Sonnet 143: Lo! As a Careful Housewife Runs to Catch
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Lo! As a careful housewife runs to catch
One of her feathered creatures broke away, Sets down her babe and makes all swift dispatch In pursuit of the thing she would have stay, Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase, Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent To follow that which flies before her face, Not prizing her poor infant's discontent, So runst thou after that which flies from thee, Whilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind; But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me, And play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind. So will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will If thou turn back and my loud crying still. |
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Lo! As a careful housewife runs to catch
One of her feathered creatures broke away, |
Look, or behold: just as a careful housewife who runs to catch one of her feathered creatures which has broken away from the flock or the coop...
The 'Lo!' is of course simply an expression used to draw attention to something that is happening or has happened, we have encountered it often; its ancillary purpose being to make up the number of syllables required for the line to scan. A housewife, or, as the Quarto spells it closer to the pronunciation at the time, huswife, would, as Professor Phyllis Rackin in our conversation on Shakespeare and Women recently pointed out, in Shakespeare's day have had many responsibilities in the running of a household, which in many cases was as much of a business as a residence. And she is here characterised as 'careful' because she is conscientious and takes care of the things she is in charge of, such as the domestic fowl, but also because she is 'full of cares', with many things to look after and juggle, her work proverbially, and right into the 20th century never being done. Exactly what species the feathered creature here referred to is, we don't know, but most likely in an English household of the time it would have been a chicken or possibly a goose, though to the poem particularly pertinent would obviously be a cockerel, for reasons that shall become readily apparent in a moment. PRONUNCIATION: Note that housewife at the time would have been pronounced hussif, either with a short u or a short ah sound as the first vowel.. |
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Sets down her babe and makes all swift dispatch
In pursuit of the thing she would have stay, |
In the pursuit of this bird and with her attention on catching it before it escapes entirely, she sets down her babe-in-arms and hurries after it, that same bird being the thing of which she wants that it stays where it is.
PRONUNCIATION: Note that in order for the line to scan, pursuit here is stressed on the first syllable: [pur-suit]. |
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Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase,
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...whilst the child she thus temporarily neglects chases after her...
There may, as Katherine Duncan-Jones in her Arden edition of The Sonnets suggests, possibly be an intended wordplay here on 'holds', to pass the action of 'holding' from the mother who did and should hold her child on to the child who now merely 'holds' his mother in chase. |
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Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent
To follow that which flies before her face, Not prizing her poor infant's discontent, |
The child, momentarily bereft of his mother, cries after her, so as to catch her attention and with it prompt her to return and thus to metaphorically 'catch' her, who she though is entirely absorbed with going after the thing that both flees and in this instance also quite literally flies in front of her eyes, while not giving any importance to the discontent and discomfort of her poor infant.
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So runst thou after that which flies from thee,
Whilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind. |
In just the same way you run after the thing which flies away and, being human, rather more earthbound, flees and runs away from you, obviously by implication another man, whilst I, who in this constellation am just like your child, run after you, far behind.
The image is a far cry from chivalry or romance: Shakespeare pictures himself as a toddler in distress at his mother running after a rogue chicken. |
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But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me,
And play the mother's part, kiss me, be kind. |
But if – and, as is implied, when – you have caught the thing that you've been hoping to catch, then come back to me and play the part of the caring mother again, kiss me, be kind to me; whereby being 'kind' here then acquires a rather more sexual connotation than a child should ever have to expect from his mother...
There is once again a level of constructive ambiguity at work in this line. On the one hand, and possibly at first reading, it comes across as a plea: if you do this, if you are successful in catching the creature you're running after, then do that, come back to me and love me. But the same sentence can also be read as an observation of something that generally is the case. In the Quarto Edition, the line before this, "Whilst I, thy babe, chase thee afar behind," ends on a comma, not a full stop, and this somewhat supports such a secondary reading, as possibly does the closing couplet, which holds out a great deal of hope that this may in fact be how things pan out, and therefore may draw from previous experience rather than represent mere wishful thinking: |
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So will I pray that thou mayst have thy Will
If thou turn back and my loud crying still. |
And so as a result of the situation being as it is, or because of all this, I pray that you may have your will and get what you want, if that means that you then come back to me and silence my loud crying with your attention, your caresses, your tendernesses, your love.
The Quarto Edition here, as in the obsessively punning Sonnets 135 and 136 both capitalises and italicises 'Will', drawing deliberate attention to the double, triple, possibly quadruple meaning in this instance of the word 'Will', which here may mean 'that which you want or desire', 'your William' – which, if here the case, may once again also imply that at least one of the other men in this woman's life is called William – 'your cock', as in the cock that you usually get or are currently after, and also, by extension following the rebound, me, 'your Will Shakespeare'. |
With his uncharacteristically lighthearted Sonnet 143, William Shakespeare plants a picture in our minds of the poet as a crying toddler placed on the ground while his mother is running after a wayward chicken, and expresses his hope, not unreasonable in the imagined circumstances, that the mother, once she has caught the bird she is chasing, will come back to him, pick him up, and comfort him with her affection and her love.
It's an unusual simile to say the least: not because it is complex or difficult to visualise – in fact the opposite – but because it departs from virtually all and any traditional or even just, one might argue, advisable comparison for a lover to invoke: rare is the Lothario who impresses his mistress by likening himself to her babe. And it continues to expressly accept the fact that this woman has other men whom she actively pursues. In this case, it would appear, one particular other man, who in this oddly farcical setup is assigned the role of the runaway cockerel.
Who the other man in this sonnet, scarcely seems to matter: William Shakespeare appears to resign himself to the situation such as it is: I run after you, you run after someone else. That someone else may or may not be another William, we don't know. It may or may not be Shakespeare's young lover, but in fact it sounds unlikely: in every one of the previous sonnets which made it clear that William Shakespeare was referring to his Fair Youth, he was agitated: angry, sad, disappointed, upset. And the same will be the case again with the next sonnet: the young man clearly matters to him. The person who here is his woman's 'feathered creature' appears not to matter at all, they're just one of many the woman fancies.
What we do know and what is striking is the equanimity with which Shakespeare acknowledges and reconciles himself to his mistress having other lovers. We have noted this before and it remains noteworthy: when in Sonnets 139 and 140 all he wishes for is that his mistress refrain from flirting with other men while she is in his company – also not unreasonable a request, in those circumstances in turn – all he is really asking for with this sonnet is that when she has caught the creature she wants to keep in her coop, she then come back to him and effectively mother him.
This particular point may strike us as decidedly odd. It's the first time we hear Shakespeare express a wish for his mistress to be motherly. What that tells us about him, about her, about their relationship, we really can't be sure, but perhaps this is one of these cases where we may be best advised not to over-psychologise what we see. Is our Will giving vent here to a deep-rooted Oedipus complex? Who knows: it's not something we can rule out categorically, and certainly the spectrum of emotions he covers towards this woman in the just 25 poems that are actually addressed to, written about, or composed in the context of the relationship with the Dark Lady would signal, as we repeatedly remark, a highly complex and profoundly conflicted constellation.
Still: the near caricature drawn by his words is comical: funny, haha, more than curious. It leaves us unworried about our Will's well-being, for children cry easily and their 'loud crying' is stilled just as quickly as it is prompted. Anyone who's ever witnessed a little one lose sight of their mother and wail their eyes out for the all of about thirty seconds it takes for her to come back into vision will find it hard to take the anguish all that seriously, even though it be the absolutely worst thing ever to have happened in the world for the infant right at that moment.
The crisis, in other words, depicted by this poem is a slight one. And the lightness is frothed further by the absence of any great or apparent layerings of meanings or symbolism. Yes, there's the punning on Will again, yes the bird, if it is a chicken may be a cockerel and thus play on a fairly feeble sexual innuendo too, but other than that we are and seem to remain on perfectly parochial, so as not to say comparatively prosaic ground. A pastoral idyll made only marginally poignant by the poet putting himself in it.
And so the leap from this to the next poem, Sonnet 144, with its highly charged symbolism, religion-grade rhetoric, and full-on sexual flavour will come as a proper jolt to the system...
It's an unusual simile to say the least: not because it is complex or difficult to visualise – in fact the opposite – but because it departs from virtually all and any traditional or even just, one might argue, advisable comparison for a lover to invoke: rare is the Lothario who impresses his mistress by likening himself to her babe. And it continues to expressly accept the fact that this woman has other men whom she actively pursues. In this case, it would appear, one particular other man, who in this oddly farcical setup is assigned the role of the runaway cockerel.
Who the other man in this sonnet, scarcely seems to matter: William Shakespeare appears to resign himself to the situation such as it is: I run after you, you run after someone else. That someone else may or may not be another William, we don't know. It may or may not be Shakespeare's young lover, but in fact it sounds unlikely: in every one of the previous sonnets which made it clear that William Shakespeare was referring to his Fair Youth, he was agitated: angry, sad, disappointed, upset. And the same will be the case again with the next sonnet: the young man clearly matters to him. The person who here is his woman's 'feathered creature' appears not to matter at all, they're just one of many the woman fancies.
What we do know and what is striking is the equanimity with which Shakespeare acknowledges and reconciles himself to his mistress having other lovers. We have noted this before and it remains noteworthy: when in Sonnets 139 and 140 all he wishes for is that his mistress refrain from flirting with other men while she is in his company – also not unreasonable a request, in those circumstances in turn – all he is really asking for with this sonnet is that when she has caught the creature she wants to keep in her coop, she then come back to him and effectively mother him.
This particular point may strike us as decidedly odd. It's the first time we hear Shakespeare express a wish for his mistress to be motherly. What that tells us about him, about her, about their relationship, we really can't be sure, but perhaps this is one of these cases where we may be best advised not to over-psychologise what we see. Is our Will giving vent here to a deep-rooted Oedipus complex? Who knows: it's not something we can rule out categorically, and certainly the spectrum of emotions he covers towards this woman in the just 25 poems that are actually addressed to, written about, or composed in the context of the relationship with the Dark Lady would signal, as we repeatedly remark, a highly complex and profoundly conflicted constellation.
Still: the near caricature drawn by his words is comical: funny, haha, more than curious. It leaves us unworried about our Will's well-being, for children cry easily and their 'loud crying' is stilled just as quickly as it is prompted. Anyone who's ever witnessed a little one lose sight of their mother and wail their eyes out for the all of about thirty seconds it takes for her to come back into vision will find it hard to take the anguish all that seriously, even though it be the absolutely worst thing ever to have happened in the world for the infant right at that moment.
The crisis, in other words, depicted by this poem is a slight one. And the lightness is frothed further by the absence of any great or apparent layerings of meanings or symbolism. Yes, there's the punning on Will again, yes the bird, if it is a chicken may be a cockerel and thus play on a fairly feeble sexual innuendo too, but other than that we are and seem to remain on perfectly parochial, so as not to say comparatively prosaic ground. A pastoral idyll made only marginally poignant by the poet putting himself in it.
And so the leap from this to the next poem, Sonnet 144, with its highly charged symbolism, religion-grade rhetoric, and full-on sexual flavour will come as a proper jolt to the system...
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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!