the job, “not fit for amateurs.” This distinguished critic shied at “incoherence” and thought poetry should make as consistent sense as prose. Some poets, he said (in an essay on Millay, warming up for Shakespeare), adopted combinations of words that didn't quite fit into perfect meanings. That was fudging but seemed to them agreeable, the combination offering “the uncertain possibility of two meanings rather than the certainty of one.” A poem was even better when you doubted what it meant “because the range of its possibilities” was wider. Civil leering, this gives the sense of Ransom's anti-Shakespeare polemic. Mild in person, he was something else in his critical prose, and didn't hold back from throwing stones at Shakespeare, aiming, he said, for the vulnerable parts.

He noticed a lot of them, for starters a confusion between non-dramatic poetry and poetry in plays. In the drama, he said, speeches and soliloquies, however poeticized, needn't work out to complete or self-determined poems. But in sonnets this requirement governs, except that Shakespeare, an imperfect logician, doesn't meet it. Not schooled in the university, he lacked Donne's or Sidney's literary training. This is where the amateur comes in. Ransom's Shakespeare is a poet in a hurry, much dash mixed with slapdash. About half his sonnets are “tolerably workmanlike” but the other half are “seriously defective.” Clashing with the standard metrical organization is “some arbitrary logical organization,” arbitrary because unargued. Readers who have got beyond Bardolatry will feel the justice of this, rough justice, perhaps, but full of implication. Often in the sonnets, form “makes head” against meaning or the meaning usurps on the form. This allows for different meanings, each asking primacy. Shakespeare's egalitarian art appears to demonstrate a species of Titanism, where the old unruly gods, penned under the earth, struggle to get out and the poet abets them.

The metrical pattern of the “English” sonnet (abab cdcd efef gg) is directive. Committed to three coordinate quatrains, it ends with a couplet that ties this series together. If well turned, the couplet approximates the epigram, “thus he said.” Spenser in his Amoretti, though he uses a different rhyme scheme, gives textbook illustrations of the conventional pattern. Maybe for this reason his sonnets strike the ear, mine anyway, as humdrum. Shakespeare, blurring the pattern he inherits, frequently “elides” his quatrains, as in the Italian sonnet where the major turn occurs after line 8. Ransom, dogging his steps, detected a Shakespeare “unequal” or “insensitive” to his formal commitment. There are other ways he could have put this. But like Dr. Johnson, Shakespeare's best critic and wrong about him half the time, he raised the right questions and his hostile critique throws a light on what Shakespeare is doing.

Let us see where the light illuminates and where it may coarsen, being too clear. Shakespeare's first seventeen sonnets offer a good access point for generalizing on his practice. Intentionality links them, the summons to “breed” or have children. But the injunction laid on Shakespeare's friend, the Fair Youth, is only the point d'appui, and Shakespeare has other things on his mind:

For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter and confounds him there.

(V)

A little avuncular, Shakespeare prescribes for the friend: “You had a father, let your son say so” (XIII). Riveting his attention is the “coming end,” however,

stormy gusts of winter's day
And barren rage of death's eternal cold.

In this cluster of sonnets, what is going on “inside” seems too urgent for the form, and the poems are like a reticule stuffed to bursting.

Some such description seems appropriate for later sonnets in Shakespeare's sequence. Two of them, concerned with the gift of a book (LXXVII, CXXII), go off at a tangent, devoting much energy to “razed oblivion” and “Time's thievish progress.” Or is the tangential thing of these poems' essence? Intended to cheer up the friend, LV, “Not marble, nor the gilded monuments,” promises him a secure abiding place in Shakespeare's powerful rhyme. But ruminations on “death and all-oblivious enmity” qualify this promise, and a sort of litotes or understatement makes it, if scrutinized, almost absurd:

But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone, besmeared with sluttish time.

Putting it mildly, this seems not much to look for.

Shakespeare at sonnets, “reverting” on himself, suggests a man at sixes and sevens. (The question is: whose eyes is he throwing dust in, his or his readers'?) Mostly the sonnets are love poems where love, a fixed star, looks on tempests and is never shaken. But fear of death or betrayal, stalking the margins, hints at some other poem, meditated but not written. In CXV, “Those lines that I before have writ do lie,” paraphrase goes one way, affect another. Hyperbolic Shakespeare is saying how his love for the friend has come too short. Abruptly, though, a darker thought besets him. Creeping in between his vows, the “millioned accidents” of time “blast the sharp'st intents, / Divert strong minds …,” etc. Digressions like this one, or call them ebullitions, betokening the old imprisoned gods, come up often. Evidently in the sonnets, “two truths are told,” remembering a line from Macbeth.

But Shakespeare's defective workmanship, if that is what it is, isn't involuntary, much less disabling. Assimilating discrete particulars or psychological states, his sonnets make a fruitful emulsion. Moderns (not “post-moderns”) want something different, perhaps a configuration, more in keeping with their view of art. But Shakespeare doesn't concede this and his suspended thing, while it enlarges understanding, annuls declarative statement. The rubric isn't “either / or” but “and … and.” These remarks aren't meant to describe his style, nicely reticulated as all attest, rather his psychology, “paratactic,” so aloof from logical progression.

For a poet whose bias tends to qualification, the English sonnet, inflexibly progressive, is hard to cope with. Shakespeare, electing it, is working against the grain, a creative opposition. He wants a pattern to adjust or depart from, and luckily he has one. Tinkering convention, he creates the “Shakespearean” sonnet, not quite the same as the English sonnet handed up by his forebears. Received wisdom instructed him that a perfect mixture of parts into which no impurities entered formed a stable compound, proof against disordering. This oldfashioned “chemistry” (as we should call it) looked to him like moribundity, the way things fall apart. In his unlikely compound, discords, straining against each other, are “at a mortal war” (XLVI). But his internecine war, running him on difficulties, vitalizes his performance and makes it cohere.

Much admired in Shakespeare's time, sonnet II illustrates this new kind of poem. Readers copied it out in manuscript more than any other sonnet, perhaps seeing something moderns don't see. In the couplet, the point is to having offspring:

This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.

Alongside the expected metrical pattern, a syntactic pattern, encountered often, conforms to the paradigm, “When. … Then. … So.”

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tottered weed, of small worth held:
Then being asked where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.

But Shakespeare's logical series functions as a blind. Modifying the paradigm, he keeps to the letter, not the spirit, and his poem resolves to an octet and sestet. The octet is pretty bleak. In his sestet, reversing field, he means to hearten. (Or, defying logic, he means to hearten and cast down.) But his coordinates, though much attenuated, still speak to each other. Initiating the second quatrain, the “Then” clause can be heard as sardonic (among other things), Shakespeare rounding on his friend, hardly cheering him up, and the matter of time eating, conveyed in spiteful images, jostles the hopeful conclusion. This poet's last word is “cold.” That doesn't say that his counsel is specious, his affection either. Only he is having it both ways.

So the end is inclusiveness and modifying the form is a means to the end. In LXIII, images, mounting up, compose a grisly picture of what time has in store for the loved one. The poet, like Marvell in his “Coy Mistress,” caresses this picture lovingly, not entirely to his credit.

Against my love shall be as I am now,
With time's injurious hand crushed and o'erworn;
When hours have drained his blood and filled his brow
With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn
Hath traveled on to age's steepy night,
And all those beauties whereof now he's king
Are vanishing or vanished out of sight,
Stealing away the treasure of his spring.

“All those beauties,” heavy with presage like Marvell's “all my lust,” looks ahead to dust and ashes.

But just around the corner a palliative is waiting. The “sestet,” supplying it, is ambiguous, though. Pronomial reference, not so clear as it might be, emphasizes this.

For such a time do I now fortify
Against confounding age's cruel knife,
That he shall never cut from memory
My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life:
His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
And they shall live, and he in them still green.

Readers alert to syntax may feel that the pledge of life after death is more efficient for the poet than the Fair Youth, also that this poet is fortifying himself. Ending the third quatrain, the concessive clause seems to read: “Age, though he cuts my lover's life from memory, has no jurisdiction over my verse.” Editors, sponsoring a univocal Shakespeare, won't have that, and a footnote to my text asks the reader to supply “he takes” after “though,” enforcing an antithesis between “my lover's life,” forfeit to age and time, and his remembered beauty, still green. This keeps encomiastic Shakespeare at his appointed task. He is the encomiast all right, also other things, but the increment isn't generally noticed.

Editors, like tour guides but unlike poets, seek to pin things down, a habit of mind appropriate to pedagogy where the movement is to ratio (this = this). A considerable poet, Ransom spots the ambiguity in Shakespeare but temperamental bias, imperious in this clear-sighted man, insists that it isn't a virtue. His word for the Shakespearean range of possibilities is “romantic,” i.e., inchoate, Shakespeare's poetry of the feelings, tainted with self-indulgence, doesn't “pursue its object with much zeal.” Or is it that Shakespeare, uncommonly zealous, has more than a single object in view? You can argue that the multiplying of objects, dispersing his energies, enervates the poems, or that his poems are quickened by this accommodating instinct.

A microcosm of the sonnets, his LIX remembers a passage in the Metamorphoses (XV, 176ff.) where all things are flux, “changing place with that which goes before.” In Shakespeare's version, the question is whether our time is better than what went before, or inferior to it, or whether flux or “revolution” is still as Ovid says it was. This sonnet, only a simulacrum of the prescribed form, is seamless except for the couplet. “Minding true things by what their mockeries be” (a phrase of Shakespeare's from Henry V), readers will want to pick up on that, observing how content isn't seamless but pestered. This promotes the altercation, noticed earlier, between content and form.

Shakespeare's young man, a nonpareil, suggests to the poet, his readers too, that there is something new beneath the sun.

If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled.

Shakespeare wants us to read his “If” clause as contrary to fact. Lessoned by his Fair Youth, we are hardly “beguiled,” and this present time when he flourishes is “mended” (l. 11) or improved, as against the long past.

Being mended, however, our modern time isn't radically improved, only “patched” (invoking the Clown in Twelfth Night, 1.5.52: “Anything that's mended is but patched”), and Shakespeare's “how” phrase, a tongue-twister, seems mimetic of beguiling. Surprisingly, that is what he denies. Even Shakespeare nods? His first line, read alone, reverses the position he appears to contend for. Syntax enjoins the reading: Now that I think about it, there is nothing new except that which is. This works out to the proposition: Everything that is is new; or (summoning Ecclesiastes and taking truce with Ovid): There is nothing new beneath the sun. This second reading doesn't cancel the first, and nothing but the whole poem precipitates out. The inclusiveness is Shakespeare's particular virtue, where virtue is power, and most of the famous poems declare it.

Antony and Cleopatra (the world well and ill lost) has a figure that clarifies what Shakespeare is up to. Saying his inclusive play, it gives the quiddity of his sonnets, at war between will and will not. The “common body,” Caesar tells them,

Like to a vagabond flag upon the stream,
Goes back and forth, lackeying the varying tide,
To rot itself with motion.

The poems don't admit of resolution, however, not unless you rack them, and the back-and-forth goes on without term.

Shakespeare, every inch the modern artist, is the master of distinctions. But he is also old-fashioned in his art, non-perspectival. His sonnets are like paintings in the older time, and like much old music whose composer honors different voices, not distinguishing between background and foreground. In XV, for instance, “When I consider everything that grows.” Matching or opposing his love for the friend, some occulted feeling calls it in question. I don't think we say that Shakespeare is self-indulgent, as when in certain late plays, not minding his dramatic manners, he breaks out against the new economics. E.g. in Pericles: “The blind mole casts / Copped hills towards Heaven to tell the earth is thronged / By man's oppression, and the poor worm doth die for't.” That is digressive and readers ask where he is coming from. In his sonnets, however, the other thing that engages him speaks as loud as the “ostensible” poem. This differs from most modern art (i.e., post-Renaissance) where one point of view gets hegemony over the others.

Anguished by the “conceit” or thought of the Fair Youth's “inconstant stay,” Shakespeare the loyalist engraves him anew in his verses. A familiar “topos” assures immortality through art, and for the first time in the sonnets Shakespeare takes off from this. (It speaks to his quality that in other sonnets, the consciousness is of universal wreck, everything gone, art included. “This thought is as a death,” and the sonnets are helpless against it.) His enabling word as he ends, following the metaphor from husbandry with which he begins, is “engraft”: as Time takes from you, “I engraft you new.” But as he tells us up front, everything that grows “Holds in perfection but a little moment,” and the Fair Youth's “stay,” given this poem's logic, is necessarily “inconstant.”

Not teasing, only searching, Shakespeare's scrutiny discloses other possibilities. “Stay” is also “support,” in this context a weak reed, and “inconstant” is not merely “fleeting” but “fickle.” A judgmental word, it reproves Shakespeare's friend. The conclusion he arrives at, though unexpected is seen to be just. That is, it surprises you but not like sleight-of-hand, and you find it rationalizable when you go back to the beginning. It isn't ironic either, only catholic or total, the poet taking all things in account.

“Rationalizable” is important, and nobody wants to be tricked. Shakespeare the rhetorician, practiced in declaiming, turns protest aside in an anthology piece like XVIII:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed.
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest,
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.
          So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
          So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Readers who look to their defenses will wonder how his young man can enjoy “eternal summer” when “every fair from fair sometime declines.” Shakespeare has an answer, asking us to suppose that poetry preserves the friend's essence. “In eternal lines” is the way he puts it, perhaps begging the question. For poetry, even his, is subject to mortality, like the buds of May and all things beneath the sun.

So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Perhaps Shakespeare's couplet is pious asseverating, rhetoric standing in for thought.

“So long” means forever, and most readers take heart at this. But in linguistic propriety Shakespeare's meditated words—heavy as stones—mean also “Just so long.” Provisionality bears a part in his promise of immortal life, and his powerful affirmative carries its own negating. Disputed in the beginning, his comparison that verges on rodomontade is vindicated and amplified on a retrospective view. Negative and positive being immiscibles, readers with an eye for tidiness want to separate them out. In Shakespeare's sonnets, however, “there's place and means” for both. The quotation comes from All's Well That Ends Well, and the sonnets in this particular anticipate the plays.

Putting a question to begin his poem, Shakespeare devises an answer. The question—but it needn't be interrogative, only a taking-off point—is his given or “topos.” This technical word, a good peg to hang the sonnets on, commits poets to an enterprise both exacting and essentially formal. In the nature of the enterprise, disposing counts more than inventing. Any given will do and what matters is how they assess it. We call Shakespeare sincere when his assessment checks out.

His summer's day comparison, ventured first in XVIII, diverts him again in XXXIII:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace.
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all-triumphant splendor on my brow.
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath masked him from me now.
          Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth.
          Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.

This second time round, reperusal of the data dictates a change of mind or heart. The beautiful boy, assimilated to the sun, is put down remorselessly: a flatterer, “coiner” or counterfeiter, an alchemist pretending to transmute base metals, patient of himself, a culprit on the way to Tyburn, “stealing unseen to west” with his disgrace. No matter, says the last line, “Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.” We end with a democracy of insufficiency, though.

XVIII and XXXIII, complementary and opposed, salute each other from a distance. But a linear pattern overlays Shakespeare's sequence, and many of his sonnets arrange themselves in pairs, often in triads. (Some examples of the former are nos. XXVII-XXVIII, XLVI-XLVII, LVII-LVIII, LXXI-LXXII, LXXIII-LXXIV. Poems that exhibit the triad pattern include nos. XXXIII-XXXIV-XXXV, LXXVIII-LXXIX-LXXX, LXXXVIII-LXXXIX-XC, CIX-CX-CXI.) A convenient phrase for this is thesis-antithesis-synthesis, except that the synthesis is only linguistic. Shakespeare's “essays” at truth, some enormously persuasive, are “topoi,” precisely, begetting different answers to a question posed.

Two well-known sonnets, XXIX and XXX, show him bending to the work. Misery is his burden in the first of these poems, “When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes.” At the end he gets rid of it, buoyed by the remembrance of his friend's “sweet love.” This ending is happy. Canvassing the same materials, the next poem in his series, “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,” recites a litany of old woes or grievances. In this second poem also, thoughts of the “dear friend” make losses good. But Shakespeare, looking in the mirror, doesn't like what he sees. Down in the dumps, he is enjoying himself, watering his “chamber round / With eye-offending brine” (like his sentimental heroine in Twelfth Night). His woes are “sweet,” called up to be exploited, a deplorable activity, at the same time refreshing. (Really that is what he tells us but readers won't trust their ears.) The couplet, a touch perfunctory, breaks off his relishing of sorrows. Another happy ending, this one is felt as too bad.

We who listen to the poet as he speaks on both sides of the question are auditors of a dramatic performance. He, if faithful to it, has to get his voices down pat. But Shakespeare, though expert in mimicry, isn't simply a mimic, and the cold-blooded artificer is also the beleaguered man, caught in a kind of hell, intolerably complete vision. More sympathetic than most or listening harder, he contains in himself all possible points of view. His special knack or unhappiness is to honor them all.

But he isn't “importunate” enough, Ransom thinks, never proposing to lose himself in the object. That isn't a saving reluctance. His considering eye is a roving eye and the willingness to hold off—Hamletesque, it might be—looks like irresolution, almost a moral failure. Why couldn't he make up his mind?

In Nashville in the Sixties, I spent an evening with “Mr. Ransom.” That was how I addressed him and how he still seems to me, not a personage who asked homage but a courtly old gentleman you were glad to defer to. A bad time, the Sixties, when many of my acquaintance knew what they knew, announcing it on placards. Some in our company, raising the big questions, weren't behindhand in offering answers. Mr. Ransom, a good listener, wasn't among them.

I wanted to quiz him about his poetry, especially “The Equilibrists,” his tale of two lovers who don't make it together. Fixed like painful stars, they spin in their different orbits, burning to come near. Honor beats them back, though, and these two live out their lives in a “torture of equilibrium.” This scenario is like Andrew Marvell's in his “Definition of Love,” where another poet wants another mistress but Fate drives iron wedges between them. Their love, linked in spirit, never in body, shows as the mind's conjunction and “opposition” of the stars, separated by 180 degrees. Perhaps “The Equilibrists” found a starting point in this seventeenth-century poem?

But a striking young woman at the dinner table—I remember the “honey-colored ramparts at her ear”—had questions of her own to put. The masses of blond hair belied what she was, which only goes to show. Issuing from a brain stocked with German philosophy, especially “the famous philosopher Hegel,” her questions bristled with capital letters. Much about Truth and Beauty, Beauty and Truth. Smoothing out his napkin, our guest attended thoughtfully, now and then murmuring answers. They weren't really answers but her questions, politely rephrased. Where was the sharpshooter who drew a bead on Shakespeare and unlucky Edna Millay? One way or another, we survived the evening, but I never got to ask about Marvell.

This was no great loss. Marvell's poem, if it gives Ransom the germ of his idea, goes off in another direction. The older poet is anti-consummation and his “Definition of Love” is when the lovers don't embrace. Ransom's poem is a house divided, one reason it stands. Taking leave of logic, it goes in two directions at once.

No lovers more passionate than the Equilibrists, her white flesh tinder to his lecheries, her body a field of lilies beseeching him to take. But if he plucks the lilies, he bruises or breaks them, and honor instructs him not to do this. A gray word and officious, its counsels are ill sped. But dispute them and you end up in Hell. Point counterpoint, and that is where great lovers lie. But when they kiss they rend each other, a never-ending torment.

Would you ascend to Heaven and bodiless dwell?
Or take your bodies honorless to Hell?

This is a quandary, “Predicament indeed,” except that most, strait-laced or libertine, resolve it without ado. It wouldn't have stumped Mr. Ransom's interlocutor. For him, the predicament is the poem, though, and you need the whole poem to measure its sharpness. A rueful epitaph, giving and taking, remembers his lovers. “Perilous and beautiful,” he calls them.

This scholar-critic, trained first in the modern sciences, came late to an interest in poetry. Vain about his early training, a whetstone for the mind, he displays it in his critical prose. There, discriminations are notably acute. Poems and plays were immiscible, like oil and water, and in the essay on the sonnets he drew a line between them. Shakespeare is the despair of taxonomers, however. The same facts are controlling for his comedies and tragedies but not the point of vantage from which he inspects them. In Romeo and Juliet he makes a noble threnody, celebrating romantic love. This becomes a theme for laughter in his next play, A Midsummer Night's Dream. But his dream play isn't unalloyed laughter. So far, the playwright is like Shakespeare at sonnets, and readers will think of other examples.

His plays, unlike the sonnets, offer him surrogates, “circus animals,” a later poet called them. Versions of himself, sometimes polar opposites, they confer greater freedom on Shakespeare the playwright. In the sonnet, a solo performance, he has to speak in propria persona. The requirement is onerous but he takes it on, my guess is that he courts it, liking to be in straits. The narrower compass certifies his agility, also putting the stamp of truth on what he has to say. (His saying is more credible because forced from him under pressure). Moving up and down the gamut from comfort to despair, he plays many parts in his first-person pronoun. But where the plays need five acts to accommodate all he is, Shakespeare at sonnets does his back-and-forth in fourteen lines.

This stunning performance makes life hard on readers who prefer the certainty of one meaning to the possibility of two. Inconsistency holds no terrors for him, “two-headed Janus” (the god he swears by in The Merchant of Venice). He isn't inconsistent, though, only “circumambient.” His poems are all of a piece but not coherent like prose, or they appeal to a larger coherence. (The narrow compass belies this, another instance where form and content have their useful contention.) Paraphrase, always inadequate for poetry, falsifies this poet absolutely, and if you are going to close with him you must honor his words, just the ones he uses. Involving himself with the latencies of words, he composes differences or allows them houseroom in the interest of his comprehensive truth. It isn't simply that he is better than Mr. Ransom's eruditi, Sidney and Donne, rather that he ploughs a wider furrow.

But I want to look at some poems where the larger truth absorbs him. This needs close reading, and many, satisfied with Shakespeare-in-outline, will call it perverse or myopic. Close reading has its comic side (“peeping and botanizing”) but readers of the sonnets ought to be myopic, eyes right down on the page. Words being Shakespeare's medium, that is where you find him.

A good poem to begin with is LXXVI, docketed by scholars as one of Shakespeare's “Rival Poet” poems. This one introduces a dessicated Shakespeare, dried up in his invention and always harping on the one string. As his poem progresses, though, he sees how to excuse himself. Things could hardly be otherwise, since the Fair Youth is his inevitable subject. His sonnet, an integer, makes a graceful tribute to this friend.

Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?
Oh, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
          For as the sun is daily new and old,
          So is my love still telling what is told.

In fact, the poet's excuse, a valid one, is there from the beginning, and what he lacks and his rival has is what he is better off for not having. The “pride” he doesn't have denotes extravagant clothing, also sexual heat. This attribute, appropriate to bad actors like his Dark Lady, seducing purity with her “foul pride” (CXLIV), is morally evil. The “quick” change not open to him equates to shifty behavior, and anyway who wants to get in step “with the time,” cultivating up-to-the-minute expedients and eccentric “compounds.” Worse for being that, the compounds are adulterated.

But Shakespeare's integer, inspected, shows fissures, or it encloses another poem within itself. “Barren” is childless, a deprived condition, and “quick,” an approbative word, tells of life. The (medicinal) compounds Shakespeare isn't learned in might help to heal him, if they weren't outside his ken. You recognize this poor poet by his ever-the-same garment, “noted” or stigmatized, also residually like a worthless plant. All his “best is dress,” mere show without substance. (That is what the ear says, but intellectualizing readers rarely consult it.) He resembles an old clothes' man or “botcher,” refurbishing wornout words. A fiscal image presents him, “spent” like a bankrupt; also, as the lexical range gets its due, sexually flaccid. The mutable sun to which he compares himself is, if renewing, cozening too. But the comparison includes both poet and Fair Youth, “my love” working two ways, a vice or hallmark of Shakespeare's. Each is “still” (three times repeated) telling over a tedious tale. How boring! “Why is my verse so barren of new pride?” Because, “sweet love, I always write of you.”

A word about pronouns: in Shakespeare, they tend to “squint.” This sows confusion, and no doubt he is doing what his critic says he shouldn't, exploiting the uncertain possibility of two meanings rather than the certainty of one. I must distinguish, however, between post-modern theory's infinite range of meanings and the ambiguity that doesn't blur but widens our horizon. Shakespeare at sonnets complicates his poems, amplifying their meaning. The primary reading is obvious, at once true and intended, the complicating or even contradicting is residually true, and the poet, a regisseur, controls both.

He gives the critics fits in his notorious sonnet XCIV, “They that have power to hurt and will do none.” These icy characters, niggards of themselves and profoundly unattractive, “rightly do inherit heaven's graces.” That is Shakespeare's proposal, hard to swallow. This poem's argument runs counter to that of the “procreation” sonnets with which Shakespeare's sequence begins. (Ransom, tapping his ferrule, observes this.) Vindicating the friend, a version of Narcissus or the austere Angelo of Measure for Measure, Shakespeare bids him hug himself to himself, keeping clear of erotic attachments. That way, he builds his credit. This counsel is disinterested but desperately partial, and the poet, with due deliberateness, is locating himself on the horns. Not confused but mimetic of confusion, the poem enacts his bifold condition.

Confusion gets its quietus in LXXXVII, “Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing.” Or is confusion aggravated to the end that Shakespeare's readers see more than before? An exercise in self-deprecating, his sonnet tells the same story over and over. Good-bye to the friend, only a “lease-hold” love, not “fee simple.” Ransom remarks the charm of the feminine endings but oddly doesn't “hear” what this dying fall does to the poem.

Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know'st thy estimate:
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving.
Thyself thou gavest, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gavest it, else mistaking;
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgment making.
          Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter,
          In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.

This sonnet says how meter and diction make argument, confounding the sense or enforcing a second sense. Diction means rhetorical questions (but they don't beget the expected answers), a heaping up of gerunds, gravid monosyllables in Shakespeare's last line. Also it means metaphor, legal and fiscal, a series of terms that puts a bargain before us, not a world-without-end bargain, however. Meter is that lugubrious extra syllable in all but two of Shakespeare's lines. Silences play into this, a strong hiatus after “waking” as the poem gathers itself to conclude. The gerunds accumulating, each line augurs this conclusion, and the emotional thrust, bitterly reprehending, tilts at the paraphrasable content. “Thus have I had thee”: a glozing or fictive love. Damning and acquitting in the same breath. Shakespeare makes a strange panegyrist.

“Fulsome panegyric,” partly strategic, dowers the young man. “Be thou the tenth Muse,” Shakespeare urges him (XXXVIII), a richer source of inspiration than the other nine in aggregate. This friend gets all the praise for whatever is “worthy perusal” in the poet. The poem, concluding, says so:

If my slight Muse do please these curious days,
The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.

“Pains” is what we expect, as in “painstaking,” but “pain” is what he gets. That is partly as his “slight Muse” points to the poet, also to his equivocal friend.

The Fair Youth is Shakespeare's alter ego, however, “two distincts, division none” (recalling his sonnet-like “Phoenix and Turtle”). In CXVI, a much-loved sonnet, handed round for a long time between boys and girls, he salutes this perfect union:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments.

He is saying with the expected gravity: May I never do this. But syntax, scansion too, heard as “impedimented,” allow of a subtext. I think the poem demands it. The speaker, a doubtful lover amply schooled by his friend, is saying also: Don't let me do this. We who look and listen, standing in the wings, are asked to hold him back, restraining an impulse to admit what he denies. “Love is not love,” this exasperated poet thinks. (Lines in poetry, enjambed or otherwise, need their autonomy.) Truth will out, and unless we stop him he will speak as “liberal” as the north wind. That is how his Emilia speaks in Othello. As the play makes clear, she hasn't any recourse, and neither has Shakespeare's poet.

But poets say what they mean or ought to? That is certainly true. What they mean depends on diction and syntax, however, and it seems fair to hold the poet to this. For the criticism of poetry, words and how they go together are the only Ariadne's thread. So Shakespeare's readers have a choice, not easily evaded. (Unlike his performance in poetry, this choice comes down to either/or.) They can fault the performance, detecting in his sonnets an incoherent Shakespeare, or agree to call him “myriad-minded.” Mostly, this well-worn phrase is a cliché of criticism, not really looked into, and single-minded readers will jib at what it discloses. Poems that grapple with big subjects, Shakespeare's poems, need complicatedness, however. A true marriage of minds that persist in their allegiance is hard to pull off, life instructing us endlessly how the course of true love never did run smooth. Poems that ask to be taken seriously will want to reflect this.

One of these poems is CXLVI, “Poor soul, the center of my sinful earth.” Alone among the 154 sonnets that make up Shakespeare's sequence, this one, rejecting our quotidian world, appeals to the World over Yonder. Editors often compare it to Donne's Holy Sonnet, “Death, be not proud.” But Shakespeare sees a logical fallacy in through-and-through conversion pieces, as when Mad Jack turns into the Dean of St. Paul's. “Anything that's mended is but patched. Virtue that transgresses is but patched with sin, and sin that amends is but patched with virtue.” Or Shakespeare's ear tells him that the Platonic strain needs amplification, some judicious impurity. Truth being at issue, a monophonic composition won't do for him, and his poem, faintly dissonant, makes room for different voices.

A De contemptu mundi poem, CXLVI ratifies the soul's wisdom in preferring “terms divine” to “hours of dross.” At the end, bizarrely feeding on death and invigorated by this, it quits the fortified place where rebel powers besiege it. Why spend such large cost on a “fading mansion”? “Is this thy body's end?” Poor body!

Shakespeare's questions have answers but readers who take thought won't speak them too quickly. The soul, not plagued by questions, thinks that life hereafter is a better bet than life in the meantime, contingent on the body's loss. Along the way to Heaven, though, it makes certain fiscal arrangements, and buying and selling portray a calculating soul. The bottom line, salvation, gets our approval. This is the meaning most pick from Shakespeare's lines but it isn't plenary, and Shakespeare sees to it that approval is tempered. Listening to him, not between the lines but consulting the lines, we are made to feel uneasy at the shopkeeper-mix of calculation and virtue.

Ransom gives high marks to Shakespeare's “Platonic” poem, “a noble revulsion” and the most “spiritual” of the sonnets. “Spiritual” is good, like “Platonic,” and the body and its claims get downgraded. Shakespeare would have been better served had he employed this poem “to conclude the unhappy history, leaving quite off the eight miscellaneous and indeterminate ones that follow.” But “indeterminate” is what we want, never more so than here.

Shakespeare's sonnet, singular in its concern with last things, is true to the rest of them in the way its subject is invested. He doesn't believe in the kernel of truth and doesn't strip away the husk but adds layer on layer. His multilayered performances don't preclude meaning, though, and the sonnets, however much trouble they give, aren't conundrums. But Shakespeare's meaning is comprehensive like the life his poems describe. Putting it that way seems to intimate some didactic purpose in this writer, whereas he wanted to “please many and please long.” Johnson, implicative as often, used these words in his preface to Shakespeare's plays. Both the plays and sonnets depend for their special pleasure on the circus master's impulse to get everything under one tent.