SOURCE: Davey, James Joseph. “The Function of the Dark Lady in Shakespeare's Sonnets,” in The Function of the Dark Lady in Shakespeare's Sonnets, pp. 5-27. Trieste, Italy: Università Degli Studi Di Trieste, 1986.

[In the following essay, Davey contends that in Shakespeare's sonnets to the dark lady, the poet moves away from the idealization of the first group of sonnets—those addressed to the young man—and instead emphasizes the dark lady's physical, earthly nature and beauty.]

Shakespeare's Sonnets, though read through with exquisite pleasure, though capable of cutting deeply into the tender marrow of the sensitive reader, are certainly not easily approached on a more critical plane. The poetic sense of the poems themselves seems to defy any attempt at simple arrangement into a neatly unified story granting a flowing read from first to last; indeed, they are enveloped in deep mystery, opening themselves only to the most disparate speculations. While this obscurity may appear a great handicap to those systematic critics who yearn for utmost objectivity regarding what is most subjective by its very nature, that is, poetic intuition, while it may seem an obstacle to those who wish to grant to the more rationalizing mind access to that richer current of feeling and expression, to that subcutaneous contact with the more spiritual order of the cosmos, the essence of life itself, of which poetry is the medium, Shakespeare's sonnet series has proven itself quite capable of infusing the sea of criticism which has washed over it with great animation of conjecture, and yet, with the ebbing tide, remains itself «ever the same» (LXXVI)¹.

Problems with a more objective understanding of the Sonnets, as they present themselves to us, come up immediately upon reading the dedication. Who might the «onlie begetter of these issuing sonnets» refer to? How much of the ordering of the sonnets was actually Shakespeare's own? Why did their publication seem to have upset the poet? The first question should not really concern us, for, in spite of Shakespeare's recurrent pretensions as to the superiority of the real figure of the Fair Youth over any portrayal which might come to the reader by way of his poetry, we do indeed encounter only the beauty and power of the poet's use of language which captivates our attention and drives us to probe the inner reaches of the writer's conception of Beauty, Truth, and, more importantly, Love, that «ever-fixed mark» (CXVI).

The second two questions interest us more and have stimulated a storm of conjecture. Indeed there is a noticeable break in the sonnet series as a whole: from sonnet I-CXXVI there is a young man being addressed, while sonnets CXXVII-CLII mostly hinge upon a relationship with a “dark lady”. The last two sonnets of the series, CLIII and CLIV, though referring distantly to the affair with the Dark Lady, are so stylistically different, so arcadian, so generally inexpressive of that intimistic warmth of the poet that they are best ignored. So, overall, we seem to be working with two main sonnet groups, though at times it does seem that certain themes overlap. Yet what distinguishes the two sonnet groups is not just the change of the beloved, but rather an overall change in tone and intensity and final scope: while the first group attempts to transpose the non-ending war between Beauty and Time into a lofty poetic contemplation of the meaning of Truth and Love, where the beloved is tendentially subtracted from this baser world and elevated to some demigod-like state, «you are my all the world» (CXII), the second series seems to prefer to negate this movement towards sublimization, and, quite on the contrary, underlines the terrestrial nature of his love's physical being. In the second series the lofty themes tend to disappear at moments; Time is no longer addressed, Beauty is no longer the path to Truth and Love. No, it all seems to become dialectically charged, where the physical is deceitful, and therefore to be objectively viewed for what it really is; Love becomes richer and, we might add, more subjective. Love is no longer dependent on any changeable, mutable sense of beauty; it is released from any such precarious bind and becomes truly an inward expression of the poetic soul which must love to live, the poetic air with which it breathes.

I cannot help but read the first 126 sonnets as an intentional «canzoniere», another sonnet sequence to be compared with those already very much in vogue at the time. If the author was somewhat put out by the publication of his sonnet series it was most probably not due to the appearance of these already circulating poems of the first 126, why should he have been? Certainly the portrayal of a man as the beloved could not have truly scandalized the courtly spirit of Renaissance England, as it could not have done in Renaissance Italy, or Classical Greece, either. The hither-thither curiousity as to whether it was an overtly homosexual affair, or rather latent, or purely platonic belongs solely to the sphere of private life and gossip. We, centuries later, in great obscurity regarding Shakespeare's personal life, should not even bother with such suppositions. What interests us solely is the poetry, and in his poetry we discover not so much the beauty of an Apollonian model, which the Poet outwardly appears to be constructing, but rather with the moods of the Poet himself who seems to be developing the ideal self, as he often stresses in his verse, strewn with however many conceits: «for all that beauty that doth cover thee / is but the seemly raiment of my heart» (XX-II); or, «What can mine own praise to mine own self bring? / and what is't but mine own when I praise thee?» (XXXIX); or still, «Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye / and all my soul and all my every part … 'Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise, / painting my age with beauty of thy days.» (LXII).

The second series of sonnets, from CXXVII on, appears as a parallel story. Indeed there are reasons to believe that the two series were composed, at least in part, contemporaneously. Certainly sonnets XL-XLII seem very much to allude to the situation we find in CXXXIII, CXXXIV, and CXLIV where we have a love triangle involving Poet, Young Man and Dark Lady. Yet this reader of the Sonnets cannot help but feel that it was precisely this second series which the Poet preferred not to see published. The first series has a basic unity of construction, of inspiration; the second series appears more as a miscellaneous collection where the Poet allows himself to remove the filter, to expose the self in all its vulnerability. The second series was, in short, too intimate, too self-revealing; possibly even too vulgar at times (CX-XXV, CXXXVI). The Dark Lady is never promised immortality by means of the Poet's rhyme as the Fair Youth is in the first series; she is never elevated to a position of metaphysical battle with Time. She remains dark and enigmatically human, as only woman can be.

I feel that Sonnet C is an intimation of this rupture of inspiration, where the Poet admits having strayed from his original and more conscious intentions:

Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget'st so long
To speak of that which gives thee all thy might?
Spend'st thou thy fury on some worthless song,
Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light?

This «darkening of power to lend base subjects light» is understood by many to refer to the preoccupation of the Poet with his dramatic production, which forced him, temporarily at least, to overlook his attention to the Fair Youth, his «tenth Muse», «ten times more in worth / than those old nine» (XXXVIII), but, in reading on to the second series, where the Dark Woman is encountered with all the allusions to a darker and yet deeper inspiration, one is tempted to see these verses as an allusion to her person and the series of poems and spiritual reflections which ensued. A power she certainly was, for indeed without any lovely outward form worthy of captivating the Poet she was almost bewitchingly able to dominate his will, distorting, as it were, all his previous notions as to what was beautiful and true. This power of hers forced him to reconsider the natural order of things, even to the point of swearing that things were what they were not in reality. The Poet, on a more existential plane, seems to have pierced the wall of appearance and outer reality and to have reached some sort of Faustian insight into existence and being.

After sonnet C the mood is somewhat changed, more charged than it was for the previous ninety-nine. If before the Sonnets could have been referred to as «sugared»², that is no longer quite possible now. One might suspect that a certain amount of time had passed between the composition of XCIX and C, and not only because the Poet directly tells us so, for to be sure he had complained of absences and the forgetfulness of his Muse in the past. In sonnet CI we speak of the Poet's Muse's «neglect of truth in beauty dyed», which of course overtly refers to his Fair Youth, while further on he affirms that «Truth needs no colour, with his colour fix'd; / Beauty no pencil, beauty's truth to lay»; in sonnet CX the Poet admits to have «look'd on truth / askance and strangely»; in CXI he avows «And almost thence my nature is subdued / to what it works in, like the dyer's hand»; in CXVIII we find «to bitter sauces did I frame my feeding; / And sick of welfare found a kind of meetness / to be diseased»; in CXIX he confesses «What potions have I drunk of Siren tears, / Distill'd from limbecks foul as hell within»; in CXXIII we encounter the strength of the affirmation «This I do vow»; could not all these passages hint at this Dark Lady experience? What is important here is that the Dark Lady experience seems to have been already passed and absorbed into the Poet's inner world of hopes and disappointments, of his own understanding of what Love must be on an idealistic level, and what it has been to him on a practical level. The attempt of the Poet from sonnet C onward is to reacquire that innocence lost of his initial love state at the very beginning of the sonnet series. But let us begin to take a look at the Dark Lady sequence itself.

It would be rather difficult to underline sufficiently the change of mood one perceives at the beginning of this series. Sonnet CXXVI, which concludes the first series, is really not a sonnet at all, but a string of rhymed couplets with a flow of its own. With a degree of emotional detachment and intellectual objectivity not often found in the Sonnets it brings the first group to an end with the admission that though Nature may spite and disgrace Time by holding back from Time's onslaught its treasure, Beauty: «She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure». The sonnet finishes on a very appropriate note with the surrender of his «lovely boy» to ever-victorious Time, ending the first series with the final word «thee»: «Her audit, though delay'd, answer'd must be, / and her quietus is to render thee.» A good fairwell. Going on to sonnet CXXVII, as is natural, following the order that has come down to us through Thorpe's edition of the poems, we enter an entirely different world:

In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slander'd with a bastard shame:
For since each hand hath put on nature's power,
Fairing the foul with art's false borrow'd face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' eyes are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Slandering creation with a false esteem:
          Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,
          That every tongue says beauty should look so.

Upon reading the first line we meet that key word that was used earlier, however occasionally, in the first 126, to describe night and ink without any particular function other than adjectivation; here, for the first time, it takes on a depth of meaning which would have been hard to imagine previously: the word black. Placed after «the old age» we seem to be distancing ourselves into some primordial period, some simpler age where things are neatly considered according to some unquestionable sense of what they really are and how they are to be evaluated. The Poet is undoubtably referring to a classical period on a conscious level, but these words, ordered as they are, become richer and more mysterious on a deeper, probably unconscious or intuitive level. Black, the non-colour, or the sum of all colours; that which absorbs all colours and in so doing annihilates them. This, I feel, is a key part of the Dark Lady, that which, figuratively, draws one out of any more epidermic considerations and casts him into a well of mystery of being where the sense of self is extracted from its contingent existence and left dangling over an abyss of metaphysical possibilities. This indeed may be what is truly attracting the Poet to a woman who might more objectively be described as ugly (CXXX) and evil (CXX-XI). Some critics underline the importance for the Poet to genuinely justify her substituting the Fair Youth as his source of inspiration, while we watch the Poet in the following sonnets as he tries to bring her up to some more Apollonian level, and, in the end, fails. He exerts himself greatly to keep her within the containable, yet she proves indomitable. This is exactly what a more romantic inspiration might unconsciously be searching for. She represents the Dionysian element of life, of inspiration, going beyond undestanding or fully possessing. She is raw energy unleashed at the beginning of creation which defies any attempt at order within the universe. This is that great sea mentioned by the Poet in sonnet LXXX, where he refers to a greater poet using his Fair Youth for inspiration:

But since your worth, wide as the ocean is,
The humble as the proudest sail doth bear,
My saucy bark, inferior far to his,
On your broad main doth wilfully appear.
Your shallowest help will hold me up afloat,
Whilst he upon your soundless deep doth ride …

This image of the sea seems much more suited to the inspirational world of the Dark Lady, where truly we have a force that goes beyond any appearance. She has a touch of that Leopardian «Infinito» which is capable of absorbing and negating all: «Così tra questa / Immensità s'annega il pensier mio: / E il naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare». But Shakespeare seems to find this shipwrecking quality of his inspiration anything but «sweet» or pleasant, for indeed the relationship between him and the Dark Lady hinges upon a physical passion as well as any metaphysical suggestiveness.

The world that the Youth represents at times for the Poet is often contradicted, in as much as the Poet attempts to dominate the source of inspiration, holding it up as some objectively viewed perfection, and the Youth as a real human being cannot help but reveal himself as something beneath that much sought after perfection. True, the Poet continually affirms that the Fair Youth defies and goes beyond any poetic description, yet seems to maintain that by simply beholding the Youth himself and witnessing his fair aspect, his beauty, one cannot but admit to have found Truth in Beauty personified. The problem is that the Youth's beauty is subject to time's wrack and therefore the timelessness of Truth seems in jeopardy; yet this problem may be overcome by the Poet's act of «distilling» his beauty's «truth» (LIV). Probably the greater problem for the Poet in maintaining the force of his inspiration is that the Youth, with time, proves his character unworthy of his appearance. Can Beauty, abstracted from its physical fount, live sublimely in its own sphere, independent of any physical contingencies? For Shakespeare, here, the answer scems no, or at least not totally. The Poet is often disappointed by the Youth betraying the image he has of him.

In sonnet CXXVII we discover that since Beauty has been corrupted by «art's false borrow'd face» black must act as «beauty's successive heir», in as much as it can successfully mourn the loss of true Beauty. Already in the first series (I-CXXVI) we find a complaint of untrue beauty, the work of artifice and cosmetics as opposed to that formed by nature's own hand. In sonnets LXVII and LXVIII we read:

Why should false painting imitate his cheek,
And steal dead seeing of his living hue?
Why should poor beauty indirectly seek
Roses of shadow, since his rose is true?

(LXVII)

Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,
When beauty lived and died as flowers do now,
Before these bastard signs of fair were born,
Or durst inhabit on a living brow …
… And him as for a map doth Nature store,
to show false Art what beauty was of yore.

(LXVIII)

It becomes apparent that the semblance of beauty is not enough; we are speaking of something which runs deeper, of an attempt to get behind the shadows and to discover the fundamental relationships between man and the Divine, the only relationship where one can possibly hope to see that dread, incessant monster, Time, defeated. This attempt on the part of the Poet forces us to take a somewhat detached view of his work. We must try to discern a personal philosophy that might act as a back-bone for the sonnets as a whole, and yet try to avoid giving a simple definition of the Neoplatonic notions that imbued his era; for, indeed, a certain love story involving great emotional strain, with wonderfully poetic solutions, transpires all the same throught this sonnet series, unifying what at times could appear to be disparate compositions. Looking over the heads, so to speak, of our Fair Youth or Dark Lady we find a love story that transcends its temporal and spatial reality to assert itself as a soul-scanning existential endeavour to uncover some semblance of permanence and truth in an apparently meaningless void of movement and interaction among physical entities, be they living or not. The Poet works with three transcendent virtues, Beauty, Truth, and Love, where Beauty is that manifestation of Truth that takes form in the physical being, the beloved, where brute physical chaos, ever-transforming matter, is tamed and infused with life-meaning order, the divine composition. In this order we find Truth, that connection with Oneness, the Unity of Being, the Godhead; an entity to which the Poet of the Sonnets will never address himself directly. The individual comes into contact with these two virtues through the powerful insight of Love, that empathy with the Divine, first in his perception of the Beautiful, and, secondly, through that intuition that dwells within him which sees through this picture, this image, this representation, and leads him to that grasping of Truth, which is his ultimate spiritual goal. The saint may overlook the importance of Beauty as this central hinge of meaning, throwing himself into a cosmic vision beyond his comprehension; the artist may be content to witness it only and pursue no further, leaving frustrated the God-inspired pull towards his inner intellect and meaning. The Poet intuits the God-imbued totality, the physical with the spiritual, and attempts to respect all three virtues as one God-inspired mechanism, which grants not only contact between subject and object, but an understanding of the Universal which contains and embraces it all. Beauty residing in the object is that spark which sets Love ablaze within the subject and draws him to gaze deeply within its flame, and if the viewer possesses that strength of pursuit, he finds that after a while the flame no longer blinds him, but rather becomes a window to draw him to the ultimate contemplation of meaning, which infuses this divine triad in indivisible unity, and, of course, brings about the dissolution of the subject. These windows of the Beautiful which lead to this meeting with Truth are to the Poet, as to the Petrarchans and others, the eyes of the beloved, which act as purifying suns at the beginning of the encounter, then become bright stars, to give way to pure crystal lenses granting one insight into being and meaning, the poetic understanding. What makes this second series of Shakespeare's Sonnets so particular, among other things, is that these clear windows, which encapsule the overall beauty of the beloved, deepen in tone most consumingly, from sonnet CXXVII on, into the blackest black.

On reading the sonnet series as a whole, we find we are working not so much with a mere move from a more or less Platonic contemplation of male beauty to a more physical involvement, if not degrading spiritual involvement, with a certain Dark Lady. If we can state with Wordsworth that «with this key / Shakespeare unlocked his heart», with the sonnet collection as a whole in mind, thus might we suggest that in the sonnets to the Dark Lady the Poet unlocked his soul. Once again, if at the beginning and throughout most of the first 126 sonnets we find a somewhat Apollonian and, therefore, static sense of beauty predominating, from CXXVII on we find, in general, a more dynamic, dialectic, Dionysian approach that seems not so much to negate Beauty as to transcend it.

Some of these considerations hinted at above lead us to ponder others. Regarding the notion of dialectic, we discover we are not working with any simple conception of a good-bad world, Manichaeanly opposed, once we come to the Dark Lady sonnets. Here we seem to enter a world which is actively attempting to wean the Poet from his dependence upon physical perfection and beauty. The bad that the Dark Lady does seems to be heightening the sensibility of the Poet, not granting him any comfortable perching ground to set himself down on. He may enjoy the physical delights the woman has to offer him (as well as to many others, if we are to take the Sonnets literally, e.g. CXLII), yet she is beyond possessing and seems to be the power of negation which is so vital in the rejuvenation of the spirit. Can we not think of Goethe's portrayal of God in the «Prolog im Himmel» from «Faust» where Mephisto is reminded that God despises none of his creatures, not even those who were so bold as to challenge his absolute authority. On the contrary, as Goethe has God say, the Devil, and his realm are the necessary antithesis that spurs man on to activity and growth, those traits of his which distinguish him from the brutes or non-animate objects. We are reminded along with Mephistopheles: «Des Menschen Tätigkeit kann allzuleicht erschlaffen, / Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh; / Drum geb ich gern ihm den Gesellen zu, / Der reizt und wirkt und muß als Teufel schaffen». As the Poet often seems to remind us (sonnet LXXVI) his style is ever the same, for «you and love are still my argument», yet such an attitude to his own personal growth can appear as a sign of monotony, of stasis, as the Poet warns us himself. This perfection of theme the Poet feels in his possession, in its actual occurrence, can become repetitious in that he, the poet, is expressing his spiritual vicissitudes within time; his expressions, once recorded, or even just uttered or thought, may fall out of this time-governed order only because they now depend no longer on the material world, but become part of a Platonic world of ideas, floating capsules of meaning-impregnated time wandering in an atemporal universe. What the Poet may be telling us, to return to sonnet CXXVII, is that not only has Beauty been «slander'd with a bastard shame», but that perhaps a perfect union between beauty in its physical manifestation, subject to Time, with Beauty as an atemporal idea is temptingly seductive, yet dangerous if dragged out to unrealistic extremes. To allow physical beauty to lead one to the conception of the idea may be desirable, but it must not be left to stagnate there, marooned so to speak. Beauty as the great intuition of the divine order and unity is the ultimate goal of the Poet and therefore to be felt as a totality within the spiritual realm, calling the Poet forward to its intersection with Truth, embraced by Love. Shakespeare in the Sonnets is ever working with these same virtues and it is quite clear that while Truth and Love may overcome that tyrant Time, in that they do not necessarily belong to its jurisdiction, physical beauty remains a contingency subject to Time's will. This calls for a sublimation process that is attempted by the Poet at, what appears to be, any cost; even that of swearing things are what they are not, placing the virtue of Truth in jeopardy and leaving his whole structure on the point of collapse; yet this will be discussed further on in the series. For now let it suffice to say that, while Goethe seems to be able to approach a total vision of reality and meaning on both a poetic and intellectual plane, a true hybrid vigour, Shakespeare seems to be operating at a solely poetic, intuitive level, which cannot help but instill a certain element of tragedy in his vision; after all, in his sonnet series it seems that Time is never ultimately defeated. Shakespeare was no German idealist, but rather an Elizabethan poet who, as J.B. Leishman says, «thought … in terms of feeling … and all his statements are metaphors, or in the process of becoming metaphors³». What is essential in the Dark Lady sonnets is that the Poet is no longer passively accepting beauty as something external to himself, but actively proposing a new sense of Beauty. Here Love is transcending simple physical beauty—for this was the shortcoming of the earlier sonnets—and stands aloof, independent of contingencies. With this liberation of Love from physical beauty the Poet's full role as poet and creator of both good and bad embraced by an overall good, the greater good, comes through; this is his travail, his deliverance. This very power to embrace all, the positive, the negative, and the new-found synthesis, is what makes Goethe's God in «Faust» so wonderfully magnificent. The black eyes of the Dark Lady become a bottomless pit, an unfathomable source of inspiration, no longer able to play the part of mirrors.

If one views the sonnet series as a whole, admittedly in an order which is not necessarily Shakespeare's own, though we can be sure that the first seventeen are in their only feasible position, we see there is this gradual passage from the Poet considering his fount of inspiration externally, as something outside of himself, and then slowly assimilating it, bringing it within his inner sphere. In the first series (up to CXXVII) we are clearly dealing with the Fair Youth, who is at first encouraged to perpetuate his beauty by begetting a child. In reading on we find this friend embodies past loves of the Poet (XX-XI), becomes the «better part of me» (XXXIX), and goes on to become a mind-encapsuled image, «for thou not farther than my thoughts canst move» (XLVII). Imaginatively we are basically passing from a world of the day, bathing in clear light, where outward appearances reign, to a world of night, where the spirit begins to preside over the physical. What could better capture this spirit of passage in the Sonnets than the third quatrain of XXVII, where the Poet finds benefit in his toilsome suffering:

… Save that my soul's imaginary sight
Presents thy shadow to my sightless view,
Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night,
Makes black night beauteous and her old face new.

In the second quatrain of sonnet CXXVII we have the trope of the «holy bower» «profaned» which sets a church-like setting for the appearance of the mourning Dark Mistress in the third quatrain. It is this religious ambience which makes this sonnet such a strong introduction to the sequence that follows. The «slandering» of beauty may call to mind the original sin of Adam and Eve, where we speak of the great transgression within God's «holy bower», the Garden of Eden. This sin-like image of falsifying reality to generate a mere outward appearance of beauty underlines the importance that Shakespeare must have felt for the deeper significance underlying true Beauty, that link in the chain of divine consciousness discussed earlier, involving Beauty, Truth, and Love. Only true Beauty can lead the Poet on to that heightened sense of existence and communion with Unity, which are his drive to create; it is his “insight” into reality which grants him the possibility of probing beneath the surface and getting beyond the world of potential illusion and deception. True Beauty's role is to capture the subject and give him the opportunity of seeing what greater meaning it can lead to. Once this has been accomplished its metaphysical essence is to be extracted—«distilled», as mentioned earlier (sonnet LIV)—from its physical representation; this is the ultimate release for Beauty, its triumph—the shell in which it was once contained remains within Time's realm. Where outward beauty has ensnared him and ultimately seems to have disappointed him, in his relationship with the Young Man, the Poet feels forced to close himself off in an empty-church-like solitude and in his effort to meditate on something surer, something more constant, deeper, he discovers the consolation of the night, that darkness which eventually must envelop all. Yet he hopes that she, in the plainness of her appearance, may redeem and carry him on to that growing process (confer CXV, where «love is a babe») that had been thwarted by a lack of correspondence between beauty and higher truth in the Youth, who had begun to grow «common» (LXIX). In her functional role of redeemer the Dark Lady becomes a Christ figure, granting the Poet that new charge of hope which is so essential for the continuation of his own development. She seems to be kneeling down in a dark, desecrated church and in her mute purity of a debased countenance seems to reinstill that metaphysical power that physical beauty once held. She mourns so sincerely the debasement of genuine beauty, as we read in the couplet, that it seems that through her Beauty is restored, by means of redeeming grace; a miracle of transformation is worked by a Madonna of Redemption.

This sonnet, in combination with the others, helps us to intuit a poetics of the Poet which was never expressed directly as such. Leaving utterances of Prospero and other dramatic figures to the side, we see the sincerity of the poet who views his expression as an almost religious quest for truth. Reality, though not always easily discerned, is God given and to be respected and revered as such. For such a poet a «slandering of creation» becomes pregnant and suggestive. This does not mean metaphors and overall extravagance of expression are to be repressed, for indeed a poet must romp freely with his poetic might. Yet the soul must be fed and expression must respect those most sacred notions of Beauty, Truth, and Love.

The Poet wants us to know, however, that his Dark Lady is not to be taken for a personification of beauty herself, objectively speaking. She is real, in flesh and blood, with smells and tastes and everything else which constitutes a living human being. In sonnet CXXX we find that she is human, all-to-human:

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
          And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
          As any she belied with false compare.

And yet is the Poet really only trying to comically depict a common wench, less than acceptable physically? While it would be a pity to rob the sonnet of any humorous touch one must admit there is more at work here than a ridiculing of his woman's looks or overall appearance. The three quatrains together tell us what this lady is by comparing her to what she is not, which reminds us of the Poet's refusal to take recourse to exaggerated and worn-out similitudes to “paint” the Fair Youth in the first series. He will continue to use his Muse and power of language to tell things as they really are, for this is the sacredness of his poetic mission. Abusing of Truth with false expressions which do not reflect the object or feelings themselves is like using cosmetics to create illusory beauty, which robs from genuine beauty. What the Poet is in fact doing here is dismantling those Petrarchan similitudes which in his age were threatening true expression. But in dismantling those supposedly necessary attributes of inspirational beauty we find the Poet reaffirming the distance between objective beauty as it might be perceived by others and the love that his relationship with the Lady instills within himself. He seems to be saying that beauty is no longer an essential step in attaining access to Truth and Love, and yet at the same time seems to be hinting at a deeper essence within his beloved which makes any outward manifestation of beauty superfluous. The root of the poetic message may be seen more as a move away from the objective sensation which places the beholder on the same level as any other viewer, banalizing the importance of the individual perception as compared to that of the collective perception. The experience is being internalized, entering the dark church of the psych, so to speak, and here the intimacy of the lover's heart gives the relationship that spark of meaning. What is communicated to the reader is that Truth is subjective, radicated in one's own sense of being; that rather than looking outward, one must look inward. The first twelve lines of the sonnet seem to attempt to tear away the skin from the true being of the beloved, to rend the real nature of his love free from any contingency. The result is that, upon approaching the couplet, the beloved as something existing outside of the Poet has disappeared and we find the Poet's subjective love has become his central concern. His Dark Lady remains present, but no longer as an objective presence, but rather as an inspirational air, infusing the Poet with thoughts of love and an awareness of his own spiritual richness.

With sonnet CXXXI we take a step beyond her unfair beauty and the consoling aspect of her blackness and are introduced to a dark behaviour which accompanies her dark semblance:

Thou art as tyrannous, so as thou art,
As those whose beauties proudly make them cruel;
For well thou know'st to my dear doting heart
Thou art the fairest and most precious jewel.
Yet, in good faith, some say that thee behold,
Thy face hath not the power to make love groan:
To say they err I dare not be so bold,
Although I swear it to myself alone.
And to be sure that is not false I swear,
A thousand groans, but thinking on thy face,
One on another's neck, do witness bear
Thy black is fairest in my judgment's place.
          In nothing art thou black save in thy deeds,
          And thence this slander, as I think, proceeds.

Different elements come into play here as the Poet approaches with his zoom lens this Dark Lady, who begins to become a black hole of mystery and self-torture. In this sonnet, and the two that follow it, we discover this world of pain and suffering which the Poet has entered upon, the sense of which is conveyed by words such as «tyrannous», «cruel», «groans», «wound», «torture» and «torment». The blackness of her character is just beginning to show itself, and the previous rapture of her antithetical beauty which pervades in CXX-VII is being transformed into a horrific encounter with a daemonic force. In sonnet CXXIX this development was given impetuous expression in describing the consequences of indulging in lust and sensual riot:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.
          All this the world well knows; yet none knows well
          To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

We find that reason has been lost, which, of course, precludes any hope of spiritual realisation that had been sought after in the Fair Youth series as well as at the beginning of the Dark Lady group. We are dealing with a futile madness that captures an important element of the Dark Lady sonnets. The outward situation seems to be that the Poet has a strongly sensuous relationship with a woman who, objectively speaking, is incapable of living up to the spiritual implications required by the Poet. The inward spiritual tension of the Poet throughout the series will be his attempt to almost consciously misconstrue her real portentousness and force upon himself an image and existential meaning for her which correspond little or nothing with the actual person he is working with. With the couplet of sonnet CXXIX we are suspended: are we to give greater emphasis to the «heaven» or to the «hell» of the last line? We know this type of relationship is a torment for the Poet, yet does this bliss proved somehow compensate adequately for the woe which follows? The Poet seems to be saying, at this point in the series, by giving the negative implications of the first twelve lines an upward turn in the couplet, that it does. All the same, the Poet has concluded the sonnet with a word which perfectly expresses the state he will find himself in shortly.

Returning to sonnet CXXXI we find the poet caught in this sorceress' net, for though he seems happy enough with his tyrannous mistress he seems to wish to shift the figurative significance of the blackness of her appearance to that of her behaviour, her deeds. Beauty is thereby restored to something of its original function where «Thy black is fairest in my judgement's place», and yet at what cost, for this affirmation is made while living within that heaven of lust realised, mentioned in CXXIX. To carry out this illusory heavenly image he must swear she indeed possesses the power to «make love groan», which, were it only an allusion to the sexual satisfaction she grants, would disturb us not. The problem is that this theme of swearing returns throughout the remaining sonnets of the series and haunts us with a much greater meaning. When the Poet speaks of the power to make love groan he seems to be alluding to that heightened sense of love discussed earlier. He now seems to be proposing that by some deep act of affirmation on his part he can declare her beauty as that which reflects Truth, and, therefore, capable of granting that elevating sense of Love which grants meaning and contact with the divine order. He hopes, however, to build all this, climb to such a height, upon a foundation whose worth has never really been ascertained. The higher he wishes to climb, the more this base seems to crumble beneath him. His act of swearing appears as a futile attempt to cement this crumbling reality from falling apart. The affirmation that Love's worth is unknown in sonnet CXVI refers to that love which is solidly rooted, which grows true and strong in good soil; it has no application here. This swearing becomes an almost Faustian pledge, where the tragedy, however, takes place on the inner stage of the mind. The Lady may, at first glance, appear as the tempting Mephisto, full of promises for a greater spiritual attainment, but on closer consideration we find that the Poet himself, as it must necessarily always be in a truly Faustian adventure, is both Faust and Mephisto rolled into one. The Poet wants to impose upon her this promise of realisation. He is willing to swear to her spiritual worth so that he might give metaphysical worth to the physical delights he proves while in her company. The false daemonic promise is that by selling his soul to a betrayal of Truth he may soar to those contemplative heights which only Love is capable of giving. The pitfall in this attempt is in believing that we alone are able to force this eventual realisation of spiritual harmony with the Unity of Being by the sole means of our will. By affirming thus we negate this very unity which we are striving to attain. We are doomed to fall in as much as we have destroyed the inward communicative power of our own being, which works not solely with what it wants or wills but with what it actually does feel and perceive. The Poet becomes aware of the Dark Lady's flawed nature, the perception of which is already a part of his being, yet insists on dividing his self to accommodate the illusion that he can make of her what he wishes. This self-deception cannot last, of course, and at the end of the series, with a final purging of his defective spirit, the Poet is able to release himself and fall back to reality.

The degree to which the Poet was actually seduced to enter within this false world of the Dark Lady and to justify her unfair beauty caused him to split her personality from her appearance and focus upon the consoling aspect of her dark eyes as opposed to the cruelty of her heart. In sonnet CX-XXII we read:

Thine eyes I love, and they, as pitying me,
Knowing thy heart torments me with disdain,
Have put on black and loving mourners be,
Looking with pretty ruth upon my pain.
And truly not the morning sun of heaven
Better becomes the grey cheeks of the east,
Nor that full star that ushers in the even
Doth half that glory to the sober west,
As those two mourning eyes become thy face:
O, let it then as well beseem thy heart
To mourn for me, since mourning doth thee grace,
And suit thy pity like in every part.
          Then will I swear beauty herself is black,
          And all they foul that thy complexion lack.

There is something here, considering the great disappointment the Poet went through upon the realisation that the Fair Youth had, temporarily at least, disappeared as his fount of inspiration, and, therefore, as his source of consolation against the transitoriness of existence under the tyrannic sway of all-consuming Time, which evokes the figure of the Donna Gentile of Dante's Vita Nuova. Clearly the Donna Gentile was without the baseness and vulgarity which infuses Shakespeare's Dark Lady, yet each had the role of keeping the poet afloat through a difficult stage of transition where the prior source of ultimate inspiration was lacking. The restorative powers of these two figures operated in drawing the respective poets out of thir despair of unconsolable loss. Both women prove unable to successfully take over the duties of the former Muse, yet are strong enough to force the poet to eventually reconsider the deeper implications of his former relationship. In Dante's case it was strong enough to grant him passage to the essence of his love for Beatrice and propel him on, in his Divine Comedy, to a vision of God and ultimate understanding, before dissolution in the incomprehensible; in this Dante conquers Time. As for Shakespeare, this experience with the Dark Woman allowed him to truly extract the essence of his relationship with the Fair Youth and make those magnificent affirmations we find in sonnets CXVI, CXXIII, or CXXIV for instance, not to mention that maturity of spirit, that human-encompassing breath we find in his later play:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken …

(CXVI)

No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change …
… Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wondering at the present nor the past,
For thy records and what we see doth lie,
Made more or less by thy continual haste.
          This I do vow, and this shall ever be,
          I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee.

(CXXIII)

If my dear love were but the child of state,
It might for Fortune's bastard be unfather'd,
As subject to Time's love or to Time's hate,
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gather'd.
No, it was builded far from accident;
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the blow of thralled discontent,
Whereto the inviting time our fashion calls …

(CXXIV)

The final five lines of CXXXII set a condition where the Poet states his willingness to acknowledge the superiority of this abstract beauty the Dark Lady has to offer him, which is based fully on the consoling power of her black eyes, and to forswear any previous notion of beauty which he might have entertained earlier, if only the woman will match that consolation of her eyes with a behaviour reflecting a consoling heart. The Poet expresses his need for love and is willing to sacrifice the Truth of Beauty in order to acquire it, yet the Dark Woman remains beyond his reach, beyond any compassion for the Poet, as aloof as ever. Black seems not so much her external colour as her unfathomable nature.

The lack of response on the part of the Black Woman forces the Poet in sonnet CXXXVII to ask himself why he has entrusted his Love to her power; he wonders what possible quality of hers could have brought him to «put fair truth upon so foul a face». There is no illusion now; she is some bewitching force, a daemonic nature which has him in a frenzy that portends no good. Yet the real question seems to be what is this Love which can transform things so, hindering the free passage of external truth to be beheld to the internal consciousness of the subject. In the opening quatrain of this sonnet the Poet interrogates Love and blames it for betraying his sense of sight, thereby misleading his spiritual quest:

Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes,
That they behold, and see not what they see?
They know what beauty is, see where it lies,
Yet what the best is take the worst to be.

This same theme of his love for the Dark Woman distorting true sight is met with in CXLVIII and the Poet becomes frantic in his attempt to find an explanation for this false perception of beauty which is urging him on to a dangerous detachment from reality. The Poet is morally sick and on the point of collapse, and she is the cause, or so he prefers to consider it. He is being torn asunder by this engrossing passion, this internal storm of his, where at times he seems ready to yield to complete self-negation and at others ready to cast off this yoke of self-illusion, to openly rebel. After sonnet CXXXIX her eyes are no longer an expression of consolation, for even this she refuses to grant him, but become mortal darts capable of putting an end to that particular inspirational image which they had previously been.

The Poet best espresses his hopeless situation with the Dark Lady in sonnet CXLVII:

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease;
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen's are,
At random from the truth vainly express'd;
          For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
          Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

We feel a deep desire on the part of the Poet to go under⁴. The experience has flooded the Poet's capacity for any further assimilation and his spirit is exhausted, for the present, even ruined. He desires death because he hopes to live again, to be reborn and to once again resume his quest toward the divine triad where Beauty, Truth and Love are harmoniously united. Only in this going under can he hope to distill the essence of yet this experience and once more acquire his spiritual and moral health. Even at this point of maximum internal crisis there is a sign of health though, in as much as he has fully intuited the cause of this most destructive course, for, as lines 11 and 12 tell us, he recognizes to have strayed in thought and in discourse from the truth, and admits, in the couplet, to have «sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright, Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.» This is the central moment of the Dark Lady sonnets, the turning-point in the experience. His exact predicament has been expressed most cathartically and he can now begin to hope for an eventual recovery. The Dark Woman, as a primordial force, had long been wooing him into a womb of self-annihilation; her blackness of mystery, if followed any longer, promises to lead him on to spiritual death; once again, black as the colour of absorbtion. The meaning to be extracted from their relationship is now exhausted, and release from her clasp must be sought. The Black Woman has served her purpose and must be abandoned.

Escape from such a relationship requires energy though, and in reading sonnet CL we see that this vortex of her annihilating being still exerts its power over the Poet. He becomes strong enough to free himself of the Dark Woman only in sonnet CLII, which fittingly concludes this second series:

In loving thee thou know'st I am forsworn,
But thou art twice forsworn, to me love swearing;
In act thy bed-vow broke, and new faith torn,
In vowing new hate after new love bearing.
But why of two oaths' breach do I accuse thee,
When I break twenty? I am perjured most;
For all my vows are oaths but to misuse thee,
And all my honest faith in thee is lost:
For I have sworn deep oaths of thy deep kindness,
Oaths of thy love, thy truth, thy constancy;
And, to enlighten thee, gave eyes to blindness,
Or made them swear against the thing they see;
          For I have sworn thee fair; more perjured I,
          To swear against the truth so foul a lie!

The sonnet is loaded with the sense of the false pact which has tied the Poet to the Dark Woman during their relationship; the words «oath» and «swear» abound, and are intensified toward the end. It is important to note how the Poet blames himself more than the actual woman; he is perjured more in lines 6 and 13, an expression of self-disgust rather than any complaint about others. He has finally come to the surface of this murky sea that covered him for so long and can once more see how Truth had been misconstrued. In the couplet, with his proper vision restored, the Poet can again assert the necessity of Truth in affirming the quality of the Beautiful. He is going through the throes of spiritual rebirth.

Even Dante discovered that Paradise could not be approached directly without first passing through the torments of Hell and the purification process of Purgatory. Analogously might we say that Shakespeare was able to reach the spiritual heights of expression we find in some of the sonnets from C-CXXVI only through the Dark Lady experience. We may find a somewhat direct expression of this in sonnet CXIX:

What potions have I drunk of Siren tears,
Distill'd from limbecks foul as hell within,
Applying fears to hopes and hopes to fears,
Still losing when I saw myself to win!
What wretched errors hath my heart committed,
Whilst it hath thought itself so blessed never!
How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted,
In the distraction of this madding fever!
O benefit of ill! now I find true
That better is by evil still made better;
And ruin'd love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.
          So I return rebuked to my content,
          And gain by ill thrice more than I have spent.

Shakesperare goes back to his Fair Youth as a source of inspiration, but are the Sonnets great for that reason? If they only speak of a relationship with a handsome youth, certainly not; but if they underline the Truth that stands behind this beauty, the timelessness within space, within objects, the truth within the form, its atemporal essence? It is likely that this is what poetry is all about.

Notes

1. All references to the Sonnets are to The Complete Works of William Shakespeare—The Cambridge Edition Text, ed. William Aldis Wright, Doubleday & Company, New York, 1936.

2. In Palladis Tamia: Witt's Treasury (1598) we read of Shakespeare's «sugred sonnets among his private friends».

3. Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets, J. B. Leishman, Hutchinson University Library ed., London, 1967, page 119.

4. I use this verb as I understand Nietzsche uses «untergehen» in Also Sprach Zarathustra.

Bibliography

Shakespeare—The Sonnets, ed. Peter Jones, The MacMillan Press LTD, London 1977.

J. B. Leishman, Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets, Hutchinson University Library ed., London, 1967.

G. Wilson Knight, The Mutual Flame, Methuen & Co. LTD. London, 1955.

Discussions of Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. Barbara Herrnstein, D.C. Heath and Company, Boston, 1964.