Thursday, February 5, 1998
Sonnet analysis truly absorbs reader
BOOK: Although often too serious in nature, scholar’s insights
inspire
By Michael Gillette
Daily Bruin Contributor
From the first page of Helen Vendler’s new critical study "The
Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets" one can see that the renowned scholar
has brought all of her formidable talents to bear on these
remarkable and elusive works.
Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets are generally read as a cycle that
explores a triangle involving the older poet composing the work,
the lovely boy to whom he addresses his poems and with whom he
grows infatuated as the cycle progresses and the dark lady who
arrives late and stands as a rival to the poet and a possible
threat to the boy’s purity and virtue.
The sonnets have been approached many ways, with critics
sometimes focusing on overall thematics. Other times critics focus
on their relation to Shakespeare’s dramatic works and even on the
possible contemporaries of Shakespeare who might have been the
models for the lady and boy.
Vendler announces her agenda straight away, with the
organization of her book and the opening content. She addresses
each of the sonnets individually, making close readings of the
rhymes and the diction, and from the first poem, she begins a study
of the character she titles "the speaker" and through this approach
treats the entire cycle as a tale by a fictive narrator.
Her analysis of the first sonnet is breathtaking. She opens her
discussion by writing, "When God saw his creatures, he commanded
them to increase and multiply."
Shakespeare, in the first sonnet of the sequence, suggests we
have internalized the command in poetic form: "From fairest
creatures we desire increase."
Quite often Vendler’s writing and analysis reach these wonderful
heights where one has the sensation of enjoying a conversation with
Shakespeare and his learned friend/interpreter. One particularly
effective technique in inspiring this illusion, is the cataloguing
of diction employed by the speaker. She looks upon the introduction
of new types of words as signposts by which the reader may orient
himself to the new concerns and ideas being addressed in the
cycle.
Techniques like this allow Vendler and the reader to proceed
with one eye on the page and the other on the larger picture
created by Shakespeare, which seems to be what Vendler has in mind.
She is hampered in this cause, however, by her own organizational
plan.
While certain sonnets lend themselves perfectly to exhaustive
readings that take into account foot counts, couplet ties, and
other such tools of Vendler’s trade, others leave the scholar with
little of interest to say. Two or three such uninspiring poems in
succession can leave even a sympathetic reader unenthused about the
project at hand.
Another hindrance is the fierce solemnity with which Vendler
approaches the works. Were one to read just her analysis and not
the poems, one might think there is nothing funny occurring, when,
with Shakespeare, that is never the case.
These complaints are minor, however. Vendler’s book is so
exhaustive, and so endlessly enlightening that one can confidently
recommend it as either an introductory lesson or a scholar’s
reference tool.