Shakespeare Fans discussion
Sonnets
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#44, 45 If the dull substance of my flesh were thought
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Mod
Sonnet 44 is so interesting because when I think of love...I think of fast heartbeats and nerves. Here...things are slowed down.
some great atmospheric images of slow....heavy....
I think of a long distance relationship. And one thinks so fast and close "across sea" as the sonnet says....it seems like no distance.
So this is great confusing contradictory-ness here.
Mod
Air:
heart
Jupiter
adolescence
blood
Fire:
gall bladder
summer
mars
bile
Earth:
old age
Saturn
spleen
winter
Water:
Autumn
Moon
Brain
Maturity
Is it possible...that these elements might be a key to the ages in the rest of the Sonnets? I don't know...just thinking out loud...
It might be interesting to tally up the number of sonnets where Shakespeare talks about the SPEED of thought--leading me to believe his thought must have been a good deal speedier than mine! (I think there are probably places in the plays, too, where he talks about the speed of thought, but none leap to my mind.)The line Candy quotes ("thought kills me that I am not thought") also seems to be a recurring idea in Shakespeare. I'm not sure I can think of any other writer, or thinker, who's hit upon that curious idea.
He pines that he can't teleport! : )Without the aid of things like photographs, or cell phones, when someone important traveled a distance that's too far to practically follow, it must have been very frustrating to try to imagine where they were, their environment, their faces and expressions.
I think he would love to be clairvoyant. Also, was it common knowledge then that the air we breathe is composed of the molecules that Shakespeare (and all creatures who were once alive) breathed?
Or is he picturing nature as the transport of thoughts and desires?
"I must attend time's leisure with my moan"--a great line in and of itself, but also one that sums up (for me, anyhow) the intense emotion of the speaker, far more intense, it seems to me, than what we've seen in the other sonnets.
I'd be pretty damn flattered to get this pair of poems in my Inbox!
I love Janice's one-line summary, "he pines that he can't teleport!"To answer David's point, there is a striking instance in "The Tempest" of the speed of thought in Prospero's "Come with a thought", which summons up Ariel. Ariel instantly appears and replies, "Thy thoughts I cleave to". Ariel teleports around the island to match Prospero's thinking, and like the Gods in Homer is quite unconstrained by space.
Ariel is air and fire; Caliban is earth and water. Ariel can bring dew from "the still vexed Bermoothes". It gives the idea of travelling to Bermuda and back from the Mediterranean before the dew has cleared.
In MND, Puck is to Oberon as Ariel is to Prospero, and Puck gives us a clear image of his speed of travel,
"I'll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes."
That's 8,000 miles in 40 mins = 12,000 miles per hour, or about mach 16. Even the fastest military jets of today only get up to about mach 10.
There is a very interesting section in Lucretius on the kind of atoms there must be in the body to make thought work as fast as it does. (Lucretius' philosophy is materialistic.) Perhaps S was aware of this.
But of course, the sonnets are about love, and illustrate its many effects. The last "music sadly" sonnet reminds us how, when in love, music acquires an almost unbearable poignancy. These two are about the tyranny of physical separation, which we take for granted most of the time, and only deeply suffer because of it when the one loved is far away.
I doubt myself that modern communication helps here: phones, photos, email, skype are no substitute for real presence. Perhaps the second sonnet has a hint that a letter has been received (how else could he know of "thy fair health"?).
"melancholy" at the line end needs to be pronounced as "melon-klee", I take it.
In fact, these two sonnets remind me so much of The Tempest. Prospero himself, "wrought of earth and water", is marooned on his island as firmly as Crusoe, waiting for rescue in the form of a passing ship. But Ariel, "slight air and purging fire", becomes his eye that sees over the whole island at once, as well as his long-distance messenger. Like these sonnets, The Tempest is full of sea and land, air, fire and earthiness, loneliness and distance, control of time/space and entrapment by it, and tears.
Yes, the shallowness of (some) digital communication does make these two poems seem all the more powerful in their attempt to address the grief begot of absence. (I was just perusing the many birthday greetings left on Facebook for a friend, and I came away thinking how much lonelier she must feel after reading all those birthday wishes whose only rhetorical effort was the much over-used exclamation mark.)
"Receiving nought by elements so slowBut heavy tears . . ."
This is all so clever -- as in Back to the Future, where Marty uses "heavy" to mean serious, and Doc to mean weighty, there is the same double meaning here, with the tears standing for the two elements of water and earth, since tears are watery and contain the mineral salt, which is part of the earth. and earth is the heaviest of the elements. "Either" in "either's woe" refers to a tear for either of the elements water and earth, suggesting two tears, from two eyes.
Among the sonnets we've read so far, this surely is the most metaphysical.
Mod
For me...this seems to be a poem about a Perpetual Motion machine. Or perhaps one of those contraptions in a church that seem animated.
Is it possible the inventions, maybe experiments n printing presses...or animated entertainments, a mill being built...? Could that have inspired some of these two?
Do you feel that, Candy, because of the materialist view of the body that S's use of the four elements seems to imply? I was struck earlier by Janice's question, "was it common knowledge then that the air we breathe is composed of the molecules?" S does not mention atoms, but the two sonnets seem to be full of a kind of material-science interest.But the science is very unconventional: S's spirit (mind and passion) move beyond the body at the speed of thought . . . I think of the "extended mind" theories of Rupert Sheldrake.
Mod
Sinks down to death, oppressed with melancholy,
Until life's composition be recured
By those swift messengers returned from thee"
It was these lines that made me do a kind of double take. The four made/related to two.
And yes, because of the materialist view of Shakespeare's about the body and the humours...the approach to the body as some kind of mechanism. I was thinkinking how if someone wanted to develop perpetual motion...wouldn't the human body be a good contraption to study.
And wouldn't we love it if love....or sex...could be a perpetual motion? Or maybe a flying machine. I would feel more confident if he mentioned a pigeon or bird LOL
So I thought...if I thought of this surely maybe someone else might have too...yay google!
"Agamben’s final chapter proposes that we render inoperative the “anthropological machine” that divides yet articulates these dual versions of bodily life by laying bare the emptiness between them. Titian may have accomplished this in the erotic realm. But Shakespeare offers reputation abruptly followed by an inconclusive jest about love and water. Looking backward instead, we see sonnet 154 echoing sonnet 153, which also echoes the “perjured eye” of sonnet 152, as well as the entire mistress series, as well as the obsession with unproductive sexuality in the young man poems, all the way back to the “self-substantial fuel” feeding the flame of sonnet 1-an earlier boy with a torch. The self-sustaining inessentiality of the cycle suggests one of Cornelius Drebbel’s perpetual-motion machines. The physics of the final dyad do recall some such apparatus, more narrowly: fire is extinguished in water, “Which from love’s fire took heat perpetual” in sonnet 154, even as brand rekindles itself to reafflict the poet in sonnet 153, who, unable to help himself, pursues a cure that provides yet more energy for his sickness. The “fountain” of sonnet 153 and the “well” of sonnet 154 suggest the elaborate waterworks of Continental gardens with their grottos and mythological automata. Drebbel’s little curiosities seem to have been driven by heat, moisture, and human credulity in equal measure. This makes them closer, though, to the lover’s plight."
Technically Alive: Shakespeare's Sonnets.
I'm almost a little disappointed I found something so specifically apt
HAHA here I was hoping I had made a grand discovery of the Sonnets Ha ha ha!
Candy wrote: ""Drebbel’s little curiosities seem to have been driven by heat, moisture, and human credulity in equal measure. This makes them closer, though, to the lover’s plight."..."Powered by human credulity... ! I hadn't ever thought of any of this, but S's mind must have loved playing with the gears of metaphor for love and science.
By the way, I've just heard about the TNT series "Will" coming in July. This will be fun!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Zpvi...
Candy's quoted notes on sonnets 153, 154 above very interesting: this pair of sonnets, like 44, 45, I've said will be posted together. I'll try and requote the notes when this eventually happens. In fact the book looks very interesting, and I think would greatly appeal to Candy. I was pleased to see he mentions Lucretius in the first sentence!A link:
John Michael Archer, Technically Alive: Shakespeare S Sonnets
It would be interesting to get the answer to Janice's earlier question about the air. Did they think each of the four elements had a particle structure? If so, what of fire? I suppose before Copernicus it might have been thought that the air filled all space up to the sphere of the stars. All I know is that Christiaan Huygens (clever man!) worked out that there was no atmosphere on the moon -- that must have been about half a century after S died.
Party on dudes, though it is the day for our next sonnet.
Mod
"In chemistry, the history of molecular theory traces the origins of the concept or idea of the existence of strong chemical bonds between two or more atoms.
The modern concept of molecules can be traced back towards pre-scientific and Greek philosophers such as Leucippus who argued that all the universe is composed of atoms and voids. Circa 450 BC Empedocles imagined fundamental elements (fire (Alchemy fire symbol.svg), earth (Alchemy earth symbol.svg), air (Alchemy air symbol.svg), and water (Alchemy water symbol.svg)) and "forces" of attraction and repulsion allowing the elements to interact. Prior to this, Heraclitus had claimed that fire or change was fundamental to our existence, created through the combination of opposite properties. In the Timaeus, Plato, following Pythagoras, considered mathematical entities such as number, point, line and triangle as the fundamental building blocks or elements of this ephemeral world, and considered the four elements of fire, air, water and earth as states of substances through which the true mathematical principles or elements would pass. A fifth element, the incorruptible quintessence aether, was considered to be the fundamental building block of the heavenly bodies. The viewpoint of Leucippus and Empedocles, along with the aether, was accepted by Aristotle and passed to medieval and renaissance Europe. A modern conceptualization of molecules began to develop in the 19th century along with experimental evidence for pure chemical elements and how individual atoms of different chemical substances such as hydrogen and oxygen can combine to form chemically stable molecules such as water molecules."
Mod
did people "know" about molecules....maybe not.
But people "knew" about molecular theory.
And this would be an interesting topic in itself...what do we know, what do we believe when we hear theories....the history of what we know....how much do we embrace a theory.
We can decode sonnet 44 and 45 similar to sonnet 99’s six flowers.Flesh (sonnet 44 line one) has the definition of one’s near kindred or descendants (OED), e.g. “my flesh and blood” in Merchant of Venice. Actually “my flesh and blood” appears three times before the trial, the way Shakespeare foretold us Shylock’s fate.
The remotest distance between two persons is above and below the earth, hinted in “my foot did stand” and “farthest earth” in sonnet 44:
No matter then although my foot did stand [5]
Upon the farthest earth removed from thee,
Sonnet 44 is a riddle to moan a deceased one related to the speaker. An “Injurious distance” (line 2) can mean the distance of the alive and the dead. Distance can spell Sidneys. Line 2 can spell Philip Sidney (1554–86). Line one can spell Mary Sidney (1561–1621)
To affirm this assumption we need sonnet 45:
My life being made of four, with two alone, [7]
Sinks down to death, oppressed with melancholy.
Mary Sidney had two sons and two daughters, so her life was “made of four”;
Mary’s two daughters died early, so “with two alone.”
William Herbert, 1580–1630.
Katherine Herbert, 1581–84.
Anne Herbert, 1583–1606.
Philip Herbert, 1584–1650.
William and Philip can be spelt in lower half of line 8;
Katherine and Anne in upper half of line 8 (with oppressed).
Herbert is in line 7.
This assumption of identities can reason every line of sonnet 44 and 45.
Sonnet 44
If the dull substance of my flesh were thought, [01]
Injurious distance should not stop my way,
For then despight of space I would be brought,
From limits far remote, where thou dost stay,
No matter then although my foot did stand [05]
Upon the farthest earth removed from thee,
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land,
As soon as think the place where he would be.
But ah, thought kills me that I am not thought [09]
To leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone,
But that so much of earth and water wrought,
I must attend, time’s leisure with my moan.
Sonnet 45
The other two, slight air, and purging fire, [01]
Are both with thee, where ever I abide,
The first my thought, the other my desire,
These present absent with swift motion slide.
For when these quicker Elements are gone [05]
In tender Embassy of love to thee,
My life being made of four, with two alone,
Sinks down to death, oppressed with melancholy.
Until life’s composition be recured, [09]
By those swift messengers returned from thee,
Who even but now come back again assured,
Of their fair health, recounting it to me.
This told, I joy, but then no longer glad, [13]
I send them back again and straight grow sad.
If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way;
For then, despite of space, I would be brought
From limits far remote, where thou dost stay.
No matter then although my foot did stand
Upon the farthest earth removed from thee,
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land
As soon as think the place where he would be.
But ah, thought kills me that I am not thought,
To leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone,
But that, so much of earth and water wrought,
I must attend time's leisure with my moan,
Receiving nought by elements so slow
But heavy tears, badges of either's woe.
The other two, slight air and purging fire,
Are both with thee, wherever I abide:
The first my thought, the other my desire,
These present-absent with swift motion slide.
For when these quicker elements are gone
In tender embassy of love to thee,
My life, being made of four, with two alone
Sinks down to death, oppressed with melancholy,
Until life's composition be recured
By those swift messengers returned from thee,
Who even but now come back again assured
Of thy fair health, recounting it to me.
This told, I joy; but then, no longer glad,
I send them back again and straight grow sad.