Sonnet 109: O Never Say That I Was False of Heart
|
O never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seemed my flame to qualify; As easy might I from myself depart As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie: That is my home of love, if I have ranged, Like him that travels I return again, Just to the time, not with the time exchanged, So that myself bring water for my stain. Never believe, though in my nature reigned All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood, That it could so preposterously be stained To leave for nothing all thy sum of good, For nothing this wide universe I call, Save thou, my rose, in it thou art my all. |
|
|
O never say that I was false of heart,
Though absence seemed my flame to qualify; |
O never say that I was unfaithful to you or lying to you about my love for you, even though my absence from you made it look like the flame of my passion had been moderated or diminished through being away from you.
'False of heart' can of course have several meanings, including 'disloyal', 'treacherous', 'mendacious', among others, but the suggestion here certainly is one primarily of unfaithfulness, as will become more directly explicit in the third quatrain. We don't know what caused this absence and whether or not it is, as has been suggested, 'voluntary' on the part of Shakespeare or, as has similarly been proposed, caused by an imprisonment possibly alluded to in Sonnet 107 of the young man. What seems clear though is that there has been a renewed period of separation which has now come to an end, and the defensive tone struck by Shakespeare further appears to suggest that the sonnet comes in response to an accusation of infidelity – or at least an expression of doubt – from the young man. |
|
As easy might I from myself depart
As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie: |
As easily might I be able to depart from myself as from my soul, and my soul lies in your breast, and since I cannot depart from my soul any more than I can depart from myself, I therefore cannot depart from you.
The idea that a lover's heart or soul lies or lives in the breast – for which read heart – of the loved person is something of a poetic commonplace, and in fact William Shakespeare told his young lover as much back in Sonnet 22: For all that beauty that doth cover thee Is but the seemly raiment of my heart, Which in thy breast doth live, as thine in me; How can I then be elder than thou art? Here now, this place is further characterised: |
|
That is my home of love, if I have ranged,
Like him that travels I return again, |
That breast and therefore heart of yours, is my home of love; if I have strayed or wandered, then like the person who travels I return back to you again...
In other words: I may have gone astray and wandered off to other metaphorical lands, for which here quite clearly read people, but I was just visiting them, they were, in effect, an excursion: you are my home, and so I come back home to you now. |
|
Just to the time, not with the time exchanged,
So that myself bring water for my stain. |
...and I do so just at the right time, or at the appointed time, or possibly at the time that I am able to do so, not changed or altered by the time that I have spent away from you, so that I myself may also bring the water that can wash away the stain of my sin or misdemeanour.
This once again alludes to the Christian idea that Jesus can wash away the sins of those who have committed them, and here Shakespeare pointedly declares – having previously in Sonnets 105, 106, and 108 skated perilously close to likening his lover to Jesus and/or God – that he, Shakespeare, himself has the substance or liquid that may absolve him of any wrongdoing. Whether he means this to be understood purely conceptually, as an abstract notion, or whether he is here referring to his tears, we also don't know, but the latter is not entirely unlikely, if we in this case cast our minds back to Sonnet 34, which, after admonishing his young man in fiercest terms for his transgression with none other than Shakespeare's own mistress, finds: Ah, but those tears are pearl that thy love sheds And they are rich, and ransom all ill deeds. Which then is followed immediately by Sonnet 35 with the opening line: No more be grieved at that which thou hast done Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud. And it may be no coincidence, that the rose as a symbol of most cherished love comes into play at the end of this sonnet too. |
|
Never believe, though in my nature reigned
All frailties that besiege all kinds of blood, |
Although during this time of our separation, my nature – my character, my being, and therefore my conduct – was occupied or controlled or driven by the prevailing weaknesses that lay siege to or dominate and overpower every type of person, do not, in spite of this, believe for one moment...
'All kinds of blood' may refer to people with all kinds of passions or appetites, and it may also refer to people of all kinds of status, whether they are of aristocratic or common blood, which would be particularly pertinent in this context since the young man is as good as certain to be a young nobleman and these same frailties have, as we know well, certainly 'besieged' him too. |
|
That it could so preposterously be stained
To leave for nothing all thy sum of good, |
...never believe that it, my nature – for which again read my character, my being – could be so absurdly or unnaturally stained as to leave the whole sum total of your qualities for what amounts to essentially nothing.
'Preposterous' has a stronger, more authentic and less comically or ironically overstated meaning in Shakespeare's day than it has today, and "To leave for nothing" can really be read in three ways, all of which here apply: either as just rendered, to mean leave you for someone or, as is here strongly implied, for some people who amount to nothing; or to leave all your good qualities behind as if they were nothing; or indeed even to do so for no reason. |
|
For nothing this wide universe I call,
Save thou, my rose, in it thou art my all. |
Because 'nothing' is what I call this wide universe, meaning everything in this universe is as nothing to me, except you, my rose: in this universe you are my everything.
|
Sonnet 109 is the first of two truly remarkable sonnets that speak of William Shakespeare's own infidelities towards his young lover during a period of prolonged absence. Although they do not form a strictly tied pair, together these two poems position our poet and his relationship in an entirely new light, because they for the first time genuinely acknowledge that he, too, like his young lover, has succumbed to temptation elsewhere while they were apart, but they both affirm him to be the only one who ever mattered and the one who truly matters now.
While this is the first time that we hear Shakespeare admit to having 'ranged', it is of course not the first time that we learn of another person being involved in this constellation. But therein lies the categorical difference: that person was part of triangular constellation, it was the woman of Sonnet 42:
That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet, it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief:
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
On that occasion, our Will made no apology for having kept a mistress – that seemed to be taken practically for granted – what he was doing there was continue to formulate his forgiveness of his young lover's transgression in having had a thing with her too, following the outrage vented Sonnets 33 and 34, and the signals of absolution in the closing couplet of Sonnet 34 and in Sonnets 35 and 41.
The upshot from that entire episode in Shakespeare's life was that the young man – then clearly quite a bit younger than now – was indulging in what Sonnet 40 called "wilful taste" of what he otherwise refused, namely sexual relations, in that case with none other than Shakespeare's mistress, of all people.
The conclusion Shakespeare comes to at the time in Sonnet 42 is that he and his young lover "are one" and that therefore her getting off with him really is simply an expression of her love for Shakespeare. This, though somewhat specious, seems to settle the matter for Shakespeare at the time, and what never even enters his mind is that him having a mistress in the first place could somehow take away from his love for his young man, any more, say, than being married to Anne who all the while is living with their children in Stratford-upon-Avon.
That was then though and this is now; and now, Shakespeare's tone is strikingly different. Obviously, time has passed – a fact being given profound expression repeatedly in the intervening sonnets by our poet – and obviously several periods of separation have occurred, including this most recent one, of which we don't know how long it lasted nor what caused it.
The idea – briefly mentioned earlier – that it may tie into Sonnet 107, which after all sits very close to this one in the collection – is worth examining just a bit further. We noted there that what Shakespeare may be referring to is his lover having been literally, physically confined, as in imprisoned, but now having been released.
This would correlate well to that sonnet being in principle about the death of Queen Elizabeth I and the ascension to the throne of King James VI of Scotland, thus becoming King James I of England. And it would then imply, strongly, that the lover in question is in fact Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, since he had been imprisoned for his participation in the famous failed rebellion by the Earl of Essex and was then pardoned and reinstated at court and in society by King James I.
Life imprisonment in the Tower of London would absolutely have supposed, as Shakespeare suggests in Sonnet 107, to spell a 'confined doom' for the young nobleman, but in fact, owing to the Queen's death, it lasted just over two years.
Is it reasonable to think that during these two years, from the 8th of February 1601 until the 10th of April 1603, when Shakespeare could not have seen much of his lover if anything at all, he had lovers elsewhere? Just a bit. Is it reasonable to accept that these other lovers were effectively casual encounters but, compared to this relationship which has by then lasted several years, paled into insignificance and were by and large and quite genuinely, meaningless? Absolutely. Would now, upon the release from prison and the re-establishment of his lover into his position of power, influence, and continued great wealth, be a good time to make it as clear as is humanly possible that 'you are my only one, the others never mattered and now that you are back I am entirely back with you'? Rather.
William Shakespeare, if this is what is happening here, is no longer as dependent on the young man's munificence and patronage as he once was: by 1603 he is a well established, highly regarded playwright and poet and he and his fellow actors are, as mentioned in our last episode, now The King's Men: he, too, enjoys the favour of the monarch, and there is no-one more powerful in the country than he. And as we also mentioned in passing while discussing Sonnet 107, Henry Wriothesley by now too is a married man. And so a balancing of the power dynamics as well as the emotional constellation has clearly taken place, which, as it happens, lends more weight to the sincerity of this and the next poem: Shakespeare in this sonnet says to his younger lover – not, notably, to his wife Anne – you are "my rose" and in this universe you are "my all."
Katherine Duncan-Jones in the Arden Edition of The Sonnets has a curious slip of the mind when she annotates the first quatrain. Lines 3 and 4 say:
As easy might I from myself depart
As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie
She glosses 'depart' correctly as "separate, be divided" but then cites the "Solemnization of Matrimony (BCP 292)" as "till death us depart," which is obviously a mistake. The actual wording of the Book of Common Prayer that she cites reads: "till death do us part" and is often rendered and spoken as 'till death us do part'. She may nevertheless be onto something, and I believe her instinct to be right: once again, as in Sonnet 108, Shakespeare bestows upon his younger lover the status, effectively, of a life partner, of someone he is – if not married to, because at the time he most certainly can't be – then committed to, for life. And as we noted then, he will do this again, both in the next sonnet and in the famous Sonnet 116.
Could it not be though that this sonnet relates to someone completely different in a wholly separate set of circumstances: that the lover is someone else, that this was written at some other time, that the absence was in fact self imposed – it happens to be Katherine Duncan-Jones who refers to it here as "voluntary" – and that this sonnet is therefore situated in a completely different part of Shakespeare's life? Could this sonnet in fact be addressed to his wife, Anne, herself from whom he has so clearly strayed so long?
The latter, really not: nobody earnestly suggests as much and it is self-evident why: the tone, its position in the collection, its contents – nothing hints at this having anything to do with Anne. There is a sonnet, much later in the collection, Sonnet 145, that very possibly does, and we'll come to that in due course, but here there is no reasonable doubt that this is addressed to his young man.
You will come across people who maintain that this as other sonnets in this group "could be addressed to either a male or a female," as for example Edmondson Wells insist in their reordered edition of All the Sonnets of Shakespeare from 2020 (Cambridge University Press), but this really doesn't stand up to close scrutiny for longer than about thirty seconds.
What is possible, certainly, is that the lover is not Henry Wriothesley and that the way this sonnet slots into a narrative around the death of Queen Elizabeth I inferred from Sonnet 107, is, though convenient, misleading. And so, no, we cannot say with certainty that this is so. We have to allow for the possibility that we are putting pieces of a puzzle together in a wrong way, yielding a false picture, that the long-term lover is someone else, that this was written at some other time, or even at a similar time but for some other reason of separation, and that our story, such, and patchy, as it is, doesn't stack up.
We occasionally ask ourselves in this podcast: what brings this on? Why is Shakespeare writing this particular sonnet at this point in the proceedings. We then as a matter of course and necessity have to remind ourselves: we don't know what the point in the proceedings precisely is, since we can't be sure that these sonnets are collated in the right order. We then though take some confidence and comfort from being told – among others by those people who point out the potential flaws in the sequence – that the collection was most likely put into the order it was first published in by the author himself. We must then take a step back and acknowledge, this too isn't certain. And we realise: we are dealing with balances of probabilities here: we know nothing for certain because everything is conjecture except the words: and what we can infer without stretching our credulity beyond the horizon of likelihood, is that these words come from:
a) someone who is in a long-term, committed though not formally solemnised relationship
b) someone who has strayed from this relationship and is now admitting to this
c) someone who needs and wants to reassure the person they love that they are still their paragon of love
We know who this someone is, it is William Shakespeare, no-one who can be taken at all seriously questions this. That means the person he is talking to has to be someone who fits a), b), and c). And that is not some random person, male or female, or indeed transgender, that is clearly the person he has been writing sonnet after sonnet to, for and about, just as he told us – again! – just then in Sonnet 108. It is not anyone: it is someone specific, someone who matters greatly to Shakespeare.
And what these words also tell us, more indirectly, but reasonably inferred from the fact alone that they have been written as much as from the way in which they were written is that their writer, our Will, feels compelled to write them. There must be a reason for him to put this out there at this point – whatever this point is – and a good, plausible, likely reason for putting something like this out there is a point at which his commitment, his devotion has been questioned. In whatever way. For whatever reason of its own.
Which takes us back to a scenario that is not proven but really in the context of everything we have been looking at more than just a little likely. And, dare I say it here again: in the absence of certainty, likelihood is our friend. A solid point for such a thing to happen – for a person's fidelity and commitment to be brought into question and needing to be affirmed – is the moment of reunion after a prolonged separation. And if the separation was anywhere near as long as two years, imposed by anything near as drastic as a supposed confined doom of life imprisonment, then we really have to give Shakespeare credit for being honest and saying: of course. It's true. I have not been chaste and celibate these past two years, I have gone here and there...
And that is exactly, verbatim, what he tells his young lover in the very next sonnet, Sonnet 110.
While this is the first time that we hear Shakespeare admit to having 'ranged', it is of course not the first time that we learn of another person being involved in this constellation. But therein lies the categorical difference: that person was part of triangular constellation, it was the woman of Sonnet 42:
That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,
And yet, it may be said I loved her dearly;
That she hath thee is of my wailing chief:
A loss in love that touches me more nearly.
On that occasion, our Will made no apology for having kept a mistress – that seemed to be taken practically for granted – what he was doing there was continue to formulate his forgiveness of his young lover's transgression in having had a thing with her too, following the outrage vented Sonnets 33 and 34, and the signals of absolution in the closing couplet of Sonnet 34 and in Sonnets 35 and 41.
The upshot from that entire episode in Shakespeare's life was that the young man – then clearly quite a bit younger than now – was indulging in what Sonnet 40 called "wilful taste" of what he otherwise refused, namely sexual relations, in that case with none other than Shakespeare's mistress, of all people.
The conclusion Shakespeare comes to at the time in Sonnet 42 is that he and his young lover "are one" and that therefore her getting off with him really is simply an expression of her love for Shakespeare. This, though somewhat specious, seems to settle the matter for Shakespeare at the time, and what never even enters his mind is that him having a mistress in the first place could somehow take away from his love for his young man, any more, say, than being married to Anne who all the while is living with their children in Stratford-upon-Avon.
That was then though and this is now; and now, Shakespeare's tone is strikingly different. Obviously, time has passed – a fact being given profound expression repeatedly in the intervening sonnets by our poet – and obviously several periods of separation have occurred, including this most recent one, of which we don't know how long it lasted nor what caused it.
The idea – briefly mentioned earlier – that it may tie into Sonnet 107, which after all sits very close to this one in the collection – is worth examining just a bit further. We noted there that what Shakespeare may be referring to is his lover having been literally, physically confined, as in imprisoned, but now having been released.
This would correlate well to that sonnet being in principle about the death of Queen Elizabeth I and the ascension to the throne of King James VI of Scotland, thus becoming King James I of England. And it would then imply, strongly, that the lover in question is in fact Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, since he had been imprisoned for his participation in the famous failed rebellion by the Earl of Essex and was then pardoned and reinstated at court and in society by King James I.
Life imprisonment in the Tower of London would absolutely have supposed, as Shakespeare suggests in Sonnet 107, to spell a 'confined doom' for the young nobleman, but in fact, owing to the Queen's death, it lasted just over two years.
Is it reasonable to think that during these two years, from the 8th of February 1601 until the 10th of April 1603, when Shakespeare could not have seen much of his lover if anything at all, he had lovers elsewhere? Just a bit. Is it reasonable to accept that these other lovers were effectively casual encounters but, compared to this relationship which has by then lasted several years, paled into insignificance and were by and large and quite genuinely, meaningless? Absolutely. Would now, upon the release from prison and the re-establishment of his lover into his position of power, influence, and continued great wealth, be a good time to make it as clear as is humanly possible that 'you are my only one, the others never mattered and now that you are back I am entirely back with you'? Rather.
William Shakespeare, if this is what is happening here, is no longer as dependent on the young man's munificence and patronage as he once was: by 1603 he is a well established, highly regarded playwright and poet and he and his fellow actors are, as mentioned in our last episode, now The King's Men: he, too, enjoys the favour of the monarch, and there is no-one more powerful in the country than he. And as we also mentioned in passing while discussing Sonnet 107, Henry Wriothesley by now too is a married man. And so a balancing of the power dynamics as well as the emotional constellation has clearly taken place, which, as it happens, lends more weight to the sincerity of this and the next poem: Shakespeare in this sonnet says to his younger lover – not, notably, to his wife Anne – you are "my rose" and in this universe you are "my all."
Katherine Duncan-Jones in the Arden Edition of The Sonnets has a curious slip of the mind when she annotates the first quatrain. Lines 3 and 4 say:
As easy might I from myself depart
As from my soul, which in thy breast doth lie
She glosses 'depart' correctly as "separate, be divided" but then cites the "Solemnization of Matrimony (BCP 292)" as "till death us depart," which is obviously a mistake. The actual wording of the Book of Common Prayer that she cites reads: "till death do us part" and is often rendered and spoken as 'till death us do part'. She may nevertheless be onto something, and I believe her instinct to be right: once again, as in Sonnet 108, Shakespeare bestows upon his younger lover the status, effectively, of a life partner, of someone he is – if not married to, because at the time he most certainly can't be – then committed to, for life. And as we noted then, he will do this again, both in the next sonnet and in the famous Sonnet 116.
Could it not be though that this sonnet relates to someone completely different in a wholly separate set of circumstances: that the lover is someone else, that this was written at some other time, that the absence was in fact self imposed – it happens to be Katherine Duncan-Jones who refers to it here as "voluntary" – and that this sonnet is therefore situated in a completely different part of Shakespeare's life? Could this sonnet in fact be addressed to his wife, Anne, herself from whom he has so clearly strayed so long?
The latter, really not: nobody earnestly suggests as much and it is self-evident why: the tone, its position in the collection, its contents – nothing hints at this having anything to do with Anne. There is a sonnet, much later in the collection, Sonnet 145, that very possibly does, and we'll come to that in due course, but here there is no reasonable doubt that this is addressed to his young man.
You will come across people who maintain that this as other sonnets in this group "could be addressed to either a male or a female," as for example Edmondson Wells insist in their reordered edition of All the Sonnets of Shakespeare from 2020 (Cambridge University Press), but this really doesn't stand up to close scrutiny for longer than about thirty seconds.
What is possible, certainly, is that the lover is not Henry Wriothesley and that the way this sonnet slots into a narrative around the death of Queen Elizabeth I inferred from Sonnet 107, is, though convenient, misleading. And so, no, we cannot say with certainty that this is so. We have to allow for the possibility that we are putting pieces of a puzzle together in a wrong way, yielding a false picture, that the long-term lover is someone else, that this was written at some other time, or even at a similar time but for some other reason of separation, and that our story, such, and patchy, as it is, doesn't stack up.
We occasionally ask ourselves in this podcast: what brings this on? Why is Shakespeare writing this particular sonnet at this point in the proceedings. We then as a matter of course and necessity have to remind ourselves: we don't know what the point in the proceedings precisely is, since we can't be sure that these sonnets are collated in the right order. We then though take some confidence and comfort from being told – among others by those people who point out the potential flaws in the sequence – that the collection was most likely put into the order it was first published in by the author himself. We must then take a step back and acknowledge, this too isn't certain. And we realise: we are dealing with balances of probabilities here: we know nothing for certain because everything is conjecture except the words: and what we can infer without stretching our credulity beyond the horizon of likelihood, is that these words come from:
a) someone who is in a long-term, committed though not formally solemnised relationship
b) someone who has strayed from this relationship and is now admitting to this
c) someone who needs and wants to reassure the person they love that they are still their paragon of love
We know who this someone is, it is William Shakespeare, no-one who can be taken at all seriously questions this. That means the person he is talking to has to be someone who fits a), b), and c). And that is not some random person, male or female, or indeed transgender, that is clearly the person he has been writing sonnet after sonnet to, for and about, just as he told us – again! – just then in Sonnet 108. It is not anyone: it is someone specific, someone who matters greatly to Shakespeare.
And what these words also tell us, more indirectly, but reasonably inferred from the fact alone that they have been written as much as from the way in which they were written is that their writer, our Will, feels compelled to write them. There must be a reason for him to put this out there at this point – whatever this point is – and a good, plausible, likely reason for putting something like this out there is a point at which his commitment, his devotion has been questioned. In whatever way. For whatever reason of its own.
Which takes us back to a scenario that is not proven but really in the context of everything we have been looking at more than just a little likely. And, dare I say it here again: in the absence of certainty, likelihood is our friend. A solid point for such a thing to happen – for a person's fidelity and commitment to be brought into question and needing to be affirmed – is the moment of reunion after a prolonged separation. And if the separation was anywhere near as long as two years, imposed by anything near as drastic as a supposed confined doom of life imprisonment, then we really have to give Shakespeare credit for being honest and saying: of course. It's true. I have not been chaste and celibate these past two years, I have gone here and there...
And that is exactly, verbatim, what he tells his young lover in the very next sonnet, Sonnet 110.
This project and its website are a work in progress.
If you spot a mistake or if you have any comments or suggestions, please use the contact page to get in touch.
To be kept informed of developments, please subscribe to the email list.
If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!
If you spot a mistake or if you have any comments or suggestions, please use the contact page to get in touch.
To be kept informed of developments, please subscribe to the email list.
If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!