Sonnet 98: From You Have I Been Absent in the Spring
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From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in everything, That heavy Saturn laughed and leapt with him. Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell Of different flowers in odour and in hue Could make me any summer's story tell, Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew. Nor did I wonder at the lily's white, Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose: They were but sweet, but figures of delight, Drawn after you, you pattern of all those. Yet seemed it winter still, and you away, As with your shadow I with these did play. |
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From you have I been absent in the spring
When proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in everything, |
I was away from you in the spring, the time when April, proudly, even ostentatiously, dressed in the multi-coloured clothing of all the blossoms and bright green leaves has put a spirit of youth into everything in nature.
William Shakespeare – as is his wont – packs a lot of poetry into this opening salvo: April is personified and so referred to as 'his', and he puts a spirit of youth into everything, meaning that he endows everything in nature with the essence of youth, the sap of life, and his metaphorical clothing is the apparel he therefore wears: the bloom and greenery of the season which contrasts so powerfully with the pale leaves and bareness of Sonnet 97. This is the first of a couple of indications we get that Sonnet 98 stands in direct context and relation to Sonnet 97. PRONUNCIATION: Note that spirit here as so often is pronounced as one syllable: sp'rit. |
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That heavy Saturn laughed and leapt with him.
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The effect of this youthful spirit that April puts into everything in the springtime is that even Saturn, who is a god associated with time and the autumn and therefore has a weighty, earthy, even – as the adjective saturnine still suggests – gloomy quality is invigorated enough to laugh and leap with him, 'him' still referring to April, of course.
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Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue Could make me any summer's story tell, |
Yet neither birdsong nor the lovely smell of all these flowers, so different in their fragrances and their colours, was able to inspire me to tell any story of a happy summer.
This is the first time in the sonnets that we hear Shakespeare refer to songs as 'lays', but he will do so again very soon twice, in Sonnets 100 and 102, and then not again. Colin Burrow in the Oxford edition points out that 'lays' "was a poeticism even by 1600," meaning that it was by that time already no longer used in everyday language. This would make the word one to look out for in the plays to see if there we can find a similar sudden and rare appearance that might therefore be surmised to correlate, in terms of the timeframe of their composition, to these three sonnets. And we shall do so when we revisit the timing of the sonnets in a special episode quite soon. 'Summer's story' meanwhile – editors generally highlight – contrasts to a sad tale which, so Mamillius tells us in the aptly titled The Winter's Tale is "best for winter" (Act II, Scene 1), in other words, it's the opposite of a winter's tale, and therefore happy or cheerful. PRONUNCIATION: Similarly, flowers here has one syllable: flow'rs. |
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Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew.
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Or pluck them – these flowers – from the lap of the earth where they grew.
The lap is 'proud' because it is – as the second line of the sonnet suggests – showy and exuberant, but both the word 'proud' as the adjective of 'pride', which we have come across and discussed several times before, and also 'lap' which here appears for the first and only time in the sonnets, have undeniably sexual connotations. Listen to Pompey in Act II, Scene 1 of Antony and Cleopatra, for example: But let us rear The higher our opinion, that our stirring Can from the lap of Egypt’s widow pluck The ne’er lust-wearied Antony. Or indeed this exchange between Hamlet and Ophelia in Scene 2 of Act III of, obviously, Hamlet where he taunts her with: HAMLET Lady, shall I lie in your lap? OPHELIA No, my lord. HAMLET I mean, my head upon your lap? OPHELIA. Ay, my lord. HAMLET. Do you think I meant country matters? OPHELIA I think nothing, my lord. And note, apart from everything else there, as if it were necessary, he pun on country matters... Or Richard in Scene 2, Act III of Richard III: I'll make my heaven in a lady's lap. The reason we're somewhat labouring the point here is that it may, for our understanding of this sonnet, become significant, of course. |
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Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose: |
Nor did I pay attention to and marvel at the gorgeous beauty of the white lily, or wax lyrical about the intense red of the rose: these two – the lily's white and the rose's red – are of course poetic commonplaces and Shakespeare is no doubt aware that he is here venturing towards cliches, so it is telling and in a tiny tingling way exhilarating that instead of simply talking about the red rose he uses the word 'vermilion' here for the first and only time in his entire body of work: it is this a hapax legomenon.
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They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those. |
These, the white lilies and the red roses were nothing but lovely things, they were mere representations or copies of the authentic thing that delights, namely you, after which they were drawn because you are the template or original of everything that is lovely, beautiful, and delightful.
This echoes the great wonder of Sonnet 53: Speak of the spring and foison of the year, The one doth shadow of your beauty show, The other as your bounty doth appear, And you in every blessed shape we know. And it also reminds us of the far more ambiguous and complex pair 67 & 68 which, in Sonnet 68 sets out: Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn When beauty lived and died as flowers do now, and so Shakespeare here again draws a conscious or subconscious line directly to these earlier sonnets of his for the young man, which does nothing so much as support our contention that these two sonnets, 97 and 98, are also addressed to the same person. |
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Yet seemed it winter still, and you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play. |
And yet to me it still seemed like winter, and you being away from me, I played with these sweets and delights only as I could play with your shadow or image or a poor imitation of you. Or indeed, if we want to stretch that far, with an imagination or vision of you.
The fact that Shakespeare says "Yet seemed it winter still" is probably telling: it strongly suggests, so hard on the heels of Sonnet 97 with its opening line "How like a winter hath my absence been," that the winter of the previous sonnet still continues; in other words, that this sonnet is indeed, as their order in the collection implies, to be read as a continuation of Sonnet 97. Also possibly telling is the inversion of the absence: the previous sonnet's "my absence" as well as this sonnet's "have I been absent" do make it as clear as possible that the person who is away from the ordinary location where the two would be together is Shakespeare. So can we read anything into the fact that Shakespeare now speaks of the young man being away from him? And if we can, should we? This is something we will examine in a little more detail in just a moment. 'Shadow' to mean 'image' or even 'apparition' as well as 'appearance' we have met before, both in the context of a separation, in Sonnet 27: Save that my soul's imaginary sight Presents thy shadow to my sightless view Which, like a jewel hung in ghastly night, Makes black night beauteous and her old face new. And also, significantly, in the afore-referenced wondrous Sonnet 53, which sounds very much inspired by or even written in the physical presence of the young lover: What is your substance, whereof are you made, That millions of strange shadows on you tend, Since every one hath, every one, one shade, And you, but one, can every shadow lend? And just how we can, may, or possibly even should read the word 'play', on which Shakespeare ends and which John Kerrigan in the Penguin edition calls "this most Shakespearean of words," shall be a focus of our discussion of this most fascinating of sonnets. |
When Sonnet 97 spoke of an absence from his lover that felt to Shakespeare "like a winter" even though it actually took place during the summer and/or autumn season, Sonnet 98 speaks of either the same or a similar absence that took place during the springtime in April, which, however, on account of not having his lover around, to Shakespeare also seemed like "winter still."
With their many similarities and essentially identical themes, the two sonnets are clearly related, and it is unlikely to be a coincidence that they follow each other in the collection, although we cannot know whether our poet is here talking about a continuous absence from his lover that lasts all the way from late summer into the next spring, or whether he is talking about a renewed period of separation, or whether in fact the two sonnets have somehow got reversed in their order and we are looking at an absence that lasts from spring throughout the summer into autumn.
This latter scenario seems an unlikely one, as we discussed when looking at Sonnet 97, and so indeed do various other theories which either see both these sonnets as merely emotional but not physical periods of separation, or as referring to periods of separation from two different people, something we also saw and noted in the last episode.
With their commonalities, these two sonnets obviously invite comparisons, and there are three principal and therefore quite fundamental differences that markedly distinguish them from each other. Two of these are to slightly differing degrees eye-catching and ones we already mentioned in the context of Sonnet 97, one is more subtle and covert and this we merely hinted at.
To recap the two more obvious ones:
Number One:
Sonnet 97 addresses its recipient as 'thou' and 'thee', Sonnet 98, by contrast, is addressed to 'you'. When we discussed this issue on previous occasions we noted two things that are potentially of some significance also to this poem.
Firstly, Shakespeare on several occasions uses both forms to address evidently the same person, and so any suggestion that this instance here is any kind of 'proof' that these two sonnets must be written to two different people does not stack up. Again, suffice it here to refer to the episodes on Sonnet 80 and 13 so we don't have to cover the same territory once more entirely.
Secondly, also without wishing to delve too deeply back into it: we got the impression – and it is this more of an impression than anything else – that Shakespeare deploys 'you' when he is in fact being more familiar, more intimate, more suggestive with his lover than usual. Ordinarily, 'you' is the more formal, polite form of address, 'thou' the more informal, familiar form of address, but Shakespeare repeatedly in these sonnets reverses this, and one of his reasons, we ventured, may be that when he is being more daring or more presumptuous or more irreverent, he signals his awareness of his status and place in the world in relation to the young man by using a more polite form of address.
Number Two:
Sonnet 97 talks about an absence and the effect it has on our poet in a curious mix of past and present tense which suggests a continuity of absence. The opening sentence – "How like a winter hath my absence been" - is held in the present perfect tense, which implies an ongoing relevance or situation. This is followed by several examples of how things have felt because of this absence, phrased in the past, but then the sonnet firmly returns to the present tense to describe what the world is like without the lover near. What this evokes – be that intentional or no – is an absence that is felt now and therefore is either still ongoing or so recent as to be vivid still. In view of Sonnet 98, an understanding of it as still ongoing seems reasonable.
Sonnet 98 also starts out in the present perfect tense –"From you have I been absent in the spring" – but then tells us what happened and what effect this had on me in the simple past tense entirely which implies that these events are now really over.
The less obvious, and therefore more subtle and perhaps for this also more significant difference between these two sonnets though lies in its focus. Sonnet 97 does mention "what freezings have I felt | What dark days seen" and it does also say that "this abundant issue" that the real world of late summer and autumn presents "seemed to me" something far more barren, neglected, and thus dejected. So it is a personal poem, no doubt. But the poem then ends on the pleasures of summer which attend on the young man and how this circumstance causes even the birds to lose their voice and the leaves to look pale because they themselves dread the winter's impending arrival.
Sonnet 98 establishes the circumstance as it was, namely that I have been absent from you in the spring, and then from the second quatrain onwards talks about what I did or did not do as a result. And here comes something that is truly riveting: it does so in a language that is inherently ambiguous.
This is not what we would expect. On the surface, Sonnet 98 does what it should to, what we are inclined to believe a poem about a poet's separation from his lover is surely meant to do: it tells him, with you away from me, even spring feels like winter to me, and all the lovely flowers bring me no joy until we're back together.
But our Will is no fool. And he is certainly not a wordsmith unaware of the power of language. And so, can it really be an accident, a coincidence, a happenstance that Shakespeare here uses language that is so suggestive? That he actively switches – and yes, this is an assumption, but it is a well-enough founded one – from 'thou' to 'you'? That he talks about "the proud lap" from which he felt unable to "pluck" these "different flowers in odour and in hue," which is the place where, after all, "they grew."
Once again, we are confronted with the reality that William Shakespeare, the man who like no other invents, enriches, moulds, and toys with the English language, here makes a choice. He chooses to talk about plucking things that grow in their proud lap. And what about these lilies and these roses? How 'innocent' how 'chaste' are they really? Anyone who's ever looked at a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph of a lily or watched the last scene of Citizen Cane with its 'rosebud' will be hard pushed to forget just how sensual, how almost overtly sexual these flowers can be.
Now our Will, having lived and composed his sonnet a good 350 to 370 years before either of these two 20th century works were created could not possibly have been influenced by them, but he knows his figures of speech, he has a sense for symbolism, he can layer meaning upon meanings.
And we mentioned 'vermilion'. Vermilion is not actually, a 'deep' as in 'dark' red, it is a bright, even orangey red. Of course, we need to allow for shifts in meaning and perception, and this is not something we can get hung up about, but it is interesting to say the least that Shakespeare here deploys one of his hapax legomena. These, it has to be said are not all that uncommon, there may be as many as 1500 or more of them in Shakespeare's works, but if you have been listening to this podcast you will have heard me say that every so often Shakespeare does something similar to what setters of cryptic crosswords do: he lifts you onto the level of looking at his language from a different angle by drawing attention to the language itself.
Here we can't say this is certainly the case, because we can't know how much this language would have drawn attention to itself in his day, but what we can say is that it draws our attention to itself, because it is both suggestive and unusual.
Which brings us to the closing couplet and the last line with its last word.
Yet seemed it winter still, and you away
As with your shadow I with these did play.
At first glance there's nothing untoward: you were away and so I played with these flowers only as I would with your 'shadow', bearing in mind that 'shadow' here is an image, a copy, or an imitation, or possibly a vision.
I beg your pardon? What did you do with these flowers? What exactly are these flowers? Or, perhaps more to the point, who are these 'flowers'?
I don't know about you, but it is rare that you find me 'playing' with flowers. Unless of course these 'flowers' are other things that one might 'pluck' from a 'proud lap' where they 'grew'. But hang on: if they were other things and you did not, as you say, pluck them, then what exactly did you do with them. How did this 'play' unfold? What was and wasn't involved? What do you mean, 'pluck'? What is this supposed to stand for or rhyme with?... We are, we realise, in a world of contradictions and ambiguities.
One needs to be careful, always, in what one reads into poetry, most particularly Shakespeare's poetry, but why would Will plant ideas in our head if he didn't mean to? Is it just us? Without much effort and not needing to foray far into conjecture, we suddenly have a whole secondary meaning of: oh, these 'flowers' that I played with a bit: they were nothing really, they were but sweet, delights, peccadilloes, perhaps, but poor substitutes for you, while you were away. This did not go far and it will go no further. And again here we have the inversion of who is away from whom: with "you away | As with your shadow I with these did play."
Now, on its own, this may seem a little far-fetched. And much of our attention in this podcast so far has been on the young man's conduct, on his infidelities, on his fickleness and aloofness.
But remember when he, the young man, got off and had a fling with Shakespeare's mistress around Sonnets 33 to 42? Well, in order for the young man to be able to betray Shakespeare with Shakespeare's own mistress, Shakespeare has to have a mistress in the first place.
We mentioned this then, but for much of the series we've been making little of the fact that our Will is no wallflower when it comes to sexual proclivity. And we are not that far away from a sonnet that will make it absolutely clear that Shakespeare too, for all his outrage, dejection, sorrow – and I do believe that it is a genuine sorrow – at his young lover's escapades, has gone quite here and there, because he tells him and us: "Alas, 'tis true, I have gone here and there," and while for its meaning and connotations and significance we will now have to wait until it comes around at position 110, what we can say now is that if it is the case with this sonnet, that far from just, as in only, telling his young man how much he missed him, he is also confessing to him that he has what we in today's language would in fact call 'played around' a bit, but that this was nothing, it was meaningless, and that these 'flowers' have no shade on him, the young man, then it would not be the first and not the only time in these sonnets that as much is being expressed.
And in such a context, the closing of Sonnet 97 then becomes quite possibly more of a scene setting for 98: what I am about to tell you about me does of course have to be read in view of summer and his pleasures waiting on thee, because there is no good reason to believe that that is not so and that the young man was not being attended on by the pleasures of summer while Shakespeare was away from him.
And so while we needs must contend ourselves with the ever-reigning limbo of simply not knowing anything for certain, we are at the very least allowed to ask ourselves the question: is there a bit of smoke here that we detect in this language, and if there is, stems it from no fire at all or are we right to speculate that there may well be more to this sonnet than at very first glance meets our eye? And considering how dense, sophisticated, layered, and complex a form the sonnet is or can be, and how skilled, dexterous, and at times mischievous in turn our Will, my inclination, cautiously, is to allow for the possibility that there may well have been some heat to cause this waft of smoulder...
With their many similarities and essentially identical themes, the two sonnets are clearly related, and it is unlikely to be a coincidence that they follow each other in the collection, although we cannot know whether our poet is here talking about a continuous absence from his lover that lasts all the way from late summer into the next spring, or whether he is talking about a renewed period of separation, or whether in fact the two sonnets have somehow got reversed in their order and we are looking at an absence that lasts from spring throughout the summer into autumn.
This latter scenario seems an unlikely one, as we discussed when looking at Sonnet 97, and so indeed do various other theories which either see both these sonnets as merely emotional but not physical periods of separation, or as referring to periods of separation from two different people, something we also saw and noted in the last episode.
With their commonalities, these two sonnets obviously invite comparisons, and there are three principal and therefore quite fundamental differences that markedly distinguish them from each other. Two of these are to slightly differing degrees eye-catching and ones we already mentioned in the context of Sonnet 97, one is more subtle and covert and this we merely hinted at.
To recap the two more obvious ones:
Number One:
Sonnet 97 addresses its recipient as 'thou' and 'thee', Sonnet 98, by contrast, is addressed to 'you'. When we discussed this issue on previous occasions we noted two things that are potentially of some significance also to this poem.
Firstly, Shakespeare on several occasions uses both forms to address evidently the same person, and so any suggestion that this instance here is any kind of 'proof' that these two sonnets must be written to two different people does not stack up. Again, suffice it here to refer to the episodes on Sonnet 80 and 13 so we don't have to cover the same territory once more entirely.
Secondly, also without wishing to delve too deeply back into it: we got the impression – and it is this more of an impression than anything else – that Shakespeare deploys 'you' when he is in fact being more familiar, more intimate, more suggestive with his lover than usual. Ordinarily, 'you' is the more formal, polite form of address, 'thou' the more informal, familiar form of address, but Shakespeare repeatedly in these sonnets reverses this, and one of his reasons, we ventured, may be that when he is being more daring or more presumptuous or more irreverent, he signals his awareness of his status and place in the world in relation to the young man by using a more polite form of address.
Number Two:
Sonnet 97 talks about an absence and the effect it has on our poet in a curious mix of past and present tense which suggests a continuity of absence. The opening sentence – "How like a winter hath my absence been" - is held in the present perfect tense, which implies an ongoing relevance or situation. This is followed by several examples of how things have felt because of this absence, phrased in the past, but then the sonnet firmly returns to the present tense to describe what the world is like without the lover near. What this evokes – be that intentional or no – is an absence that is felt now and therefore is either still ongoing or so recent as to be vivid still. In view of Sonnet 98, an understanding of it as still ongoing seems reasonable.
Sonnet 98 also starts out in the present perfect tense –"From you have I been absent in the spring" – but then tells us what happened and what effect this had on me in the simple past tense entirely which implies that these events are now really over.
The less obvious, and therefore more subtle and perhaps for this also more significant difference between these two sonnets though lies in its focus. Sonnet 97 does mention "what freezings have I felt | What dark days seen" and it does also say that "this abundant issue" that the real world of late summer and autumn presents "seemed to me" something far more barren, neglected, and thus dejected. So it is a personal poem, no doubt. But the poem then ends on the pleasures of summer which attend on the young man and how this circumstance causes even the birds to lose their voice and the leaves to look pale because they themselves dread the winter's impending arrival.
Sonnet 98 establishes the circumstance as it was, namely that I have been absent from you in the spring, and then from the second quatrain onwards talks about what I did or did not do as a result. And here comes something that is truly riveting: it does so in a language that is inherently ambiguous.
This is not what we would expect. On the surface, Sonnet 98 does what it should to, what we are inclined to believe a poem about a poet's separation from his lover is surely meant to do: it tells him, with you away from me, even spring feels like winter to me, and all the lovely flowers bring me no joy until we're back together.
But our Will is no fool. And he is certainly not a wordsmith unaware of the power of language. And so, can it really be an accident, a coincidence, a happenstance that Shakespeare here uses language that is so suggestive? That he actively switches – and yes, this is an assumption, but it is a well-enough founded one – from 'thou' to 'you'? That he talks about "the proud lap" from which he felt unable to "pluck" these "different flowers in odour and in hue," which is the place where, after all, "they grew."
Once again, we are confronted with the reality that William Shakespeare, the man who like no other invents, enriches, moulds, and toys with the English language, here makes a choice. He chooses to talk about plucking things that grow in their proud lap. And what about these lilies and these roses? How 'innocent' how 'chaste' are they really? Anyone who's ever looked at a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph of a lily or watched the last scene of Citizen Cane with its 'rosebud' will be hard pushed to forget just how sensual, how almost overtly sexual these flowers can be.
Now our Will, having lived and composed his sonnet a good 350 to 370 years before either of these two 20th century works were created could not possibly have been influenced by them, but he knows his figures of speech, he has a sense for symbolism, he can layer meaning upon meanings.
And we mentioned 'vermilion'. Vermilion is not actually, a 'deep' as in 'dark' red, it is a bright, even orangey red. Of course, we need to allow for shifts in meaning and perception, and this is not something we can get hung up about, but it is interesting to say the least that Shakespeare here deploys one of his hapax legomena. These, it has to be said are not all that uncommon, there may be as many as 1500 or more of them in Shakespeare's works, but if you have been listening to this podcast you will have heard me say that every so often Shakespeare does something similar to what setters of cryptic crosswords do: he lifts you onto the level of looking at his language from a different angle by drawing attention to the language itself.
Here we can't say this is certainly the case, because we can't know how much this language would have drawn attention to itself in his day, but what we can say is that it draws our attention to itself, because it is both suggestive and unusual.
Which brings us to the closing couplet and the last line with its last word.
Yet seemed it winter still, and you away
As with your shadow I with these did play.
At first glance there's nothing untoward: you were away and so I played with these flowers only as I would with your 'shadow', bearing in mind that 'shadow' here is an image, a copy, or an imitation, or possibly a vision.
I beg your pardon? What did you do with these flowers? What exactly are these flowers? Or, perhaps more to the point, who are these 'flowers'?
I don't know about you, but it is rare that you find me 'playing' with flowers. Unless of course these 'flowers' are other things that one might 'pluck' from a 'proud lap' where they 'grew'. But hang on: if they were other things and you did not, as you say, pluck them, then what exactly did you do with them. How did this 'play' unfold? What was and wasn't involved? What do you mean, 'pluck'? What is this supposed to stand for or rhyme with?... We are, we realise, in a world of contradictions and ambiguities.
One needs to be careful, always, in what one reads into poetry, most particularly Shakespeare's poetry, but why would Will plant ideas in our head if he didn't mean to? Is it just us? Without much effort and not needing to foray far into conjecture, we suddenly have a whole secondary meaning of: oh, these 'flowers' that I played with a bit: they were nothing really, they were but sweet, delights, peccadilloes, perhaps, but poor substitutes for you, while you were away. This did not go far and it will go no further. And again here we have the inversion of who is away from whom: with "you away | As with your shadow I with these did play."
Now, on its own, this may seem a little far-fetched. And much of our attention in this podcast so far has been on the young man's conduct, on his infidelities, on his fickleness and aloofness.
But remember when he, the young man, got off and had a fling with Shakespeare's mistress around Sonnets 33 to 42? Well, in order for the young man to be able to betray Shakespeare with Shakespeare's own mistress, Shakespeare has to have a mistress in the first place.
We mentioned this then, but for much of the series we've been making little of the fact that our Will is no wallflower when it comes to sexual proclivity. And we are not that far away from a sonnet that will make it absolutely clear that Shakespeare too, for all his outrage, dejection, sorrow – and I do believe that it is a genuine sorrow – at his young lover's escapades, has gone quite here and there, because he tells him and us: "Alas, 'tis true, I have gone here and there," and while for its meaning and connotations and significance we will now have to wait until it comes around at position 110, what we can say now is that if it is the case with this sonnet, that far from just, as in only, telling his young man how much he missed him, he is also confessing to him that he has what we in today's language would in fact call 'played around' a bit, but that this was nothing, it was meaningless, and that these 'flowers' have no shade on him, the young man, then it would not be the first and not the only time in these sonnets that as much is being expressed.
And in such a context, the closing of Sonnet 97 then becomes quite possibly more of a scene setting for 98: what I am about to tell you about me does of course have to be read in view of summer and his pleasures waiting on thee, because there is no good reason to believe that that is not so and that the young man was not being attended on by the pleasures of summer while Shakespeare was away from him.
And so while we needs must contend ourselves with the ever-reigning limbo of simply not knowing anything for certain, we are at the very least allowed to ask ourselves the question: is there a bit of smoke here that we detect in this language, and if there is, stems it from no fire at all or are we right to speculate that there may well be more to this sonnet than at very first glance meets our eye? And considering how dense, sophisticated, layered, and complex a form the sonnet is or can be, and how skilled, dexterous, and at times mischievous in turn our Will, my inclination, cautiously, is to allow for the possibility that there may well have been some heat to cause this waft of smoulder...
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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!