Aubade: the Morning After

Dawn says, we all strive to be beautiful,
and yet clouds remain to pad the cold wind
blowing from an iron sky. Snow, winter,
bleak the morning after, and how heavy
this burden of days and nights and sorrows,
regrets and the insight of harms and harm
and the need to heal and these needs, action
to take and amends to make, yet the sky
seems to sleep in Dawn’s reluctant dreaming.
What sort of day? What omen in a blank
twilight, colorless? Foretell this my love,
shall this day one of healing or regret
be, a day of dwelling in solutions
or remaining in yesterday’s problems?

David M Pitchford
26 December 2009

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities – ever, however, implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.

[Section 1., opening stanzas]

You keep your clothes on – never get undressed
Show just enough to make me want to stay
But never give more than you need away
Maintain the fiction that you know what’s best

How cleverly you tease my interest
Suggesting so much more than you display -
And I fill up the gaps in what you say
With what I hope will one day be expressed:

And I go naked – totally exposed
I shout and scream my love into the air -
While you remain immaculately posed
I could go crazy and you wouldn’t care:
But this is also true: I couldn’t bear
To be so open, if you weren’t so closed.

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunckless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away

What warm and spiny hope, what tiny glow
now kindles like a phosphorescent cell,
pale bioluminescence on a swell
of steely inner sea? Faint as a low
blue flame, it settles in, and left to grow
unchecked would spread its bloom across the tide,
bright streak of optimism just beside
the monstrous ocean’s darkest ebb and flow.
Winter has struck the flint of this strange light,
has tricked the mind, and now the season’s turn
means change is possible, and all that’s fine
and clear may yet infuse a future bright
beyond all reason, ‘freeze’ revised to ‘burn’
as easily as water, once, to wine.

This sonnet first appeared in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Winter 2005. . . .There’s something about those holiday lights when they appear . . .

There was a limit, I suppose, to the length of time I could keep this blog going before eventually reaching Shakespeare. It is perhaps odd that now that I finally reach him I choose to look at Sonnet 18, one of the most popular and well-known of Shakespeare poems.

My reason for turning to it now was prompted by a discussion I saw on Yahoo Answers where someone had asked what the meaning of sonnet 18 was. The best answer was apparently: “though her beauty may fade … her beauty will be seen and remembered”.

Umm, no. Do people have such a short attention span these days that they can’t make it to the last two lines of a 14 line poem? It is in fact about the immortality of Sonnet 18 so, unless you’re in love with Shakespeare, could people please stop reading this at weddings now.

Sonnet form

Form is the easiest element of this poem to analyse because almost everyone these days (as Yahoo Answers does prove) at least understands the Shakespearean sonnet form.

Fourteen lines divided into three four-line stanzas (called quatrains) and a final couplet composed in iambic pentameter. The rhyme scheme is usually abab cdcd efef gg. Every sonnet has a volta (or turning point) which in the Shakespearean form occurs usually at the beginning of the third quatrain. Sonnet 18 has all of these characteristics but what the Yahoo Answers readers appear to have forgotten is that fourteen lines does not a sonnet make. The point of the sonnet is the epiphany, the revelation, the VOLTA.

To understand this, and the effect of the volta in sonnet 18 (and, consequently, what the poem is really about) let’s go quatrain by quatrain. Quatrain 1 asks the question everyone remembers – Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day. The poet’s answer is, simply, no. “Thee”, whoever thee may be, is nicer than a summer’s day. Quatrain 2 then describes what a summer’s day is like and why it isn’t such a great thing to be compared to one. And now the all important quatrain 3. Shakespeare so much doesn’t want you to miss this volta that he starts the line with a “but”: It describes “thee” and says that the thing being described (1) has an eternal summer (2) which is always fair and which (3) never needs fear death and in fact (4) increases and grows over time. The closing couplet tells you what is being described – Shakespeare’s very own sonnet that you are reading. As long as there is mankind on the earth and we have eyes to read with we will be able to read the sonnet and so it is the sonnet that will live eternally and the sonnet that gives life to the person described in it (who may be a man, by the way).

But is there any more to this narcissistic romp than perfect deployment of form? Of course. It is written, as if most of Shakespeare’s poems and plays, in iambic pentameter – five feet consisting of alternating unstressed and stressed elements (bold indicates stresses and the “/” divides the feet):

Shall I/ compare/ thee to /a sum/mer’s day?
Thou art /more love/ly and /more temp/erate:
Rough winds/ do shake/ the dar/ling buds/ of May,
And sum/mer’s lease/ hath all/ too short/ a date:

Unstressed followed by stressed. Except in line three where we have two stresses lying next to each other in “rough winds”. This is known as a spondee and serves to functions, firstly it breaks the clip-cloppy rhythm that constant and uninterrupted iambic pentameter would produce but, secondly, and more importantly for our purposes, it adds to meaning. See if you can spot where other spondees occur. There is one on “too hot” and a third and final one on “Death brag.” When describing summer’s drawbacks Shakespeare will say that it is too short, its complexion dims or it declines. He only uses three nouns which are negative – winds, heat and Death and all occur in spondees. It is the spondee which is emphasised and sticks out when you read the piece aloud and so what he is emphasising is not summer’s good qualities – but the bad ones, the rough wind, too hot and Death bragging.

Shakespeare also does some clever things with language. He describes summer as having taken out a lease, and a short-term lease at that. Think of all which a lease means – you can never get too settled or comfortable, you can’t paint the walls and put in a picture window, and at the end you pack up all your things and leave without a trace. Sounds like the human condition, doesn’t it? Shakespeare extends the personfiication of the seasons and the world in the next line when he describes the sun as the “eye of heaven”. This is something which is fixed and permanent, always looking down across all the seasons and all of time. Sometimes the sun dims summer’s gold complexion with its heat. That which is permanent and eternal, in other words, sears with its heat and dims the temporary things of the world around it. Then Shakespeare says how he is going to make this person immortal and the reader is wondering how, after the effort he has expended in setting up the transience of things. The “reveal” in the final couplet is made all the greater when you realise that the “eye” here refers back to the sun. His sonnet will live for as long as the sun will shine/see.

Let’s look at something else – the choice of form. Shakespeare chose sonnets in part because they were fashionable then and in part because he was good at them (as he shows off here). But the readers on Yahoo Answers immediately jumped to the conclusion that this was a love poem because we typically associate sonnets with love poetry. That is what the form was traditionallu used for. So Shakespeare is in a way being subversive here. He starts off his sonnet in a way that makes it look like it’s going to be a love sonnet and yet it isn’t. He is using the form to praise both his talent and the form itself. The poem is about love, then, but not about love of a beloved. It is the sonnet form that causes the person described in the sonnet to be immortal and to be remembered. It’s no coincidence that rhyme is used in song-writing – rhyme makes things easier to remember, as does metre and Shakespeare in choosing this form also deliberately opts for a style that is more likely to live on in the memory after reading.

The opening line plays into this conceit too. The central theme of poetry is comparing one thing to another to reveal surprising, pleasing or previously unseen commonalities. Shakespeare steps back from his poem like an editor and asks his reader if he should make this comparison in a rhetorical opening question. He is telling us he can do it (as he goes on to do), but is asking whether he should (his answer is no). It almost smacks of showing-off, as if he wants us to put up some absurd impossible comparison challenge for him to try and meet: compare your lover to a used tea-bag or some such. And so, even though one doesn’t appreciate it until the end, he makes the very act of writing poetry an issue right in the first line.
With this new lens, if you re-read the poem you will see that he can make his poem more lovely, or more temperate, or he can use it to shake. You can see the eternal lines to time, the growth as the poem is caught up in popular imagination, reproduced in books and passed from generation on to generation.

But let me muddy things up a little now. I said that summer was being personified. Why personify the summer, and death for that matter, if it is a person to whom Shakespeare seeks to give immortality in this sonnet? Well, isn’t summer eternal in its own way? Doesn’t it return season after season? Won’t it be there for as long as the sun remains in the sky? Is Shakespeare not writing about the summer too in making his comparison? And writing about death? And if the poem achieves immortality do they not too?

Shakespeare can employ such things as seasons and weather in his poems and give to them what attributes he will and make of them what he will. He can “lease” them for his purposes as summer leases the weather. He can make summer both simultaneously too hot and too cold, he can possess fairness like one would own property. He is saying that poetry creates a world, creates eternity. The man is a genius.

These woods belong to my good friend.

A week each fall, he’s kind to lend

his cabin, hills and trees to me

so I can taste the season’s end.

It’s here I sit beneath a tree

(an oak whose leaves are still not free

though summer’s green is now gone);

it’s here I sit and simply be.

The other trees look bare and drawn –

they’ll sleep until the summer’s dawn –

but oaks still sing a rustling score,

defying even winter’s brawn.

…. My songs, I hope, your hearts restore,

…. if only for a season more.

… de este blog que comienza a oler a muerto. Pongo tons un video de una ROLÍSIMA bien poca madre de The Verve, que sirve para sacar bueyes de la barranca.

Ahí les dejó Sonnet… de rodillas!

too often have I sought these songs of middle-more:
though long as summer, they are like him cast.
their sweetness lasts no longer than it must,
like morning's penetrations of sleep's grasp.
they girt all the horizons they address,
and turn to air, once they're run out of sea,
and turn to thee once they are out of that,
having been lost almost, having almost confessed
that all their power that was soft and felt,
has no more its keenness; and aloud
none is sung. under a blanket-shroud
their hearers must be fled.
So when they are read twice and more and met anew,
I'd like to say that them I knew (though differently clad).

Drip drop like a faucet,

I can feel it through my sweater.

And yeah, it’s soaking wet,

This could have turned out better.

But I look to the window,

And let it just sit there.

Who invited this ho?

I need some fresh air.

The radio’s still blastin’,

As I ask if we can pull over.

This smell is everlasting,

A truly unpleasant odor.

Okay, now this is quite urgent,

Hopefully I have some nice detergent.

When I think Sonnet 18, I think goatees and arm hair.

A new generation of children are now surfing the internet, often without a moral compass. Who will help steer these youngsters toward education and edification? The TMZ’s of the world? AO-fucking-L?

Never let it be said that Fancy Plans didn’t “think of the children,”  as we proudly present the legendary works of Shakespeare (current record-holder: Most Required Reading List Appearances) in their mostly original glory.

Oh, and FJ practically dared me to do it. So there’s that. Enjoy.

Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and slightly less humid:
Unless we speak of Arizona,
In which case, thou art a triple-digit dry heat:

Quoth the Bard, Bob Dylan,
The times they are a-changin’,
But not for Arizona,
Where time stands still twice a year:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And Summer’s lease hath been violated:
Perhaps with noise complaints,
Perhaps with bathtub meth explosions:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And rends my skin from the bones with chemical burns:

And every fair from fair sometime declines,
Due to wandering tweakers and cinder-block’d Camaros:
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d,
Much like the lawn and hedges:
And thyself, truth be told,
I shall off to the Walgreens for an Epi-lady:

But thy eternal Summer shall not fade
Like Macauly Culkin from the public mind;
Resurfacing in familial lawsuits and unbidden dreams,
Where was I?
Oh, yes…

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
$200 cash; dealers don’t take checks,

Nor shall Death brag thou wanderest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
He’s off to check Pete Doherty’s pulse for the thousandth time,
And when he returns, he’ll need a nap,
And a beer:
And so shall I

Shall I seduce thee with a selection from my LiveJournal,
I’ve borrowed a bit from the past but altered it slightly;

“So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee“

Beautiful, isn’t it?
I see your eyes are misty and your guard is down:
Shall we to the old man’s Ford?
Or mayhap behind the bushes?
Not so much the cellar,
Because locking door or not,
Your parents are light-sleepers;
And heavily armed:

Perhaps one more from my LiveJournal before we retire:

“Face down, ass up
That’s the way we like to fuck.”

-CLT