Sonnet 113: Since I Left You, Mine Eye Is in My Mind
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Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind,
And that which governs me to go about Doth part his function, and is partly blind, Seems seeing, but effectually is out; For it no form delivers to the heart Of bird, of flower, or shape which it doth latch; Of his quick objects hath the mind no part, Nor his own vision holds what it doth catch; For if it see the rud'st or gentlest sight, The most sweet-favoured or deformedst creature, The mountain or the sea, the day or night, The crow or dove, it shapes them to your feature. Incapable of more, replete with you, My most true mind thus maketh mine untrue. |
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Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind
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Since I have been away from you, my eye is now mostly or partly in my mind, as opposed to just looking outside at the physical world around me, as will become clear in just a moment.
"Since I left you" to us sounds like a person who is speaking after they have permanently left their partner or lover, but there is no indication in this or in any of the other sonnets in this group that this is what has happened. What the sonnet does refer to, however, is some temporary absence of Shakespeare from his lover – for whatever reason this may be – and the way this first line opens and the rest of the sonnet unfolds strongly suggests that once more enough time passes or has passed for Shakespeare to miss his lover. |
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And that which governs me to go about
Doth part his function, and is partly blind, Seems seeing, but effectually is out. |
The thing that steers me through the world and therefore controls how I go about the physical aspect of my life, namely my eye, is in parts doing what it is supposed to do and so partly fulfils its function, but it is also partly blind: it seems to be seeing what is out there in the world, but in effect it is not working, it is 'out', as in extinguished or, as we today might say, 'switched off'.
For Shakespeare to use 'his' instead of 'its' for a thing – here the eye – is not at all unusual, we have come across this several times before; and 'effectually' is what we today would call 'effectively'. |
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For it no form delivers to the heart
Of bird, of flower, or shape which it doth latch; |
Because it, the eye, delivers or sends no visual information to the heart of the things it sees, such as a bird, or a flower, or any other thing that it latches onto...
The Quarto Edition for 'latch' here has 'lack', which also, as it happens, would make sense, the line would then read Of bird, of flower, or shape which it doth lack because it can't see or visually hold on to it, but this is universally recognised to be a printing error, since the line absolutely has to rhyme with 'catch' two lines further down, and since 'latch' in the manuscript may well have been spelt 'lach', the emendation to 'latch' has established itself widely. Interesting here, as on one or two previous occasions, is how Shakespeare conflates the mind and the heart: although "mine eye is in my mind," the information about things in the outside world is here considered to be ordinarily expected by the heart: the heart and the mind are treated as essentially the same. Shakespeare now reverts back to 'mind', once more also referring to the eye as 'his': |
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Of his quick objects hath the mind no part,
Nor his own vision holds what it doth catch; |
Because no information about what the eye is seeing is delivered to the heart and the mind, the mind cannot perceive or perceptively take part in the live objects that the eye sees, and nor is the eye itself capable of holding on to the things it catches in the world.
'Quick' here simply means 'alive' or 'animated' or possibly, by extension therefore, 'real' as 'in the real outside world', rather than, as we might today understand it, 'fast'. This too, is common enough in Shakespeare and something we have seen in these sonnets before. |
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For if it see the rud'st or gentlest sight
The most sweet-favoured or deformedst creature, |
Because whether it – still the eye, of course – happens or were to see the rudest or roughest or most uncouth thing in the world, or the gentlest one there is, whether the most beautiful or the most deformed and therefore ugliest creature...
The Quarto Edition here has The most sweet-favour or deformedst creature, and so some editors justifiably render this as 'most sweet favour', with 'favour' then becoming a noun. While this also makes sense, there is in this instance a very strong argument for emending the line to 'most sweet-favoured', for two specific reasons: 1) The hyphen suggests the whole term should be read as an adjective, and 2) the pattern that is being established is one of clear and direct contrasts: rudest versus gentlest, mountain versus the sea, day versus night, crow versus dove, so it here really makes a great deal more sense to keep that pattern and posit the most sweet-favoured versus the most deformed or, as it is put here, 'deformedst' creature, and consider the Quarto Edition here to show a printing error. |
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The mountain or the sea, the day or night,
The crow or dove, it shapes them to your feature. |
The list of contrasting things that the eye may catch or latch onto continues: the mountain, the sea, the day, the night, the crow or the dove; and all these things – standing for everything there is in the whole wide world – are being shaped by the eye to look like you. In other words: no matter what I look at, I only see you, in everything there is.
While to us the crow and the dove may look and sound like simply two fairly large birds among many, in Elizabethan and early Jacobean England, they were of profound symbolic, religious, and mythological meaning, and as opposite to each other as night and day: the crow was seen – and is referenced by Shakespeare elsewhere – as a harbinger of death and bad fortune, as the embodiment of deception and malevolent forces; the dove, by contrast, was and remains to this day in many cultural contexts, a symbol of purity and peace. |
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Incapable of more, replete with you,
My most true mind thus maketh mine untrue. |
And so, incapable of taking in anything else, and being entirely content and fulfilled with just you alone, my most faithful and devoted mind – for which here once more we may also read my heart – in this way turns my eye into a liar.
Some editors get themselves in a twist over this last line, which once again, if you get used only just a bit to the craft of sonneteering and to the way Shakespeare uses his language, turns out to be entirely unproblematic. As the line stands and as it is rendered in the Quarto Edition, it seems to us to make no direct sense: My most true mind thus maketh mine untrue. To make it make sense, some editors suggest that 'untrue' here be read as a noun, so then the line says: my most true, as in faithful, trustworthy mind in this way makes, as in creates, my thing which is untrue, my untruth, so to speak, my inability to see things correctly. This makes some sense and may in fact be an intended secondary meaning. But readers of, and listeners to, this sonnet at the time of Shakespeare would have known that 'eyne' is a plural form of eye. Shakespeare uses it often enough in his works, 13 times to be exact. Since 'eye', 'eyes', and 'eyne' start with a vowel, the normal way for Shakespeare to say 'my eyes' would have been 'mine eyes' or 'mine eyne'. The line would then have to read: My most true mind thus maketh mine eyne untrue. This, apart from repeating the same sound, yields eleven syllables and therefore a weak or female line which pairs ill – as in not at all – with the male or strong line of ten syllables, which it forms a couplet with: Incapable of more, replete with you: And so our Will – in a minor poetic flourish – discards the 'eyne' which we hear contained in 'mine' anyway and which we know we are speaking of because we've been talking about 'my eye' and therefore by extension 'my eyes' since the first line and throughout this poem, and just says: My most true mind thus maketh mine untrue. And the line scans perfectly: problem solved. It certainly isn't a mistake. Shakespeare could easily have said, 'My most true mind thus makes mine eye untrue', but he clearly chose not to. He clearly and obviously went for a little pun and a word play and therefore an elegant, though to our ears somewhat alien contraction of 'mine eyne', or, as therefore some editors now spell it 'm'eyne'. What absolutely doesn't work, for exactly the reasons just outlined above of its complete incompatibility with the coupling line that precedes it, and what therefore constitutes nothing short of a poetic abomination, but what you will come across in some otherwise perfectly knowledgable scholarly editions is: My most true mind thus maketh mine eye untrue. It is rare for me to say that something is simply wrong, but this is simply wrong, and where you find it in your printed versions of the sonnets, you may boldly go ahead and delete 'eye': it completely wrecks the prosody of what Shakespeare wrote. |
With Sonnet 113, William Shakespeare returns once more to the theme of separation, reflecting on how, when he is away from his younger lover, everything he sees takes on his lover's shape and thus reminds him of him. Although we don't know when exactly the sonnet was written and therefore where precisely in the collection it truly belongs, it would appear to also, therefore, pick up on the notion, emphatically expressed in the previous sonnet, of his lover being his "all the world," and it certainly also connects strongly to the sonnet that follows, which will further elaborate on the idea that the younger man with his beauty turns even the ugliest appearance to loveliness in Shakespeare's mind.
The first, most immediate question that Sonnet 113 poses for us may well be: what is this absence that William Shakespeare is talking about? Is he here referring to a new period of separation, or does the sonnet really belong to an earlier, perhaps recent, period of separation, or is he reflecting in perfectly abstract terms on what happens when he is away from his lover, even for the shortest of times.
It is not a question that we can answer, certainly not from the contents of this poem; and in many ways, though perhaps first on our minds, it may well be secondary to Shakespeare at this point, and therefore to our reading of a sonnet that seems simple enough to understand.
The idea that 'I see you in everything I look at' or that a vision of you inhabits my mind even when you are not here in itself is hardly new or original. Shakespeare himself has explored the relationship between the mind's eye and the physical eye several times in this series. Sonnets 27, 43, as well as 46 & 47 all play on it in one way or another.
What is new and therefore potentially significant is that the younger lover is here given a far more important role than a mere presence in Shakespeare's mind. In this sonnet, unlike previous ones, it is not just the case that when Shakespeare closes his eyes he sees his younger lover, or that his heart and his eye are in a dispute over who 'owns' the precious sight and visual memory of him; in this sonnet, as well as the one that follows, the young man has the power to turn everything that Shakespeare sees into something beautiful that resembles him. And that means his presence and predominance in Shakespeare's life is even more firmly established than it had been.
While we are, as ever, well advised not to take things all too literally and allow for a healthy portion of poetic commonplace being deployed, toyed with, and enjoyed, quite possibly for its very own sake, this re-iteration and re-assertion of the younger man's unassailable priority ties in well with the poem's position in the collection.
People can, will, and in a sense must, argue at length over the chronology of events that may or may not be influencing or directly inspiring these sonnets, and many will be the voice you come across – if you listen long and wide enough – who insist that none of anything we find in this poetry is anything but poetry pure and must not under any circumstances be interpreted as in any way related to real life events.
But what is telling and, because telling, quite possibly revealing is that if we read these sonnets as the reflection of phases in Shakespeare's life, then both this and the sonnet that follows both fit remarkably well into a phase that comes after at least two, possibly three, extended periods of separation, and one in which our poet now uses several of his sonnets to reassure his young lover, to affirm him in his position, and to declare him 'the one and only'.
In a nutshell, the sequence as it appears in the 1609 Quarto Edition goes:
109: Yes, I have 'ranged' and acquired a 'stain', but you are my 'home of love', you are my 'rose', in this universe you are my everything.
110: And yes, it is true, 'I have gone here and there', and tried other lovers, but you are my 'god in love', nobody else comes close, take me back to your 'most, most loving breast'.
111: It is really entirely Fortune's fault that I have to live my life in the public domain, and that my name is as exposed to reputational damage as it is, so pity me for this, and I can assure you that this alone will suffice to 'cure me' of any damage that I have done to myself through my own conduct or behaviour.
112: Your love and your pity does exactly that, and you are so closely tied into my heart and my mind that compared to how you exist to me, to everyone else you might as well be dead.
113: In fact so strongly are you present in my mind that the outside world in its own right and presence does not exist to me either: whatever I look at, I only see you.
All of which makes perfect sense.
I reiterate, because it is important for us to be aware and to acknowledge: we cannot be certain that this sequence was created in this order and that this is what Shakespeare consciously, deliberately set out to do. The possibility exists that he wrote these sonnets far apart from each other and that either he or someone else, when it came to assembling the collection, put them together because they yield a thematic flow. Equally possible, and, depending somewhat on how we look at it all, considerably more likely though, is that this is exactly the sequence in which these particular sonnets were composed, reflecting a sequence of events that is entirely congruent with the overall arc of the collection.
How we look at it all in turn depends largely on where we prefer to find ourselves: in the 'camp' that sees poetry predominantly as removed from any personal experience, as a professional or playful thing poets do in pursuit of recognition, patronage, and/or financial reward, or whether we see our poets as first and foremost human beings who draw on their own emotional world for their writing. And there is no reason why a poet could not do either or both at different times in their life and in different contexts, or indeed at the same time in the same context.
And context is perhaps the key component to all this. In the context of the collection as we have been experiencing it – and I use the word 'experience' here deliberately and consciously, and we are now well over two thirds into this exploration – I hold that it is all but disingenuous to deny these sonnets any relation to our Will's real life emotional world. It is true, we can't prove this, but we can identify point after point, step after step, stage after stage, in a progression that is in fact entirely plausible.
And so while Sonnet 113 on its own and in isolation may not strike us as the kind of poem that yields a great deal of new insight into William Shakespeare's heart and his relationship with his young man, as part of a sequence of sonnets that reflect this progression, it marks a meaningful step, and one that will be echoed and further developed by the sonnet that immediately follows, reinforced by the sonnet that comes next, and crowned, we might say by the glorious sonnet that comes after that, a sonnet that some scholars view, and not entirely without reason, as the pinnacle of all the sonneteering ever done by William Shakespeare...
The first, most immediate question that Sonnet 113 poses for us may well be: what is this absence that William Shakespeare is talking about? Is he here referring to a new period of separation, or does the sonnet really belong to an earlier, perhaps recent, period of separation, or is he reflecting in perfectly abstract terms on what happens when he is away from his lover, even for the shortest of times.
It is not a question that we can answer, certainly not from the contents of this poem; and in many ways, though perhaps first on our minds, it may well be secondary to Shakespeare at this point, and therefore to our reading of a sonnet that seems simple enough to understand.
The idea that 'I see you in everything I look at' or that a vision of you inhabits my mind even when you are not here in itself is hardly new or original. Shakespeare himself has explored the relationship between the mind's eye and the physical eye several times in this series. Sonnets 27, 43, as well as 46 & 47 all play on it in one way or another.
What is new and therefore potentially significant is that the younger lover is here given a far more important role than a mere presence in Shakespeare's mind. In this sonnet, unlike previous ones, it is not just the case that when Shakespeare closes his eyes he sees his younger lover, or that his heart and his eye are in a dispute over who 'owns' the precious sight and visual memory of him; in this sonnet, as well as the one that follows, the young man has the power to turn everything that Shakespeare sees into something beautiful that resembles him. And that means his presence and predominance in Shakespeare's life is even more firmly established than it had been.
While we are, as ever, well advised not to take things all too literally and allow for a healthy portion of poetic commonplace being deployed, toyed with, and enjoyed, quite possibly for its very own sake, this re-iteration and re-assertion of the younger man's unassailable priority ties in well with the poem's position in the collection.
People can, will, and in a sense must, argue at length over the chronology of events that may or may not be influencing or directly inspiring these sonnets, and many will be the voice you come across – if you listen long and wide enough – who insist that none of anything we find in this poetry is anything but poetry pure and must not under any circumstances be interpreted as in any way related to real life events.
But what is telling and, because telling, quite possibly revealing is that if we read these sonnets as the reflection of phases in Shakespeare's life, then both this and the sonnet that follows both fit remarkably well into a phase that comes after at least two, possibly three, extended periods of separation, and one in which our poet now uses several of his sonnets to reassure his young lover, to affirm him in his position, and to declare him 'the one and only'.
In a nutshell, the sequence as it appears in the 1609 Quarto Edition goes:
109: Yes, I have 'ranged' and acquired a 'stain', but you are my 'home of love', you are my 'rose', in this universe you are my everything.
110: And yes, it is true, 'I have gone here and there', and tried other lovers, but you are my 'god in love', nobody else comes close, take me back to your 'most, most loving breast'.
111: It is really entirely Fortune's fault that I have to live my life in the public domain, and that my name is as exposed to reputational damage as it is, so pity me for this, and I can assure you that this alone will suffice to 'cure me' of any damage that I have done to myself through my own conduct or behaviour.
112: Your love and your pity does exactly that, and you are so closely tied into my heart and my mind that compared to how you exist to me, to everyone else you might as well be dead.
113: In fact so strongly are you present in my mind that the outside world in its own right and presence does not exist to me either: whatever I look at, I only see you.
All of which makes perfect sense.
I reiterate, because it is important for us to be aware and to acknowledge: we cannot be certain that this sequence was created in this order and that this is what Shakespeare consciously, deliberately set out to do. The possibility exists that he wrote these sonnets far apart from each other and that either he or someone else, when it came to assembling the collection, put them together because they yield a thematic flow. Equally possible, and, depending somewhat on how we look at it all, considerably more likely though, is that this is exactly the sequence in which these particular sonnets were composed, reflecting a sequence of events that is entirely congruent with the overall arc of the collection.
How we look at it all in turn depends largely on where we prefer to find ourselves: in the 'camp' that sees poetry predominantly as removed from any personal experience, as a professional or playful thing poets do in pursuit of recognition, patronage, and/or financial reward, or whether we see our poets as first and foremost human beings who draw on their own emotional world for their writing. And there is no reason why a poet could not do either or both at different times in their life and in different contexts, or indeed at the same time in the same context.
And context is perhaps the key component to all this. In the context of the collection as we have been experiencing it – and I use the word 'experience' here deliberately and consciously, and we are now well over two thirds into this exploration – I hold that it is all but disingenuous to deny these sonnets any relation to our Will's real life emotional world. It is true, we can't prove this, but we can identify point after point, step after step, stage after stage, in a progression that is in fact entirely plausible.
And so while Sonnet 113 on its own and in isolation may not strike us as the kind of poem that yields a great deal of new insight into William Shakespeare's heart and his relationship with his young man, as part of a sequence of sonnets that reflect this progression, it marks a meaningful step, and one that will be echoed and further developed by the sonnet that immediately follows, reinforced by the sonnet that comes next, and crowned, we might say by the glorious sonnet that comes after that, a sonnet that some scholars view, and not entirely without reason, as the pinnacle of all the sonneteering ever done by William Shakespeare...
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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!