Depth charge…

…so an examination of compositional strategies Sh used in his Sonnets to give them the appearance of depth. Cribbed from the introduction (p. 19-21, 38) of the Art of Sh’s Sonnets by Helen Vendler.

1. TEMPORAL. The establishment of several retreating “panels” of time, representing episodes or epochs in the speaker’s past, gives him a continuous, nontransient existence and a continuity of memory.
(there is unity in continuity)
eg Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought,

2. EMOTIONAL.
The reflection, within the same poem, of sharply contrasting moods with respect to the same topic.
eg Sonnet 148: O me! What eyes hath love put in my head,

This can be abetted by contradictory or at least nonhomogenous
discourses rendering a topic complicated.
eg Sonnet 125: Wer’t aught to me I bore the canopy

The volatility of moods in the speaker suggests a a flexibility-even an instability-
of response verbally “guaranteeing” the presence of passion. (yeah baby)
eg Sonnet 29: When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,

3. SEMANTIC.
The speaker’s mind has a great number of compartments of discourse
(theological, legal, alchemical, medicinal, political, aesthetic, etc.)
These compartments are semi-pervious to each other, and
the osmosis between them is directed by an invisible discourse-master/mistress,
who stands for the intellectual imagination.

4. CONCEPTUAL.
The speaker resorts to many incompatible models of existence even within the same poem.
eg Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pibled shore,
describes life
first as a homogeneous steady-state succession of identical waves/minutes (a stoic model);

then as a sharply delineated rise and eclipse of a sun (a tragic model);

and next as a series of incessant violent extinctions (a brutal model).

These models, unreconciled, convey a disturbing cognitive dissonance,
one which is, in a philosophical sense, intolerable. The alert and observant mind
that constructs these models asserts the “truth” of each for a particular occasion
or aspect of life, but finds no “supra-model” under which they can be intelligibly contained.
In this way, the mind of the speaker is represented as one in the grip of philosophical conflict.

5. PHILOSOPHICAL.
The speaker is a rebel against received ideas.
He is well aware of the received topoi of his culture,
but he subjects them to interrogation,

as he counters neo-Platonic courtly love with Pauline marital love
(eg sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds),

or the Christian Trinity with the Platonic Triad
(eg sonnet 105:Let not my love be called idolatry,),

or analogizes sacred hermeneutics to literary tradition
(eg sonnet 106: When in the chronicle of wasted time,).

No topics are more sharply scrutinized than those we now
subsume under the phrase “gender relations”:

the speaker interrogates androgyny of appearance
by evoking a comic myth of Nature’s own dissatisfaction with her creation
(eg sonnet 20: A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted);

he criticizes hyperbolic praise of female beauty
(eg sonnet 130: My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun,);

he condones adultery
(eg the so-called “will” sonnets 135: Whoever hath her wish thou hast thy Will,
+136: If thy soul check thee that i come so near,);

he sees adultery as less criminal than adulterated discourse
(eg sonnet 152: In loving thee thou knowst I am forsworn,).

No received idea of sexuality goes uninvestigated; and
the thoroughly unconventional sexual attachments represented
in both parts of the sequence stand as profound critiques of
the ideals of heterosexual desire, chastity, continence, marital fidelity,
and respect for the character of one’s sexual partner.

What “ought to be” in the way of gender relations by Christian and Civic standards
is represented as an ideal in the “marriage” sonnets (sonnets 1-17),
but never takes on existential or “realist” lived validation.

Sh’s awareness of the norms is as complete as his depiction,
in his speaker, of experiential violation of those norms.

6. PERCEPTUAL.
The speaker is also given depth by the things he notices,
from Damask roses to the odor of marjoram to a canopy of state.

Though the sonnets are always openly drifting toward emblematic
or allegorical language. They are plucked back into the perceptual,

as their symbolic rose is distilled into real perfume
(sonnet 54: O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem,),

or as an emblematic April is burned by hot June
(sonnet 104: To me fair friend you never can be old,).

The speaker stands poised between a medieval emblematic tendency
and a more modern empirical posture; within his moral and philosophical systems,
he savors the tang of the “sensual feast”.

7. DRAMATIC.
The speaker indirectly quotes his antagonist.
Though no one but the speaker speaks in a lyric,
Sh exploits the usefulness of having the speaker,
in private, quote in indirect discourse something
one or another of the dramatis personae previously said.
In the give and take of prior criticism answered by the speaker,
we come closest in the sonnets to Sh the dramatist.

These rebuttal sonnets are

76: Why is my verse so barren of new pride?,

105: Let not my love be called idolatry,

116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds

117: Accuse me thus, that I have scanted all

151: Love is too young to know what conscience is,).

More could be said of the strategies that create a credible speaker
with a complex and imaginative mind (which we take on as reader)
but Helen finishes with her seeing these multiple armatures as mutually reinforcing,
and therefore as principles of authorial instruction.

Her purpose is to set out strategies that make the speaker credible,
that generate an evolutionary dynamic, that suggest interaction among
the linguistic ingredients of the lines, that use the couplet,
that beguile by fancifulness, and so on.

He is a poet acutely conscious of grammatical and syntactical possibility
as an ingredient in invention and routinely he varies tense, mood, subject-position,
and clause-patterns in order to make conceptual or rhetorical points.

(There is)… a formidable intellectual command
of phenomena (both physical and moral),
of means (both human and cosmic),
of categories (both quotidian and philosophical), and
of discourses (both learned and popular)
(which) lies behind the Sonnets in the person of their author.

She hopes to show Sh as a poet constantly inventing
new permutations of internal form –
the permutations of emotional response.