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

Publication: ELH

Publication Date: 22-MAR-94

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COPYRIGHT 1994 Johns Hopkins University Press

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.

I

In many Renaissance love lyrics, thinking on the beloved contrasts the memory or fantasy of him or her with the all-abundant source of that memory or fantasy, his or her presence, making painfully evident the poet-lover's current impoverishment. In Astrophil's tenth song, an extended apostrophe to thought, Astrophil enjoys fantasies about Stella for several stanzas, but concludes:

O my thought, my thoughts surcease, Thy delights my woes increase, My life melts with too much thinking; Thinke no more but die in me, Till thou shalt revived be At her lips my Nectar drinking.(6)

(PS, 43-48)

In Amoretti 89, Spenser's poet-lover, who has in fact already secured his beloved's commitment and now must only endure a temporary absence, claims: "Ne joy of ought that under heaven doth hove / can comfort me but her owne joyous sight."(7) An unusual example is Amoretti 52 in which the poet-lover intentionally avoids feeling joy while alone, in the absence of his beloved, to ensure that her presence will be all the more satisfying when he is literally with her: "So I her absence will my penaunce make, / that of her presens I my meed may take" (ES, 13-14). The topos of waking from a dream of the beloved to the bleak reality of day is in this category, from Astrophil and Stella 38, Delia 45, and Fidessa 14 and 15, to Milton's "Methought I saw," as are those representations of bitter-sweet desire rooted in Petrarch, in which unadulterated joy is impossible because the poet-lover's pleasurable thoughts cannot be distilled from his despairing ones.(8) Examples abound, in Wyatt, in Tottel at large, in the other miscellanies, and in all the sequences: Delia 14 is a good example--"So much I please to perish in my wo" (D, 12), as are these lines from Constable's Diana: "To live in hell, and heaven to behold, / To welcome life, and die a living death," and Astrophil and Stella 108, the last in the sequence:(9)

But soone as thought of thee breeds my delight, And my yong soule flutters to thee, his nest, Most rude dispaire, my daily unbidden guest, Clips streight my wings, streight wraps me in his night.

(PS, 5-8)

Many of the melancholic poems recount and lament the going "astray" of the poet-lover's thoughts--how the obsession with the beloved has bereft him of his usefulness, especially in the public world--as in Wyatt's "Suche vayn thought as wonted to myslede me," "The longe love, that in my thought doeth harbar," and "Who so list to hounte" (particularly: "yet may I by no means my weried mynde / drawe from the Diere" |(W, 5-6~); Cleophila's exclamation in Old Arcadia, "And thus my thoughts can think but one thought still"; Delia 5 in which the poet-lover laments: "My thoughts like houndes, pursue me to my death" (D, 12); Astrophil and Stella 30, in which Astrophil reports the difficulty of participating in political conversations when all he can really think about is Stella; and Certain Sonnets 31, in which "desire" is "too dearely bought, / With price of mangled mind" (PS, 1-2).(10)

Thought of the beloved does bring pleasure, or at least peace, in many love sonnets informed by neoplatonic or Christian ideas, but only because thought is then--at least ostensibly--a function of a higher and purer ambition. In Amoretti 8, the poet-lover builds toward his claim, "You frame my thoughts and fashion me within" (ES, 9), by insisting the beloved's gaze, her "bright beames," have nothing to do with Cupid's poisonous darts, but rather, dispatch "Angels ... to lead fraile minds to rest / in chast desires on heavenly beauty bound" (ES, 7-8). In Amoretti 22, "thoughts doo day and night attend" the beloved's image in the poet-lover's mind, "like sacred priests who never think amiss" (ES, 7-8), and Delia 15 is addressed "to her that sits in my thoughts Temple sainted" (D, 7). In Amoretti 80, Spenser's poet-lover claims his "contemplation" of his beloved's "heavenly hew" his "spirit to an higher pitch will rayse" (ES, 11, 12).

In some of these poems, and in less idealistic poems as well, the poet-lover's pleasure in contemplation of the beloved is wholly centered on the thought of his or her beautiful face or powerful gaze, as is often the case in the Rime sparse. A good example hies again from the Amoretti, sonnet 78, which begins:

Lackyng my love I go from place to place, lyke a young fawne that late hath lost the hynd: and seeke each wheere, where last I saw her face, whose ymage yet I carry fresh in mynd.

It ends: "Cease then myne eyes, to seeke her selfe to see, / and let my thoughts behold her selfe in mee." This couplet certainly anticipates Shakespeare's commitment to the pleasures and usefulness of reflection on the beloved. Indeed, several poems in the Amoretti and in Astrophil and Stella that elaborate the image-within-the-heart convention, do set the stage for the more autonomous "thoughts" represented in Shakespeare's sonnets, as do several of Daniel's lyrics; for example, Delia 25, "Raigne in my thoughts faire hand, sweete eye, rare voyce, / Possesse me whole, my harts triumvirate" (D, 1-2). But the image of the beloved in these affords pleasure because the "real" thing did or would afford more pleasure.(11) The beloved's physical presence is not only the source but also the end goal of the thinking at hand (her physical presence along with her "virtue," but "virtue" often also refers to a property indicative of her physical self--her virginity, and the anticipation of enjoying it). Which is to say, these poems and their representations of desire are invested in the absolute object-ness of a beloved--her radical separateness from, and so potential possession by, a poem's subject.(12)

The majority of Shakespeare's sonnets 1-126 rehearse or elaborate these conventional representations of the lover's experience of thought and absence. Sonnets 27, 28, and 43 are variations on the day/night theme (though I'd argue 27 is a more ambiguous account of absence and thought, one which, despite its disappointing and conventional couplet, points the way toward 29); Sonnets 97 and 98, and the couplet of 56, follow a similar pattern with a winter/summer opposition (56 in fact has much in common with Amoretti 52, which values absence because it makes presence satisfying). Poems 44 and 45 are meditations on the distinction between thought and being; 44, which begins, "If the dull substance of my flesh were thought," and turns on the line, "But ah, thought kills me that I am not thought," makes explicit why thinking on the beloved is such a tease or trap: wildly hopeful in the throes of powerful thought, one might easily believe--for a minute--that inwardness governs being. Sonnet 45 also recalls how the seeming pleasure of thought transforms readily to torment. And sonnets 113 and 114 represent the dull substance of flesh trying to be thought, as it were, and only provisionally succeeding; despite 113's clever merry couplet about the mind being true though the eye is not, 114 emphasizes that this pair of poems is about the mind's distortions and delusions, however clever and merry those distortions and delusions might be.

But a few of the sonnets, as I have claimed, represent thought of the beloved as vital and good in and of itself. Here I include 29, 30, and 122, though 39 (which names the beloved's absence as a "sweet leave / to entertain the time with thoughts of love"), 47, 75, 116, and in part, 25 and 31, may also be read as part of this group.(13) Sonnet 47 in fact engages the image-within topos, but contrasts that explicitly with "thoughts of love"; the poet-lover is pleased how both of these work toward the same end: to keep the beloved "present still" (SS, 10) even when he goes away. These sonnets are outnumbered by more conventional complaints, and the ideas proposed by them may be neutralized temporarily by other sonnets: the third quatrain of sonnet 39 is intelligently challenged by sonnet 44; sonnet 116 is at odds with sonnet 33 among others, and sonnet 87, which invokes that waking from a dream convention,...

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