Alan's Reviews > Shakespeare's Sonnets
Shakespeare's Sonnets
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Over my years of teaching, I have memorized a couple dozen of these sonnets, on my morning walks. Some I learned in a two-mile walk, like the one on his own writing, "Why is my verse so barren of new pride?"(76). Others I have had to re-memorize every time I teach, like "Some glory in their birth, some in their skill," (91). Their imbedded mnemonics vary greatly. When I have required Shakespeare classes to memorize a couple, students would often pick very difficult ones, not knowing they varied so.
They only improve with familiarity as do many well-known poems. Ease of memorization is one criterion of poetic greatness, though it's also a function of personal experience and obsessions. Overall these sonnets may NOT be as easy to memorize as are Dickinson's poems, or many of WB Yeats's, say "Under Ben Bulben." Or Herbert's "Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright."
My Ph.D. was on 17th C English poetry that citicized other poems, especially Andrew Marvell and Donne, but even Dryden who made criticism prose. (My This Critical Age, U Minn., 1976) Sonnets are often critical of sonnet conventions, like #116,
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediment. Love is not love
That alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no, it is an ever-fixed mark
Which looks on tempests and is ne'er shaken;
It is a star to every wandering bark
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips
And cheeks within his bending cycle's compass come.
Love alters not through his brief hours and weeks
But bears it out unto the edge of doom.
IF this be error, and upon me proved,
I Never writ, no no man ever loved."
Here the author sums up what sonnets claim of Love, that
the conventions he knows from writing, AND from loving.
But as Will (his punning sonnet name for himself in the later ones) says of his own writing, "That every word doth almost tell my name" (76).
This can also be said of Dickinson's and some of Yeats's. Shakespeare adds that this verse name-telling also suggests the genealogy of the verse,"Showing their birth...." In that way, these sonnets become ads--for themselves. Political admen, eat your hearts out.
They only improve with familiarity as do many well-known poems. Ease of memorization is one criterion of poetic greatness, though it's also a function of personal experience and obsessions. Overall these sonnets may NOT be as easy to memorize as are Dickinson's poems, or many of WB Yeats's, say "Under Ben Bulben." Or Herbert's "Sweet day, so cool, so calm, so bright."
My Ph.D. was on 17th C English poetry that citicized other poems, especially Andrew Marvell and Donne, but even Dryden who made criticism prose. (My This Critical Age, U Minn., 1976) Sonnets are often critical of sonnet conventions, like #116,
"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediment. Love is not love
That alters when it alteration finds
Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh no, it is an ever-fixed mark
Which looks on tempests and is ne'er shaken;
It is a star to every wandering bark
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips
And cheeks within his bending cycle's compass come.
Love alters not through his brief hours and weeks
But bears it out unto the edge of doom.
IF this be error, and upon me proved,
I Never writ, no no man ever loved."
Here the author sums up what sonnets claim of Love, that
the conventions he knows from writing, AND from loving.
But as Will (his punning sonnet name for himself in the later ones) says of his own writing, "That every word doth almost tell my name" (76).
This can also be said of Dickinson's and some of Yeats's. Shakespeare adds that this verse name-telling also suggests the genealogy of the verse,"Showing their birth...." In that way, these sonnets become ads--for themselves. Political admen, eat your hearts out.
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May 23, 2012
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Cleo
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May 30, 2019 08:57PM

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Sorry I didn't see your kind response 'til 7 months later, 23 May 21, but urge you to say 'em ALOUD -- dunno how that'll work running.

Well, you know aloudreading was part of daily "constitutionals" in the Middle Ages, as monks wlked around their columned cloisters, outdoors but protected from rain.



Mainly, say 'em aloud. Over and over.