Shakespeare's Sweet Leaves: mourning, pleasure, and the triumph of thought in the Renaissance love lyric.

These are the measures destined for her soul.

("Sunday Morning," lines 23-30, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens |New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985~). Even more so in Stevens's later poems, meditation is salvation, thought its own consummation: it is in a "mind between this light or that and space" that "the woman receives her lover into her heart / And weeps on his breast though he never comes" ("Poem with Rhythms," lines 3 and 8). I also think of the Gershwins' "They Can't Take That Away from Me": how thinking about and verbalizing "the way you wear your hat" or "the way we danced till three" is its own pleasure, distinct from the pleasure of literally encountering "the way you wear your hat" or literally dancing "till three." The celebration of cerebral experience is hardly novel in the sixteenth century lyric at large. Psalm translations and devotional verse extol the usefulness of personal contemplation, and English lyrics in the "moral-philosophical tradition" frequently thematize the value of thought.(1) Wyatt's verse epistle, "My mothers madyes," counsels the reader to:

seke no more owte of thy self to fynde the thing that thou haist sought so long before for thou shalt fele it sitting in thy mynde.(2)

With even more assurance, if less delicacy, the popular "In Prayse of a Contented Mind," by Edward de Vere (Oxford) or Sir Edward Dyer, imparts the same lesson:

My mynde to me a kingdome is, such perfect joye therin I finde, That it excelles all other blisse that world affordes or growes by kind.(3)

Particularly as the Reformation permeated England, the efficacy of the individual mind was widely assumed. When Hamlet remarks, "For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so," a forerunner of Satan's affirmation, "The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n," he voices neither a daring nor an original idea.(4)

But to represent the power or joy of thinking in a love poem is a different matter. The lion's share of love lyrics from the English Renaissance, like their continental prototypes and counterparts, represent thought of the beloved as tormenting or dangerous, despite any momentary pleasure it might afford; indeed "love" would not be love without the experience of "darke thoughts," as Daniel laments in Delia 9.(5) Here I summarize some of that dark thinking as a foundation for reading Shakespeare's sonnets 29, 30, and 122, poems in which thought of the beloved is represented as vital and good in and of itself. These poems offer a surprising and useful alternative to the melancholic mode of reading, writing, and loving dominant in the Elizabethan erotic lyric. I argue in fact that the three sonnets are examples of "anticipatory elegy": they answer to love's most terrible apprehensions by fostering in advance the creative, narcissistic spirit of traditional mourning elegy.