…made back in 2001.
GK Knight- The Mutual Flame.
‘every person or thing in shakespeare is expressed as a being of eternal rights: the soul-life of each is touched,…every least person…enjoys this royalty… shares in this elixir, is known by the atman, or divine spark within’.
Creating every bad a perfect best…114.8
What more perfect description could you find to characterise Shakespeare’s human delineation, surveying as it does, both good and evil with inhuman clarity and charity, as though from a consciousness itself looking down on them from some eternal dimension?
The quality of the sonnets is such that every critic trying to evaluate their content can only see what he is capable of seeing and no more. and those who see moral perversions, or a complete conventional association of the poet with this or that nobleman of the day simply reveal their own level of consciousness.
if anyone has gone deeper and penetrated beneath the surface, he has found an unnameable something that invokes intuitions, suggestions that cannot harden into opinions, intimations rather than statements.
The content of the sonnets is something you cannot be dogmatic about. moreover no allegory can be dissected for hidden symbolic meaning.
the rich imagery, the incomparable language adorn and complement the truth they embody.
No matter what the mental pattern of a civilisation may be and its sophistication, the inner interplay of light and dark must go on.
This is the individual’s struggle towards the realisation of the Soul’s intention.
The importance of distilling from our lives something of essential value while we live.
Rather than die leaving no ‘progeny’. i.e. No worthwhile accomplishment for the general good,
– or for the perpetuation of our own individual character,
a basis for future good fortune and strength and growth.
Yet what future?
If death is the end of all?
The explanation seems to lie in 59, which presupposes a former as well as a future life.
AT LEAST 7 OTHER SONNETS HAVE VEILED HINTS OF THIS DOCTRINE.
This human everyman entity is old , even was old to antiquity, and at the same time prevails on into years of posterity.
Shakespeare’s use of Time with all its allusions to its passage, and what it does to humans; it’s relation to endless age and by implication immortality.
The theme of antiquity and futurity existing as ONE is found in several sonnets along with the idea of the eternity of Nature, of the Cosmos, and of man.
Giordano Bruno, following Pythagoras:
of the broad sweep of CYCLES, of the World itself as a living being
ensouled by the Divine Presence: man and atom
and all other entities existing
only as parts of the One LIFE.
Was Shakespeare a part of Raleigh’s School of Night?
and did he meet Bruno there? i.e. to be influenced by his thinking and writings.
alongside the Oxford Dons and other cultured schooled in life men.
Are the Sonnets echoing a COSMIC philosophy which envisions the Metaphysical nature of Man as part of the Universe.
Man himself has an individual identity in his deepest aspect:
For example:
No I am that I am…121.9,
affirms this realisation in spite of any untoward appearances.
In the same way the loved one is addressed:
that you alone are you…84.2,
Yet in:
Let me confess that we two must be twain, although our undivided loves are one…36.1,2,
and
even for this let us divided live and our dear love lose name of single one…39.5,6,
and
My bonds in thee are all determinate, for how do i hold thee but by thy granting…87.4,5,
and
O how thy worth with manners may I sing, when thou art all the better part of me… 39.1,2,
and
My spirit is thine, the better part of me…74.8,
and
for all that beauty that cover thee is but the seemly raiment of my heart, which in thy breast doth live as thine in me…22.5,6,7,
and
But here’s the joy, my friend and I are one. Sweet flattery then she loves but me alone…42 final couplet.
these lines express the boundless reverence for and gratitude towards what could not be called anything other than the inner companion of every other human being:
call it,
conscience,
guardian angel,
inner monitor,
super ego,
or the divine self in the world.
This other self seems to be only at times a friendly and sustaining support (in the sonnets and life).
at other times it is a silent monitor, receding when the lesser self becomes wayward and untrue,
and
withdrawing altogether for indeterminate periods when neglected for too long by its pupil, the consistent human ‘I’.
eg 110, 112, 121,
Is this a humble return to the great central loyalty after a period of inattentiveness, or trifling , or meaner pursuits?
Has the lesser ‘I’ lost sight of the august and patient Self?
yet in this mood can admit:
O give thyself the thanks, if aught in me, worthy perusal stand against thy sight…38.1, 2,
