Sonnet 114: Or Whether Doth My Mind, Being Crowned With You
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Or whether doth my mind, being crowned with you,
Drink up the monarch's plague, this flattery, Or whether shall I say mine eye saith true, And that your love taught it this alchemy, To make of monsters and things indigest Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble, Creating every bad a perfect best As fast as objects to his beams assemble? O tis the first, tis flattery in my seeing, And my great mind most kingly drinks it up; Mine eye well knows what with his gust is greeing, And to his palate doth prepare the cup. If it be poisoned, tis the lesser sin That mine eye loves it and doth first begin. |
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Or whether doth my mind, being crowned with you,
Drink up the monarch's plague, this flattery, |
The sonnet picks up on the theme discussed in the previous poem and opens with an 'or whether this ... or whether that' construction which we are today no longer familiar with, but which to Shakespeare's reader or listener would have been fairly normal.
Here formulated as a question, it means: is it the case that this first of two possibilities that I am about to consider applies, or is it the case that the other one applies? This here yields: Is it the case that my mind, being blessed and privileged with your love and the attention you give me, eagerly consumes this flattering, for which we here may also read pleasing, delusion it is being offered by the eye, namely that everything that I see looks like you? The mind, having been invested with and elevated by the young lover, is considered a king, and flattery is correspondingly characterised as 'the monarch's plague', because then as now, the more powerful you are, the more people will flatter and fawn on you, and so kings and queens are more exposed, and often also therefore more susceptible, to flattery than anyone else. The sonnet, with this reference to "being crowned" and the "monarch's plague, this flattery" does remind us of Sonnet 87, though Sonnet 87 actually marked a low point in the relationship between Shakespeare and his young lover. It opened with a resigned Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing and closed with the utterly dejected couplet; Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter, In sleep a king, but waking no such matter. And of course, as is so often the case, we don't know whether this link to what would appear to be an entirely different – in fact arguably entirely contrasting – phase in Shakespeare's and the young man's life is deliberate or not. But the question as to where this allusion comes from and what, if anything, it may signify is one we will want to explore a little further in just a moment. |
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Or whether shall I say mine eye saith true,
And that your love taught it this alchemy |
Or is it the case that I should in fact acknowledge: my eye tells the truth and it is nothing other than your love that has taught the eye this ability to perform alchemy on what it sees:...
Alchemy – as we saw with Sonnet 33 – is the mediaeval 'art', or rather attempted pursuit, of transmuting one material into another, specifically a base material into a noble one, and Shakespeare here uses it as a metaphor for what the eye is doing to everything it looks on. This, as it happens, provides a second link to another crisis in the relationship in quick succession. Sonnet 33 is the sonnet in which clouds gather for the first time over the relationship as Shakespeare uncovers the affair his young lover has had with his, Shakespeare's, own mistress, and it is the only other sonnet in the collection which features the concept of 'alchemy'. |
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To make of monsters and things indigest
Such cherubins as your sweet self resemble, |
The 'alchemy' here referred to is one of turning monsters and ugly things into cherubs that resemble beautiful you.
'Indigest' means either "not yet composed or arranged, immature," (Collins) or simply "not carefully thought out or arranged" and also "formless" (Merriam-Webster); an 'indigest thing', in other words, is a shapeless, formless thing that may therefore be considered to be ugly. This is one of only two appearances of the word 'indigest' in the canon, and the only one in the Sonnets. As indeed is 'monster'. 'Cherubin' is an old form of the word 'cherub', and it is possibly significant that Shakespeare invokes here the image of a childlike innocence to refer to his young man. This, especially if the sonnet belongs anywhere near the position in the collection where it finds itself, is in itself surely flattery. What may or may not be significant too is that this is the only time in the Sonnets that Shakespeare compares his young lover to a cherub. |
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Creating every bad a perfect best
As fast as objects to his beams assemble? |
The description of what the eye may be doing with its alchemy continues:
And thus in the same process of turning ugly things into cherubs that resemble you, creating from every bad thing that it sees a perfect image of the best possible thing in the world – you! – just as fast as any object comes within its field of vision, so to speak. Shakespeare and his contemporaries did not yet fully understand optics and the workings of the eye, and so it was generally believed that the eye itself sends out beams of light which illuminate everything it sees, hence objects coming into the 'beam' of the eye. The idea that objects 'assemble' there is nonetheless a curious one: it almost appears to suggest that the objects come together of their own volition, themselves keen to be caught by the eye and to be thus turned into a perfect thing before being passed on to the viewer's mind. This, as it happens, is also the only time that Shakespeare uses the word 'assemble' anywhere in the Sonnets. |
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O tis the first, tis flattery in my seeing,
And my great mind most kingly drinks it up; |
Shakespeare now provides the answer to his own question: oh, it is the first of these two possibilities, it is flattery in my vision, and my mind drinks it up in a most kingly way, meaning that my mind is very much – indeed most – like a king who is eager and willing to accept and believe what flattery he is being told.
This is also why the mind is here, with a hint of irony, called 'great': a king in an age of absolute and near-absolute monarchs is by definition 'great', and so Shakespeare here emphasises not his own genius as a poet and playwright, but the way his mind behaves most like a king in 'drinking up' the flattery his vision offers him. PRONUNCIATION: Note that flattery here is pronounced as two syllables: flatt'ry. |
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Mine eye well knows what with his gust is greeing,
And to his palate doth prepare the cup. |
My eye knows very well what my mind likes, what agrees with his 'gust' or taste', and so it prepares the cup from which my mind 'drinks up' the images so served accordingly.
In other words: the eye knows that what it is looking at is not all wondrous beauty, cherubs with appropriately angelic faces, and general gorgeousness, but it also knows what my mind likes and wants to see, and so it prepares the potion of images, as it were, accordingly. 'Gust' here obviously does not mean any burst of wind, but 'taste', or also, as Collins additionally defines it, "enjoyment or gratification." We don't use the word in that sense anymore, but we do still very much refer to things that are not to our taste or enjoyment or indeed gratification as 'disgusting'. And this, too, is a word that only appears once in the Sonnets in this sense, here. |
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If it be poisoned, tis the lesser sin,
That mine eye loves it and doth first begin. |
And if it should turn out the case that this potion so prepared is poisoned and therefore does damage to the mind – for example by preventing it from seeing the world as it truly is – then the mind's sin of accepting this flattery is mitigated by the fact that the eye too loves the flavour and gratification provided by imagined beauty and tastes of it first, before passing it on to the mind as flattery.
The 'that' in the last line here works as 'for that' or 'because'. Editors generally point out that this places the eye in the role of taster to the mind's monarch, and thus in a subservient position. But this is not, as has been suggested, a menial task. Taster to the monarch in the age of Shakespeare was an immensely important, indeed vital, role: on it depended the life and wellbeing of the king or queen and therefore the welfare of the state itself, and so this would have been a trusted individual, intimately familiar and associated with the monarch and closely embedded in court life. What is fascinating about this dynamic is that thus the mind and the eye – monarch and taster – collude or conspire to bringing to the mind what he desires and what the eye also enjoys and wants to see: visions of the Fair Youth, even when they are apart. |
With his curiously cryptic Sonnet 114, William Shakespeare poses a rhetorical question to his younger lover, asking whether his experience of seeing him in everything he looks at is down simply to his eye flattering him or to his eye having acquired the ancient mystical art of alchemy and actually turning even ugly creatures into beautiful angelic beings just such as the young man himself.
He then also settles the matter emphatically and declares without reservation that it is indeed flattery on the eye's part that has this effect on him, but that any sin the mind may be committing in lapping it all up is mitigated by the fact that the eye too loves what it wants to see – the young man's beauty – and so willingly tastes of this flattering, though therefore potentially poisonous, potion first, before passing it on for the mind to metaphorically imbibe.
If you have been following Sonnetcast, you may recall that in the episode covering Sonnet 108, we quoted Katherine Duncan-Jones, editor of the current Arden edition of the Sonnets, quoting Thomas P Roche, an expert in Renaissance poetry, as saying: "Our main difficulty as readers of sonnet-sequences is that we have not yet learned the rules of the game," and this is an obstacle that may be making itself felt in this for us quirky sonnet in particular.
The first question we may well feel inclined to ask upon hearing this poem is one of semantics or possibly also culture: why is it 'flattery' of Shakespeare's mind when his eye tells him that everything in the world, even the ugliest object or creature, looks like and therefore is as beautiful as his younger lover?
We would, were we inclined to flatter someone, be likely to take a more direct approach and do so by massaging their own ego, saying perhaps something like 'you are so rooted in my mind that everything I look at reminds me of you'. This is of course exactly what Shakespeare is telling his young man. It is not, though, what Shakespeare's eye is telling Shakespeare's mind: Shakespeare's eye is telling Shakespeare's mind: 'everything I look at reminds me of your lover, and so all I can show you is beauty such as his'. This, we would think, has the same effect as Shakespeare telling his lover that everything he looks at reminds him of him: it flatters the young lover. Not Shakespeare's mind.
So either our poet here once again has a lapse of logic – this wouldn't be the first time, we noted once or twice before – or we are simply being way too simplistic for Shakespeare's playful era and intricate craft, forgetting that even just having your mind occupied with an exquisite young nobleman of the standing, stature, and sublime beauty of the young man is an unearthly privilege, one which 'crowns' the mind and elevates it to the status of a king. A state, incidentally, that Shakespeare would not swap his infinitely more lowly position with in the much earlier Sonnet 29:
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
And so this may help us unlock the first conundrum of this sonnet: once we allow for the act, or, since it is less of an act than a state of being, the condition of loving someone in such a way that they permanently and exclusively occupy our mind to be a privilege and a greatly enriching and ennobling thing, then the eye conveying nothing but images of that loved person to the mind can indeed become a kind of flattery of the person so loving.
Flattery is – as we noted just a moment ago – a type of delusion. In the case of the lover who only sees the one they love, this may well be a self-delusion, and in the case of the lover who is thus deluded and aware of it, but enjoying the state of being so deluded for the warm fuzzy feeling that being in love just naturally entails, it may be a willing, deliberate, even sought-for, self-delusion.
And knowing our Will as we know him by now, we may well entertain the possibility and notion that such wondrous complexity is fully and consciously intended within just this one concept of 'flattery'.
The second element we may well struggle with and find hard to peel apart and distinguish properly is the difference between the eye 'flattering' the mind by feeding it only images or visual information that resembles the beautiful young man, and the eye employing alchemy – taught it, notably by "your love" – to transform all objects, even ugly ones, into such cherubs as resemble the young man.
That, to us, amounts pretty much to the same thing, does it not: what the mind receives is images of the young man. Either way. Except there is something of a difference in – if we want to employ a somewhat more modern term that may therefore be only partially applicable – 'agency' and therefore cause in relation to this effect.
And how we read this alchemy also, and importantly, depends on how we read the 'teacher', as it were. The sonnet posits the alchemy as taught by "your love." The first and obvious reading of 'your love' is, of course, your love of and towards me. This would make sense: the love you give and show me lends my eye the power and skill to transform everything it sees into you.
But 'your love' can also be me, as in 'your lover', and if I am meant by 'your love' then it is not your love to me, it is loving I that teaches my loving eye – pun alert, it is here fully intended – the art of transforming everything it sees into you.
If it is the former – if it is your love to me – then you with your devotion to me are the agent of transformation because it is you and your devotion to me that teaches my eye the alchemy it uses to turn everything it looks at, even the ugliest thing, into beautiful you.
If it is the latter – if it is I, your love, as in your lover who teaches my eye this same alchemy – then I with my love am the agent that makes my eye capable of what it is doing, turning everything, even the ugliest thing it looks at, into beautiful you.
And there is, or would be, a big difference. But Shakespeare says it is neither. He states categorically, it isn't alchemy. It is flattery. And flattery has remarkably little to do with love, in this poem or elsewhere. It has to do with kings, it has to do with status, with power. It is a form of deception.
Here is how Shakespeare uses it in these sonnets.
Sonnet 42 tells his young lover:
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.
What follows are two quatrains of fairly sophistic excuses for the young lover's offence off getting of with none other than Shakespeare's own mistress, and then yield into the conclusion:
But here's the joy: my friend and I are one.
Sweet flattery, then she loves but me alone.
We noted at the time that Shakespeare when he says this knows he is deceiving himself, but he chooses to do so, because it allows him to handle an otherwise impossibly fraught situation.
That is the only time, apart from this sonnet here, that Shakespeare uses the noun 'flattery' in the Sonnets.
Here is how he uses the verb 'to flatter':
Sonnet 28 tells his younger lover that when he's away from him he tries to please the day by telling him – the day – that he is 'bright' and does his lover 'grace'. Similarly:
So flatter I the swart-complexioned night,
When sparkling stars twire not: 'thou gildst the even'.
And here Shakespeare even spells out that this is obviously a deception:
But day doth daily draw my sorrows longer
And night doth nightly make grief's length seem stronger.
In Sonnet 33, already referenced and therefore already intentionally or accidentally linked to this sonnet, Shakespeare relates:
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy,
only to then allow bad weather to rain all over this parade of bliss.
And in Sonnet 87, which has also been referenced already, and which similarly speaks of a low point in the relationship, Shakespeare concedes:
Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter:
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.
What does all this do to our poem in hand? It rather appears to spike it with meaning. But – alas! – we may never know what exactly that meaning is: we may simply not have recovered and relearnt the rules of the game sufficiently to decode what is contained in this poem.
Does it want to allude specifically to a self-delusion? Does it want to contextualise somehow within the previous low points of the relationship this period, which otherwise appears to be a high point and in fact a phase working towards a climax in the relationship? We don't know. It could be the case, but we can't be certain. There could also be some other meaning locked up in this poem that we don't recognise, or the poem is super-simple though perhaps a bit convoluted and not overly logical.
But this, though possible, by this stage in the proceedings, is hard to believe.
And so since we don't know and can't pretend to know whether there is any hidden code deliberately placed in this sonnet, let alone what it means if there is, let us do what we can do and look at and summarise the oddities that stand out and make this sonnet unusual and apparently potentially cryptic.
First, there is the opening device of comparing two possibilities with 'or whether'. While we noted above that this would have been easy enough for Shakespeare's contemporaries to understand, it is the only time he uses it in this way in the Sonnets, which makes this sonnet singular and unusual.
Next we noted two references – intentional or accidental – to sonnets that deal with two most likely separate low points in the relationship with most likely the same young man. They were Sonnets 87 and 33.
Then we have the fact that the two possibilities that are being juxtaposed – flattery and alchemy – are both referenced once and once only elsewhere in the Sonnets: in Sonnet 42, which also, like Sonnet 33, deals with the affair the young man was then having with Shakespeare's mistress, and in Sonnet 33 itself.
And then we have this real concentration of hapax legomena inside the series: 'monsters', things 'indigest', and 'cherubins' all appear nowhere else in these sonnets, nor does the verb 'assemble'. They make up four of the 28 words in this quatrain alone. And a word that is found often in the Complete Works, and once elsewhere in the Sonnets, but nowhere else in the Sonnets with the same meaning is 'gust'.
This, you would be right to suggest, may mean nothing more than that Shakespeare is going through a particularly inventive and creative phase and playing around with new words. We don't know. Except this is not something we need to stay completely ignorant about. We can employ a method we have toyed with on previous occasions for other purposes and compare how these words that are very rare in the Sonnets feature in the plays:
'Monster', while unique here in the collection of the Sonnets, is something Shakespeare uses all the time: there are 98 instances in total of either the singular or the plural in his Complete Works.
'Indigest' as an adjective appears here and twice in the plays: once in Henry VI Part 2, Act V, Scene 1, and once in Henry VI Part 3, Act V, Scene 6, in each case to insult Richard who will later become Richard III, with his hunchback, and it also appears as a noun in King John, Act V, Scene 7.
'Cherubin' or 'cherubins' appears in nine of the plays and in A Lover's Complaint. This is interesting in so far as with one exception these plays, as well as very likely A Lover's Complaint, fall into a period of composition after 1600 and are therefore either just late Elizabethan or properly early Jacobean, much as this sonnet is believed to be. The exception to this is The Merchant of Venice, which gets dated to 1597. The others are: Troilus & Cressida, 1602; Othello, 1604; Timon of Athens, 1606; Macbeth, 1606; Cymbeline, 1609; The Tempest, 1611, and Henry VIII, 1613,
The verb 'assemble', whilst only featuring once here in the Sonnets, appears a further 16 times in the plays, and 'gust' as a noun to mean 'taste' or 'relish' apart from here only appears in Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene 3. As a verb to mean 'to taste' or 'to realise' it appears in The Winter's Tale, Act I, Scene 2. Though nine years apart, both these plays, dated to 1601 and 1610 respectively, also therefore fall into the same broad period of very late Elizabethan, early Jacobean works.
What we can glean from all this, then, is that although Shakespeare's use of these words – which are unique to this poem within the Sonnets – favours plays that were also written between 1603, when Queen Elizabeth I dies and King James I / VI accedes to the throne and 1609, when the Sonnets are first published, they do in fact stretch over more than a decade and in some cases are prevalent in the plays throughout, including some very early ones, such as the Henry VI plays. Which means that our Will is here not simply discovering a new pool of vocabulary and exuberantly experimenting with it, he is using words he uses elsewhere, but places them here pointedly, it would seem.
And that leaves us not with a conclusion or let alone a solution, but with a hunch – and I realise that doesn't seem much much after so much deliberation – that there is more to this sonnet than meets our eye. We would have to speculate, and wildly, what this 'more' may be, because the words themselves give us no further clues; none at least that we can readily understand. And since it is our approach to go by the words and what the words tell us above all, so as not to say only,, we more or less have to leave it here and enjoy the fact that there are things about these sonnets that will most likely forever now elude us.
And also possible – this is worth acknowledging – is that Shakespeare here simply takes apart the poetic commonplace of 'all I see is you' and tries to, perhaps even ironically, rationalise how such a thing could be possible when the world is full not only of beautiful people and things like you, but also of the 'indigest', the ugly, the monstrous. In which case this sonnet, and the one it links up with directly, Sonnet 113, is perhaps nothing so much as a good-humoured diversion; a detour, so to speak, while handling another period of – by the sounds of it not terribly long, nor altogether unbearably taxing, period of absence from his younger, but no longer himself all that young, lover.
What comes next is a sonnet that claims the right to revise upwards the quality and intensity of the love a person me feel towards somebody else over time; and that then is followed by – we have announced it before, we are building up to it – one of the most famous sonnets of them all, possibly the one you are most likely to hear recited in public, very often at a wedding, and arguably also one of the best pieces of poetry Shakespeare has bequeathed on us, the wonderful Sonnet 116.
He then also settles the matter emphatically and declares without reservation that it is indeed flattery on the eye's part that has this effect on him, but that any sin the mind may be committing in lapping it all up is mitigated by the fact that the eye too loves what it wants to see – the young man's beauty – and so willingly tastes of this flattering, though therefore potentially poisonous, potion first, before passing it on for the mind to metaphorically imbibe.
If you have been following Sonnetcast, you may recall that in the episode covering Sonnet 108, we quoted Katherine Duncan-Jones, editor of the current Arden edition of the Sonnets, quoting Thomas P Roche, an expert in Renaissance poetry, as saying: "Our main difficulty as readers of sonnet-sequences is that we have not yet learned the rules of the game," and this is an obstacle that may be making itself felt in this for us quirky sonnet in particular.
The first question we may well feel inclined to ask upon hearing this poem is one of semantics or possibly also culture: why is it 'flattery' of Shakespeare's mind when his eye tells him that everything in the world, even the ugliest object or creature, looks like and therefore is as beautiful as his younger lover?
We would, were we inclined to flatter someone, be likely to take a more direct approach and do so by massaging their own ego, saying perhaps something like 'you are so rooted in my mind that everything I look at reminds me of you'. This is of course exactly what Shakespeare is telling his young man. It is not, though, what Shakespeare's eye is telling Shakespeare's mind: Shakespeare's eye is telling Shakespeare's mind: 'everything I look at reminds me of your lover, and so all I can show you is beauty such as his'. This, we would think, has the same effect as Shakespeare telling his lover that everything he looks at reminds him of him: it flatters the young lover. Not Shakespeare's mind.
So either our poet here once again has a lapse of logic – this wouldn't be the first time, we noted once or twice before – or we are simply being way too simplistic for Shakespeare's playful era and intricate craft, forgetting that even just having your mind occupied with an exquisite young nobleman of the standing, stature, and sublime beauty of the young man is an unearthly privilege, one which 'crowns' the mind and elevates it to the status of a king. A state, incidentally, that Shakespeare would not swap his infinitely more lowly position with in the much earlier Sonnet 29:
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
And so this may help us unlock the first conundrum of this sonnet: once we allow for the act, or, since it is less of an act than a state of being, the condition of loving someone in such a way that they permanently and exclusively occupy our mind to be a privilege and a greatly enriching and ennobling thing, then the eye conveying nothing but images of that loved person to the mind can indeed become a kind of flattery of the person so loving.
Flattery is – as we noted just a moment ago – a type of delusion. In the case of the lover who only sees the one they love, this may well be a self-delusion, and in the case of the lover who is thus deluded and aware of it, but enjoying the state of being so deluded for the warm fuzzy feeling that being in love just naturally entails, it may be a willing, deliberate, even sought-for, self-delusion.
And knowing our Will as we know him by now, we may well entertain the possibility and notion that such wondrous complexity is fully and consciously intended within just this one concept of 'flattery'.
The second element we may well struggle with and find hard to peel apart and distinguish properly is the difference between the eye 'flattering' the mind by feeding it only images or visual information that resembles the beautiful young man, and the eye employing alchemy – taught it, notably by "your love" – to transform all objects, even ugly ones, into such cherubs as resemble the young man.
That, to us, amounts pretty much to the same thing, does it not: what the mind receives is images of the young man. Either way. Except there is something of a difference in – if we want to employ a somewhat more modern term that may therefore be only partially applicable – 'agency' and therefore cause in relation to this effect.
And how we read this alchemy also, and importantly, depends on how we read the 'teacher', as it were. The sonnet posits the alchemy as taught by "your love." The first and obvious reading of 'your love' is, of course, your love of and towards me. This would make sense: the love you give and show me lends my eye the power and skill to transform everything it sees into you.
But 'your love' can also be me, as in 'your lover', and if I am meant by 'your love' then it is not your love to me, it is loving I that teaches my loving eye – pun alert, it is here fully intended – the art of transforming everything it sees into you.
If it is the former – if it is your love to me – then you with your devotion to me are the agent of transformation because it is you and your devotion to me that teaches my eye the alchemy it uses to turn everything it looks at, even the ugliest thing, into beautiful you.
If it is the latter – if it is I, your love, as in your lover who teaches my eye this same alchemy – then I with my love am the agent that makes my eye capable of what it is doing, turning everything, even the ugliest thing it looks at, into beautiful you.
And there is, or would be, a big difference. But Shakespeare says it is neither. He states categorically, it isn't alchemy. It is flattery. And flattery has remarkably little to do with love, in this poem or elsewhere. It has to do with kings, it has to do with status, with power. It is a form of deception.
Here is how Shakespeare uses it in these sonnets.
Sonnet 42 tells his young lover:
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.
What follows are two quatrains of fairly sophistic excuses for the young lover's offence off getting of with none other than Shakespeare's own mistress, and then yield into the conclusion:
But here's the joy: my friend and I are one.
Sweet flattery, then she loves but me alone.
We noted at the time that Shakespeare when he says this knows he is deceiving himself, but he chooses to do so, because it allows him to handle an otherwise impossibly fraught situation.
That is the only time, apart from this sonnet here, that Shakespeare uses the noun 'flattery' in the Sonnets.
Here is how he uses the verb 'to flatter':
Sonnet 28 tells his younger lover that when he's away from him he tries to please the day by telling him – the day – that he is 'bright' and does his lover 'grace'. Similarly:
So flatter I the swart-complexioned night,
When sparkling stars twire not: 'thou gildst the even'.
And here Shakespeare even spells out that this is obviously a deception:
But day doth daily draw my sorrows longer
And night doth nightly make grief's length seem stronger.
In Sonnet 33, already referenced and therefore already intentionally or accidentally linked to this sonnet, Shakespeare relates:
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy,
only to then allow bad weather to rain all over this parade of bliss.
And in Sonnet 87, which has also been referenced already, and which similarly speaks of a low point in the relationship, Shakespeare concedes:
Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter:
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.
What does all this do to our poem in hand? It rather appears to spike it with meaning. But – alas! – we may never know what exactly that meaning is: we may simply not have recovered and relearnt the rules of the game sufficiently to decode what is contained in this poem.
Does it want to allude specifically to a self-delusion? Does it want to contextualise somehow within the previous low points of the relationship this period, which otherwise appears to be a high point and in fact a phase working towards a climax in the relationship? We don't know. It could be the case, but we can't be certain. There could also be some other meaning locked up in this poem that we don't recognise, or the poem is super-simple though perhaps a bit convoluted and not overly logical.
But this, though possible, by this stage in the proceedings, is hard to believe.
And so since we don't know and can't pretend to know whether there is any hidden code deliberately placed in this sonnet, let alone what it means if there is, let us do what we can do and look at and summarise the oddities that stand out and make this sonnet unusual and apparently potentially cryptic.
First, there is the opening device of comparing two possibilities with 'or whether'. While we noted above that this would have been easy enough for Shakespeare's contemporaries to understand, it is the only time he uses it in this way in the Sonnets, which makes this sonnet singular and unusual.
Next we noted two references – intentional or accidental – to sonnets that deal with two most likely separate low points in the relationship with most likely the same young man. They were Sonnets 87 and 33.
Then we have the fact that the two possibilities that are being juxtaposed – flattery and alchemy – are both referenced once and once only elsewhere in the Sonnets: in Sonnet 42, which also, like Sonnet 33, deals with the affair the young man was then having with Shakespeare's mistress, and in Sonnet 33 itself.
And then we have this real concentration of hapax legomena inside the series: 'monsters', things 'indigest', and 'cherubins' all appear nowhere else in these sonnets, nor does the verb 'assemble'. They make up four of the 28 words in this quatrain alone. And a word that is found often in the Complete Works, and once elsewhere in the Sonnets, but nowhere else in the Sonnets with the same meaning is 'gust'.
This, you would be right to suggest, may mean nothing more than that Shakespeare is going through a particularly inventive and creative phase and playing around with new words. We don't know. Except this is not something we need to stay completely ignorant about. We can employ a method we have toyed with on previous occasions for other purposes and compare how these words that are very rare in the Sonnets feature in the plays:
'Monster', while unique here in the collection of the Sonnets, is something Shakespeare uses all the time: there are 98 instances in total of either the singular or the plural in his Complete Works.
'Indigest' as an adjective appears here and twice in the plays: once in Henry VI Part 2, Act V, Scene 1, and once in Henry VI Part 3, Act V, Scene 6, in each case to insult Richard who will later become Richard III, with his hunchback, and it also appears as a noun in King John, Act V, Scene 7.
'Cherubin' or 'cherubins' appears in nine of the plays and in A Lover's Complaint. This is interesting in so far as with one exception these plays, as well as very likely A Lover's Complaint, fall into a period of composition after 1600 and are therefore either just late Elizabethan or properly early Jacobean, much as this sonnet is believed to be. The exception to this is The Merchant of Venice, which gets dated to 1597. The others are: Troilus & Cressida, 1602; Othello, 1604; Timon of Athens, 1606; Macbeth, 1606; Cymbeline, 1609; The Tempest, 1611, and Henry VIII, 1613,
The verb 'assemble', whilst only featuring once here in the Sonnets, appears a further 16 times in the plays, and 'gust' as a noun to mean 'taste' or 'relish' apart from here only appears in Twelfth Night, Act I, Scene 3. As a verb to mean 'to taste' or 'to realise' it appears in The Winter's Tale, Act I, Scene 2. Though nine years apart, both these plays, dated to 1601 and 1610 respectively, also therefore fall into the same broad period of very late Elizabethan, early Jacobean works.
What we can glean from all this, then, is that although Shakespeare's use of these words – which are unique to this poem within the Sonnets – favours plays that were also written between 1603, when Queen Elizabeth I dies and King James I / VI accedes to the throne and 1609, when the Sonnets are first published, they do in fact stretch over more than a decade and in some cases are prevalent in the plays throughout, including some very early ones, such as the Henry VI plays. Which means that our Will is here not simply discovering a new pool of vocabulary and exuberantly experimenting with it, he is using words he uses elsewhere, but places them here pointedly, it would seem.
And that leaves us not with a conclusion or let alone a solution, but with a hunch – and I realise that doesn't seem much much after so much deliberation – that there is more to this sonnet than meets our eye. We would have to speculate, and wildly, what this 'more' may be, because the words themselves give us no further clues; none at least that we can readily understand. And since it is our approach to go by the words and what the words tell us above all, so as not to say only,, we more or less have to leave it here and enjoy the fact that there are things about these sonnets that will most likely forever now elude us.
And also possible – this is worth acknowledging – is that Shakespeare here simply takes apart the poetic commonplace of 'all I see is you' and tries to, perhaps even ironically, rationalise how such a thing could be possible when the world is full not only of beautiful people and things like you, but also of the 'indigest', the ugly, the monstrous. In which case this sonnet, and the one it links up with directly, Sonnet 113, is perhaps nothing so much as a good-humoured diversion; a detour, so to speak, while handling another period of – by the sounds of it not terribly long, nor altogether unbearably taxing, period of absence from his younger, but no longer himself all that young, lover.
What comes next is a sonnet that claims the right to revise upwards the quality and intensity of the love a person me feel towards somebody else over time; and that then is followed by – we have announced it before, we are building up to it – one of the most famous sonnets of them all, possibly the one you are most likely to hear recited in public, very often at a wedding, and arguably also one of the best pieces of poetry Shakespeare has bequeathed on us, the wonderful Sonnet 116.
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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!