Poem of the Week 2024/52

 On Christmas

With footstep slow, in furry pall yclad,

    His brows enwreathed with holly never-sear,

    Old Christmas comes, to close the waned year;

    And ay the shepherd's heart to make right glad;

Who, when his teeming flocks are homeward had,

    To blazing hearth repairs, and nut-brown beer,

    And views, well-pleased, the ruddy prattlers dear

    Hug the gray mongrel; meanwhile maid and lad

Squabble for roasted crabs. – Thee, Sire, we hail,

    Whether thine aged limbs thou dost enshroud,

    In vest of snowy white, and hoary veil,

Or wrap'st thy visage in a sable cloud;

    Thee we proclaim with mirth and cheer, nor fail

    To greet thee well with many a carol loud.

– John Codrington Bamfylde

This sonnet from 1778 comes by its antiquated language honestly. as well as its rustic presentation of Christmas, so different from the glittery festival we are maybe overly familiar with today: the holiday was often under Protestant suspicion, as being too pagan or too Popish; this poem dates from before the iconography of Santa Claus/Father Christmas was set, before the German Prince Albert popularized the Christmas tree in England, before Charles Dickens helped make the holiday a signal time of festive cheer, before Christmas became the linchpin of the capitalist year.

It does mark the closing out of one year, in the rural dead-time of winter; here, as so often with months, seasons, or holidays, the day is personified, as Old Christmas, & he does seem old, with his slow footsteps, wearing against the cold a furry pall (meaning a cloak or cloth covering, but the word is often associated with hearses & tombs, as well as with a feeling of gloom, or something that is losing its appeal), but also with evergreen (never-sear, that is, never browned) holly on his brow: an allegorical figure, & not just another old man suffering from the cold.

The close of the year is a time when farm-work is as much in abeyance as it's ever going to be, which is a good reason for the shepherd, his wandering sheep gathered safely home, to be glad. He has his roaring fire & his nut-brown ale (a type of brown ale made in northern England). One similarity with our current Christmas is that this is a family holiday; he watches his ruddy prattlers, that is, his children. Ruddy presumably because they are vigorous & healthy, prattlers because they are still young enough to speak in a childish, maybe even babyish, way. There is a young couple, or couple-to-be, flirting over roasted crabapples (the usual meaning of crab in early modern English). No sign of the shepherd's wife, who is possibly off somewhere keeping the household running, but otherwise a fun & festive holiday scene, though one devoid of our tinsel & the piles of presents.

The closing sestet hails Christmastime, vowing to greet it always with merriment & singing, no matter how it appears: in snowy white and hoary [frosty] veil, something like the White Christmas of our recurrent fantasies, even here in California, or wrapped in a dark cloud, preventing us from seeing his features. There's uncertainty here, as there always is about the future, but also a determination to greet whatever it is in an open spirit: not a bad resolution to keep, at any time of year.

I took this poem from A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic-Era Revival, edited by Paula R Feldman and Daniel Robinson.

Poem of the Week: 2024/51

The Faery Chasm

No fiction was it of the antique age:

\A sky-blue stone, within this sunless cleft,

Is of the very foot-marks unbereft

Which tiny elves impressed; – on that smooth stage

Dancing with all their brilliant equipage

In secret revels – haply after theft

Of some sweet babe, flower stolen, and coarse weed left,

For the distracted mother to assuage

Her grief with, as she might! – But, where, oh where

Is traceable a vestige of the notes

That ruled those dances, wild in character?

– Deep underground? – Or in the upper air,

On the shrill wind of midnight? or where floats

O'er twilight fields the autumnal gossamer?

– William Wordsworth

I was looking up a much better-known sonnet by Wordsworth, The world is too much with us, when I came across this one, which seemed connected in spirit, at least to the lines:

                                    I’d rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.

But here, the manifestations of the "creed outworn" are not classical deities but the native elves & fairies of Britain. The faery (to use the alternate spelling) chasm of the title refers not only to the fissure in the earth that, we are told, shows imprinted evidence of this secret world; it also refers to the deep division between our world, a "modern", industrializing world, & the ancient realms of Faery.

The first line asserts the reality of the old stories, & the proffered evidence, in the second line, is an eerie distortion of our normal perceived reality: there is the sky-blue color, but it doesn't belong to the sky, but to a stone hidden in a dark cleft in the rock, away from the sun's exposing glare. The oddity continues with the word unbereft, which is a strange way of saying that the footprints are actually there. But the strangeness is the point (& Wordsworth does need the word for the rhyme, but he makes the curious choice work as part of the unsettling opening description), & within unbereft is bereft, meaning a sad, lonely feeling due to the loss of a person, place, or thing – a reference to our alienation from the rich ancient world of folklore that helped bind us, in its attempts to explain otherwise inexplicable manifestations, to the natural world.

The description continues with another subtle distancing device, the use of a theatrical metaphor to convey the vanished scene: the stone is a smooth stage, & the now-unseen elves are brilliantly caparisoned, like some fantastical & vivid ballet. We tend to take theatrical spectacles, so easily available to us on our many screens, for granted, but in the early nineteenth century this sort of dramatic splendor would be a much rarer, & more treasurable, event, possibly available only in the larger cities. Again, the faery world is presented as similar to ours, but distorted, weird, at a slant.

And this slant & secret world is not necessarily benevolent, or guided by the principles that supposedly guide human society: the poet now references one of the familiar fairy tricks, swapping a changeling child for an infant – taking a flower & leaving a weed, as he puts it. The substitution is clear enough to the bereaved mother for her to be left struggling with a lifetime of grief at the loss, a struggle & an unending grief that don't matter to the trickster elves.

And, in a sort of unsettling way, it doesn't matter to the poet, either. He doesn't dwell on the maternal pain once he has pictured it so vividly, but immediately, & here is the turn of the sonnet to its final sestet, wishes he could, if not actually join the elves, at least hear the wild music (something obviously appealing to a poet) of their revels. There is perhaps a suggestion here that the poet (not just this poet, but any poet, as a poet) contains something inhuman, is somehow set apart from normal human society, suspended between that & the possibly more intriguing unseen antique world that is dismissed by rational modern society.

He seeks some trace, however fleeting, of the maddening missing music. But he is not even sure where to look for it; conspicuous by its absence is any attempt to find it among modern humans, or normal society; instead, he looks to nature, but not even the nature near at hand: deep underground – or perhaps in the upper atmosphere? In the cold howls of midnight winds? (In a time before electric lights, midnight was a much more significant & haunted time than it is in our artificially illuminated world.) Or somewhere in between, in a liminal world: at twilight, the period of transition from day to night's darkness, in autumn, the time when hot & fruitful summer moves towards the coldness & barrenness of winter, or in light & insubstantial gossamer, a substance associated with the natural world (spider webs, silk, little gatherings of dust) & with the faery world. Perhaps the longed-for & missing music is floating past us, unheard, in some in-between space just out of our reach. . . .

This poem is part of a sonnet sequence by Wordsworth titled The River Duddon, so I assume the sky-blue stone really exists, or existed. I took the poem from the Penguin Classics edition of William Wordsworth, The Poems: Volume Two, edited by John O. Hayden, which seems to be, sadly, out of print.

Poem of the Week 2024/50

 Ozymandias

I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: two vast and trunkless 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 that 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.

– Percy Bysshe Shelley

Ozymandias, the person, was real; it is an antique Greek name for Ramesses II, also known as Ramesses the Great. When Napoleon invaded Egypt in the late eighteenth century, sending along artists, archeologists, & plunderers, it ignited a fascination among Europeans with Egypt, a civilization that had been old when Greece & Rome were young. But to say these things, to talk about the "reality" of Ozymandias himself, & the cultural & political context in which Egypt fascinated European writers, is to miss the point of the poem, with its layered dissection of what is really real, & what survives of that reality.

Ozymandias himself does not appear in the poem, & the poet does not even see the statue of him. He's not even looking for it. He meets a traveler, who, in the time-honored way of travelers, tells him what he has seen on his trips to far-away & fantastical destinations. And what the traveler has seen is not, of course, the long-dead pharaoh, or anything he caused to be built; he's seen a statue of the ruler. The great political power of the ruler has survived only because of artists: the traveler, who functions as a story-teller, & the sculptor, who created the monumental stone portrait. But even their work has not come down intact: the traveler tells us very little about the ruler, & the statue is both broken & half-hidden by the shifting desert sands.

What survives is not actually flattering to the pharaoh; as the poem describes the sculptor' work, we see a not particularly appealing character: not a benevolent or merciful ruler, but the frown, the wrinkled lip, the sneer of cold command. Presumably the ruler not only accepted but wanted this brutal portrayal; it must have come across to him as conveying power & superiority, while the satirical possibilities would be hidden from his egotistic view. It makes me think of Goya's portraits of the Spanish royal family, in which, to our eyes, they look coarse & stupid – but they must have approved the portrayals &, coarse & stupid though they look, the portraits might actually be flattering. Centuries of entitlement & in-breeding will do that to a family.

So the sculptor is sort of an ambiguous figure: he saw these unappealing qualities in his ruler, yet he took the commission (possibly under duress; the traveler is not telling his tale, only that of his ruined work). Is he glorifying, or satirizing, or, in some way, both at once? (This is an eternal dilemma; think of composers like Shostakovich under Stalin's rule.) The sculptor's is presumably the hand that mocked these qualities, but what does his mockery come to? The statue was still erected, to the glory of the great ruler. The statue, even with its vivid portrayal of human passions, is a lifeless thing. Yet even in fragmentary form, this artwork is all that remains of the ruler's reign: there are no remaining laws, or customs, or even stories about him; only massive broken pieces of his celebratory statue, & a boasting epitaph: yet the only "works" that survive to be looked upon by "the Mighty", or even by a common traveler, are the works of the sculptor: the works of the artist, & even those are broken & uncertain in meaning.

We don't even know why or how the statue was broken: did time just move on & as people stopped caring about the pharaohs nature took its toll? Was it vandalized, and if so, was it part of the grave-robbing of ancient Egyptian monuments, or was it some sort of political or military act? We aren't told. The sculptor is as long dead as his ruler (the ruler who was his subject), & the traveler doesn't give us that part of the story.

Only art survives. But what is it telling us? And is its message the one that was originally intended? Beyond the intentional portrayal of great political power, & the subversively accurate portrayal of the ruler's cold arrogance, the very fragmentary nature of the statue tells us something unintended by either ruler or sculptor: something about the transitory nature of even the greatest, most frightening political power, &, what is more disquieting, the transitory nature of even the greatest art.

Only art survives, but only fragments of that art, fragments whose meaning has been changed by time. The blankness of the desert sands drifts over them, burying them, or revealing them if the wind changes direction. It was Shelley who claimed that poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but there doesn't seem much reason to think their legislation is necessarily wiser & more far-seeing than the more political kind: it just has more of a chance of lasting. Shelley elegantly conveys the futility of power & permanence in his last lines, in which the colossal wreck is surrounded by the balanced alliteration of boundless and bare & lone and level: the words convey a vast yet unvarying expanse, something like a physical equivalent of endless time, stretching out flat & alone, an expanse of sand stretching endlessly on around the mighty but smashed fragments.

Like most people who know this poem, I came across it early on, in school, and it has floated for years in the back of my mind. Dread over the American disaster looming over us brought it back to mind. I took the poem from the Modern Library edition of The Complete Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley.

Poem of the Week 2024/49

Worship Service

In a snowfall

    that obscures the winter grasses

a white heron –

using his own form

    to hide himself away.

– Kigen Dogen, translated by Steven Carter

A few swift strokes, & an entire world is summoned. It is winter, obviously, as snow is falling. We are in a snowfall, but who is we? Is "we" even the right word there? The reader is not told who or what is in the snowfall: is it the writer, the reader, both of them, or just a place & moment we are suddenly being made aware of? "We" – poet & reader – are not actively present; this poem is about a level of perception that goes beyond (over or under) our conscious viewing.

The snow is heavy enough to obscure the winter grasses. It doesn't quite cover or obliterate them, but there is enough snow to make them difficult to see. Perhaps we simply know they are there, because we've seen them there before, though now the snow blankets them. Then in the middle of the poem, a striking appearance: a white heron. We are not told "then I saw" or "suddenly there was " or "and then I noticed" or anything like that: the heron simply appears. Again, neither poet nor reader is shown actively perceiving this relatively large bird: it simply manifests its presence. As something living amid the snowy scene, it catches our attention. Herons are graceful, striking birds. It must take a moment for "us" to realize it's there: the white bird against the white ground & the falling whiteness of the snow. There are fine gradations of white, little spots of color in the eyes, beak, & legs, even with snow falling around them.

After the perception that there is a heron there, we have a dash – that is to say, a grammatical break, which signals a change, a movement in our perception. The poem guides us to move from the scene itself to a realization about the bird: he is using his own form to hide himself away. What does this mean? On one level, it's just the camouflage effect of a white bird in a snowy landscape. On another, it's a comment on how we – poet, poem, reader – did not at first see, & then saw, & now perhaps are back to having trouble seeing, the bird in his stillness against the snow. But it's not just about our perception of the bird's existence, its aliveness in a chilly scene: the bird himself is trying to hide himself away. Why? How is he doing it by using his own form? Perhaps just by staying still, white against white, melding with the world around him. Why is the bird trying to recede from view? He doesn't seem to feel danger (if he did, he could fly away). The bird is simply being itself. There is a mystery in a living thing impenetrable by other living things. And this mystery becomes part of the landscape, & of our realization of our existence in the landscape.

Winter, snow piling up, whiteness: all frequent images of some sort of void, something beyond human life & even comprehension (think of Melville's chapter on the whiteness of Moby Dick). We have a living thing trying to hide his own individual existence in this mysterious void. By noticing & perhaps trying to understand what this alien form is doing, we also contemplate this void, this spiritual meaning that floats just above (or beyond or under or over) the surface of our world. This awareness of a spiritual significance to a pleasing but not unusual view is no doubt why the poem is titled Worship Service. Here we do not have a Mass or other ceremony; there are no official prayers being chanted, either by or to or for us; we are not in a church, or sanctuary, or even on some sort of sacred ground. There is only the ordinary (or "ordinary") world, & a moment of perception, that brings us beyond the visible world into a deeper consciousness.

I took this from Zen Poems, edited by Peter Harris, in the Everyman's Library Pocket Poet series. It's interesting to contemplate the subtle ways a reading of a poem can be changed by the context in which we find it: read as part of an anthology highlighting Zen poems, spiritually inclined perceptions are going to be topmost for the reader. But there are other possibilities, other shades of emphasis: in an anthology highlighting poems celebrating the natural world, or even specifically birds, the emphasis might be first on the scene presented, on the life rather than emblematic significance of the heron in the snow. Or it could be presented & read as one of the "Eastern" poems that influenced in English translation the Imagist School of the early twentieth century, or the beats in mid-century. A poem can be held to the light at many different angles.

Poem of the Week 2024/48

The Dimensions of the Milky Way

    (Discovered by Harlow Shapley, 1918)

Behind the men's dorm

at dusk on a late May evening,

Carver lowers the paper

and watches the light change.

He tries to see Earth

across a distance

of twenty-five thousand light-years,

from the center of the Milky Way:

a grain of pollen, a spore

of galactic dust.

He looks around:

that shagbark, those swallows,

the fireflies, that blasted mosquito;

this beautiful world.

A hundred billion stars

in a roughly spherical flattened disc

with a radius of one hundred light-years.

Imagine that.

He catches a falling star.

Well, Lord, this

infinitesimal speck

could fill the universe with praise.

– Marilyn Nelson

This is from a sequence of poems on the life of George Washington Carver, who was born enslaved and became a prominent scientist & educator in post-Reconstruction America.

This poem hovers between the factual, sometimes all too real world around us & one made up of the fancy & imagination inside us: a liminal space natural for a man sitting in the dusk after a long day of work. The opening lines give us time & place, & with the first mention of Carver, & his first action – lowering the newspaper he has been reading – moves us away from the workaday world, the world of work & journalism & the specific time & place one occupies, into a world more open to speculation: he watches the light change.

Light is a longtime symbol of wisdom (as in the term enlightenment) & even of God (who will make a reappearance at the end of the poem; we can infer that Carver was a religious man). It is also, of course, actual light, a phenomenon of interest to & subject to analysis by a curious scientific mind like Carver's. He knows the measurement of the Milky Way, but it's an imaginative leap on his part to take himself out of his evening seat, & even out of this planet, into a celestial vantage point: what is our home, the Earth, seen from afar? A speck, but significantly the tiny items it's compared to – a grain of pollen, a spore – are both, though tiny, generative, capable of reproducing or helping to reproduce much larger organisms. Even the presentation of the pollen, as a grain, adds to the sense that these miniscule, almost unseeable cells can be fructifying.

We are brought back to Earth by another action of Carver's: he looks around, but in his mind now is the immensity of the galaxy & the smallness of Earth. But what he sees may be small but does not come across as insignificant: shagbark (a type of large hickory tree), swallows, fireflies, a mosquito. And these are very individual things that he sees: that shagbark, those swallows, a mosquito: not generic "trees" or "birds" but specific examples of specific varieties. And from the human perspective, not all are desirable: trees, birds, & fireflies are lovely, but that blasted mosquito! The bloodsuckers are also part of this world, this beautiful world, as Carver thinks in an emotionally open & resounding way. (The political situation of Carver's time, one inimical to a Black man like himself, does not enter directly into this poem, but the reader would be conscious of it, & it provides the context for Carver's meditations on our place in the Universe & the beauties of our world despite all that humanity has done to make things ugly & dangerous.)

The poem then moves again towards the factual & scientific, yet it transitions with a "poetic" image: a hundred billion stars. This immensity both conjures up a striking picture & is a straightforward description of the Milky Way. Carver fits these sparklers into their appropriate geometric container, & considers the container's radius. Then we move into Carver's free-flowing inner thoughts, indicated in italic type. He begins with the phrase Imagine that. This is both a conventional thing to say, equivalent to "just think of it!" or "who would have guessed!" but it's also an injunction: imagine that, conjure up in your mind both the grand & particular realities of the universe &, at the same time, both the smallness & the immense beauty of the physical world we inhabit. Only a sense of sustained wonder can balance such disparate elements.

These final thoughts are interrupted by a final action on Carver's part: he catches a falling star. To catch can mean to observe something, often something that might easily be missed ("Did you catch that?", said of both words & actions) but it also gives us the suggestion that Carver has caught a falling star: a literal impossibility, of course, but a metaphorical reality. The phrase brings to mind Donne's famous song, opening Go, and catch a falling star, in which the catching is the first of a list of vivid & impossible tasks. A falling star is often considered a fortunate thing to see (hence the superstition that you should make a wish when you see one); it's certainly a lovely & encouraging image, thinking of a tired scientist & teacher, struggling to carry on despite the social system surrounding him, & despite human frailty & evil in general, managing to catch this marvelous Universal thing. The possibilities of our tiny Earth, already compared to a speck, but a generative one, fill Carver's mind as he thinks of it filling the Universe with praise, praise here directed to a creating Deity, but also capable of echoing, through the imagination, through the vast Milky Way. We know both the physical measure of the Milky Way, & its spiritual immeasurability.

I thought this would be a good poem for Thanksgiving week. I took it from Faster than Light: New and Selected Poems, 1996 - 2011, by Marilyn Nelson.

Poem of the Week 2024/47

Dead

The Winter is her lover now,

    A brilliant one and bold;

And she has gone away from me,

    Estranged and white and cold.

He painted all the hills for her

    And laughed the skies blue-warm;

He rattled down the pears and plums

    And crashed a happy storm.

Then southward-swinging lines of birds,

    And chilly rains he sent,

And sharpness in the air to prove

    His serious intent.

And now at last her heart is won.

    She's gone – where did she pass?

For Winter holds his breath and see –

    This frost upon the grass.

– Elizabeth Bishop

This early (1930) poem by Bishop has the feeling of a classic English lyric – the ballad meter (4/3/4/3 beats in a quatrain, with regular rhymes on the second & fourth lines), the vivid evocation of a seasonal change, with metaphorical implications, the attention-catching details – yet it also has something modern & ambiguous about it.

Who is the she being described? On the most basic level, it's another human being, a friend or former lover of the poet. But you could also read it in a larger sense as the Earth (usually characterized as a woman; in many mythologies, the earth, the source of life, is a woman & the sun, which helps bring forth life in the warmer seasons, is a male) conquered by Winter. You could see the poem as describing the death of this woman, or perhaps as the death of her relationship with the narrator. The title Dead perhaps tips the scale too much, but what is dead could refer to a romance as well as to a once-living person.

The characterization of Winter, usually portrayed as an icy old man nearing his end, is unusual. Winter is quite a dashing figure here, dashing in both the sense of extremely, energetically active & also stylish & attractive. He is brilliant & bold, adjectives usually associated with sunnier times, but they make perfect sense in this poem's presentation. In the second stanza, like an artist he paints the hills (& leaves & grass do change color as Winter approaches; Bishop was always an accurate observer of the natural world) & it is his laughter, a distinctive way of describing Winter, that turns the skies blue-warm during second summer, the brief period of warm weather that usually occurs sometime in the Fall. He energetically rattles down the pears & plums, & though they're falling, the reference to them is a reminder of harvest-time abundance. Also, plums are a summer fruit, & pears ripen in autumn, so again the transition of seasons is underlined through precise observation of Nature. Then in the third stanza, Winter's energy turns a bit darker, a bit more threatening: he sends the birds migrating south, there is increasing sharpness in the air. There are chilly rains; storms, like the theatrically crashing one in the previous stanza, tend to be of shorter duration than rain, which can last steadily for days.

In the first stanza, the declaration that Winter is her lover now strongly (though maybe not definitively) suggests that the woman is a former lover of the poet's; estranged in the final line suggests (again, not definitely) that what is being described is the end of a romance instead of a life. It would be an unusual word to describe someone's physical death, but a standard one to describe a spouse or lover who had moved out or moved on. She has gone away from me could refer metaphorically to death, or to her departure from the narrator's life.

The final stanza both both summarizes & suggests. Bishop continues the metaphor of Winter as a successful wooer of the woman – at last, her heart is won; all the colors & falling fruit & increasingly serious signs of Winter have succeeded. She is gone. And where did she pass? Pass can mean to go in a certain direction or to leave behind; it is also a common euphemism for death. But the poem's question is not when, why, or how but where did she pass – where did the final act, whether it was moving on or dying, take place? It's an interesting emphasis that suggests the importance of place, & encourages a reader to think of the departed She as maybe not a single individual but, as I suggested earlier, the Earth itself, or as a sort of Persephone abducted to the Underworld, bereaving us of flowers & greenery. Whether an individual or more generally the Natural world, the phrase could also mean where did she pass to, suggesting our never-ending curiosity about & ignorance of what happens to our spirits when physical death strikes us (or, in the case of the Earth, where are the snows of yesteryear?). It's a resonant question.

Even the Winter, the successful wooer, is holding his breath to see what happens. Throughout the poem there has been a conflation of death & love; Winter, usually a time of endings, is here presented as a vigorous, appealing new suitor. The narrator's sadness is presented in a few lines, but the bulk of the poem is a quite appealing picture of an oncoming end: laughter, blue skies, fruit falling. Whether it is the end of a season, or a love affair, or a life that is being presented here, the process is shown as enticing, as seductive, though it ends in some form of death. The final line is powerfully evocative & mysterious. We are left with that sign of Winter, frost upon the grass. Does this represent where she "passed"? The growth (eternal renewal of Nature!) on her gravesite? Is the frost on the grass a sign of what happened to the Earth? A sort of Whitmanesque invocation of the power of even small manifestations of life force as a leaf of grass to move us beyond an individual passing? It is, appropriately for a poem titled Dead, a haunting ending.

I took this poem from Poems, Prose, and Letters by Elizabeth Bishop, edited by Robert Giroux & Lloyd Schwartz for the Library of America.

Poem of the Week 2024/46

Air has no Residence, no Neighbor,

No Ear, no Door,

No Apprehension of Another

Oh, Happy Air!

Ethereal Guest at e'en an Outcast's Pillow –

Essential Host, in Life's faint, wailing Inn,

Later than Light thy Consciousness accost me

Till it depart, persuading Mine –

– Emily Dickinson

Possibly the first science fact that made a huge impression on me was the statement "Air is everywhere". I'm not sure what about it hit my first-grade brain with such force. Perhaps it was just the realization that where I had thought there was Nothing, there was in fact Something, something unseen but ever-present, even unavoidable, something that, without knowing it, I had depended on from the moment of birth..

Dickinson begins this poem with something of that aura (or, we might say, something of that air) of being present & necessary while also absent. Air is disembodied, as the poet implicitly wishes she were: no set residence, so no housekeeping or neighbors; no ears to have to listen to them, no doors either keeping one in or letting other people in (as there's no residence, air is always out, without needing to go out formally through something so mundane as a door). Above all, air has no apprehension of another, and apprehension can mean both understanding or grasping conceptually a person or thing & also anxiety or fear about dealing with a person or thing. The poet is wishing to be cut off from the limitations, the bother, the unpleasantness & boredom, & also the anxieties & fears, of life: free from all that, like the Air; Oh, Happy Air!

But can Air actually be happy? Underlying the conception here is an assumption of consciousness: the poet wishes to be as free as the air, but still, somehow, connected to humanity, or at least the "good" parts of it (like happiness): present, in the "air is everywhere" way; essential to life, but free of its burdens.

The second stanza develops this idea. While the first emphasizes the ways the envied Air is different from people (no set dwelling or irritating neighbors, none of the floating anxieties of existence), the second emphasizes the way Air is deeply connected with human life. In the first line, Air is modified by ethereal, & besides the musical sound of ethereal air, the word suggests something heavenly, floating above the world, yet this almost angelic atmosphere visits, as on a mission of mercy, even the lowliest & most wretched – the outcast of the earth.

In the second line, Air transmutes from Guest to Host, from visitor to provider at Life's faint, wailing Inn. And it's true, Air provides essential sustenance, just as an earthly innkeeper does. The Inn is Life, & we, humanity, are the passing guests, maintained there for a while by Air. But this isn't some bustling, hearty Inn out of a Victorian novel; it's faint & wailing. Faint suggests fading, loss of consciousness, weakness; wailing suggests lamentation, sobbing, anger. The two seem connected: our weakness leads to anger & sorrow. The two adjectives together also suggest both childbirth & death: the weakness of a mother after labor, the crying of her newborn; the loss of consciousness attendant on death, followed by our sorrow at our loss.

The association with death is strengthened in the final lines, in which the poet, realizing that her lot is with humanity & not the air, reflects on her own end: Light is one of the last things left as we lose our grip on existence, & when that goes, when we can no longer see (or, to use a term evoked earlier in this poem, apprehend) the world, we have one more final & most essential thing: breath. Air is breath, & our final exhalation can carry our soul with it, out of our body, into the air. Dickinson uses the intimate form in addressing & personifying this manifestation of air: thy; such is her dependence on, & subsequent intimacy with, this universal element. She talks, as if she were addressing a friend, about thy Consciousness, which suggests both the air's awareness – all along, she has been describing the air as if it had human components, not merely atmospheric – & her own awareness of the world as its light passes from her (as she is the one projecting consciousness onto a non-living gas).

This Consciousness accosts her: that is, it approaches her boldly, as a determined & final messenger. She & the Air, meaning she & her breath, & she & her soul, are tied up with this universal (air is everywhere!) element. The Air comes to receive from the dying poet her last breath. It departs, persuading Mine – meaning it takes her final breath with it, "persuading" it to join itself to Air. The poem ends, significantly, with a dash – beyond the finality of the death described in the final lines, there is an unknown ending, a possible continuation of some sort – nothing so firm & definitive as a period belongs here. The poem floats off, like our final breath.

Throughout, despite her envy of Air's nonhuman qualities, Dickinson gives to Air a certain awareness, & a vital role in human life. In this way Air mirrors our own consciousness; however much we may long to float above the boredom & suffering of life, however tired we are of the constant maintenance it needs, we can never quite imagine the world without our consciousness floating through it, present everywhere.

This is Poem 1060 in the Thomas Johnson edition of The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson.

Poem of the Week 2024/45

Our legions are brimful, our cause is ripe.

The enemy increaseth every day;

We, at the height, are ready to decline.

There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat,

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.

– William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene 3, ll 214 - 223

I had a different poem planned for today, but agitation over the presidential election has gotten the better of me & my original selection will have to wait. This passage jumped into my mind, because Shakespeare has something to say to every moment, & this does feel like a turning point in the country's history, a pretty clear choice between a backward-looking – well, that's not quite the right phrase; backward, yes, but looking to a past that was invented, or merely hallucinated, by some citizens, to the exclusion & often intense suffering of many other citizens – rage-filled fascist (who is also, quite clearly, in cognitive decline, & I do not say that lightly or callously) versus, you know, an actual functioning adult, who has a track record of trying to help her fellow citizens. And yet it's close. I remain baffled & frankly disgusted. I guess this election, like the Civil War (of which it is, in fact, another manifestation) will never end, but only continue in different mutations.

Brutus makes this speech to persuade his fellow conspirators to join battle at Philippi with the forces of Octavius Caesar (later to be Caesar Augustus), Marc Anthony, & the negligible Lepidus. Brutus, famously described in his funeral oration for Caesar by Marc Anthony with searing, sneering irony as "an honorable man", is, in actual fact, an honorable man, brought in my Cassius to lend moral & intellectual respectability to their plot to assassinate Caesar, thereby ending his burgeoning power. The alliance between the conspirators is already fraying, but Cassius gives in to Brutus, to conciliate him, with disastrous results for their cause.

Yet Brutus really isn't wrong in his assessment: he knows their alliance, their armies, their power, are all starting to fall apart, while the strength of Octavius & Anthony is growing. Strike while the iron is hot, in other words, & strike before your enemy gets out of your control. Brutus, being a philosophically inclined politician, speaks not of strategy or military advantage, as a politician or a general would, but of things a philosopher would talk of: how to live in the world, how to judge the unknowable ways of Fortune (& of History). The metaphors are grand: the ocean, the tide rising & falling, the full sea, & we in our uncertain little ship, trying to negotiate the hazards around us. Brutus knows that the events around us are uncontrollable; it's how we respond that makes a successful life. We are on a voyage, separated from the deep & powerful sea only by our relatively frail ship, trying to negotiate often unseen dangers. Brutus's advice here is actually quite sound; it turns out to be exactly the wrong thing to do, as the more realistic & calculating Cassius had tried to say, but still: good advice. But the mysterious turns of Fortune (or, as we might say, of History) are as unfathomable as the sea.

When I was young, Julius Caesar used to be featured on high school reading lists (which is not where I read it; I read all of Shakespeare on my own); I suspect the real reason is that the verse is fairly straightforward (plus there's a stabbing, & ghosts, & it's "historical", but not about English kings we don't care about anymore unless it's through Shakespeare's words), but it used to be presented as showing "Shakespeare supported democracy", because we like to believe that great artists believe what we claim to believe. This struck juvenile & precocious me as, you know, implausible: even the American revolutionaries, two centuries after Shakespeare's birth, didn't believe in "democracy" the way we understand it (which is one of the reasons we're saddled with the goddam Electoral College), & even if Shakespeare (the all-seeing!) had somehow decided democracy was the way to go, it's unlikely that he could present a work defending it under a monarchy vigilant of its prerogatives & on the constant look-out for subversion.

So Julius Caesar is not about "supporting democracy"; as always with Shakespeare, any interpretation can be undercut, even if it's the official resolution of the play (think of the happy ending of The Merchant of Venice; after what we've experienced of Shylock, & why he acts the way he does, & how he's treated (& how in turn he treats others), it's difficult to take the "happy ending" without some reservations; even the end of Twelfth Night leads some people I know to a feeling of sadness for the madly-used Malvolio). We can come away concluding that it was wrong to assassinate Julius Caesar, but Caesar himself is presented as a superstitious, flawed man with a constant politician's eye on the main chance – he often seems like a performative Noble Roman, in such moments as the one in which someone urges on him a petition concerning his own safety & he grandly announced that that one will be considered last.

So if you need to find a "meaning" or "moral" in this play, perhaps it's only that we are all wandering, lost, through the mysteries of life. Noble, well-meant actions end up in murder, deceit, & treachery; cruelty & cunning result in peace & prosperity. Much depends on chance & actions & outcomes we don't control. Brutus & Cassius thought they were saving the Republic, or (for Cassius), maybe just themselves; centuries later, Dante stuck each of them, along with the arch-traitor Judas Iscariot, each in one of Satan's three mouths. Others consider them heroes &, despite their aristocratic standing, revolutionary role models.

All we can do is try for the best. That means choosing openness, respect, accountability, mutual support. If my deluded fellow citizens & our semi-functioning system do put the fascist back in power, it's important to remember that we still don't know how things will turn out. Keep hopeful, keep fighting.

Perhaps by the time this entry is posted, we will know if Americans chose, to be blunt, Right or Wrong. But it's good to keep in mind, for purposes of checking our own egos, that everybody thinks their choice is for the Right. The essential thing is to look clearly, widely, & compassionately (to see, in short, with the sort of vision Shakespeare had).

Poem of the Week 2024/44

 For Halloween week, two by Robert Herrick. The first:

The Hag

1.    The hag is astride,

        This night for to ride;

The Devill and shee together:

        Through thick, and through thin;

        Now out, and then in,

Though ne'r so foule be the weather.

2.     A thorn or a burr

        She takes for a Spurre:

With a lash of a Bramble she rides now,

        Through Brakes and through Bryars:

        O're Ditches, and Mires;

She followes the Spirit that guides now.

3.     No Beast, for his food,

        Dares now range the wood;

But husht in his laire he lies lurking:

        While mischeifs, by these,

        On Land and on Seas,

At noone of Night are a working.

4.    The storme will arise,

        And trouble the skies;

This night, and more for the wonder,

        The ghost from the Tomb

        Affrighted shall come,

Cal'd out by the clap of the Thunder.

The second:

The Hagg.

    The staffe is now greas'd,

    And very well pleas'd,

She cockes out her Arse at the parting;

    To an old Ram Goat,

    That rattles i' th' throat,

Halfe choakt with the stink of her farting.

    In a dirtie Haire-lace

    She leads on a brace

Of black-bore-cats to attend her;

    Who scratch at the Moone,

    And threaten at noone

Of night from Heaven for to rend her.

    A hunting she goes;

    A crackt horne she blowes;

At which the hounds fall a bounding;

    While th' Moone in her sphere

    Peepes trembling for feare,

And night's afraid of the sounding.

– Robert Herrick

Two poems by the same poet, on the same theme, using many of the same images – the flying witch, the noon of night (that is, midnight), fear spread among wild animals, the Devil (the Ram Goat in the second poem is an image of a devil) – even the same title (with an additional g in the second), & yet I find the effect of the two very different.

Both hags are clearly "bad", of, if you prefer, outside of standard societal norms, but with Hag 1 there's something frankly appealing about the picture: she's powerful, insouciant, with a literally Devil-may-care attitude. She has the traditional witch/pagan link to the Natural world: she rides out at night, soaring through the sky, fearless of wind or rain; the references in Stanza 2 to her using a thorn as a spur & a prickly vine as a lash are reminiscent of poetic descriptions of the fairy-world (see, for example, A Midsummer Night's Dream or the Queen Mab speech in Romeo & Juliet). And even though the fairy-world is darker & more menacing than we of the modern age like to think, there is still something appealing about it, something striking & beautiful, as in any natural mystery. We could live side by side with this world & feel not unease or danger but the richness of unseen possibilities.

Hag 1 causes mischief (or mischeifs, as the seventeenth-century spelling has it) but implicit in the word is a sense of playfulness, something that is more an inconvenient prank than a serious threat. And the harm that is being done isn't shown affecting humans, at least directly; it's the forest predators (who are themselves possible dangers to people) who cower in their caves until the hag passes. She causes storms (like the Weird Sisters in Macbeth), but, again, the danger doesn't seem to threaten humans directly. Instead we get the extremely picturesque image of ghosts, themselves frightened by her powers, coming out when the thunderclaps are most violent. Hag 1 seems to have great power, which, at some level, is always appealing, or at least intriguing, to people. She soars above, heedless. She is linked to Nature, but can also manipulate it (mostly, it seems, for theatrical effect; her actions don't seem to have any purpose more specific than stirring things up). It's an image that charms.

Hag 2, on the other hand, is much grosser. The first stanza describes some sort of sexual encounter with a devil, & not a charming, sophisticated devil either (like Goethe's Mephistopheles), but an old goat (click here for one of Goya's images of witches consorting with Satan in the form of a giant goat). The staff that is greased might refer to the stick she uses as her air-borne steed, but it has an unmistakably phallic undercurrent; perhaps she & Satan are using some sort of dildo. Her parting shot is an offensive fart. It's a physical encounter, but a mostly unappealing one: greasy, smelly, gagging.

Hag 1's appearance is never mentioned, except for what's implicit in the word "hag". Hag 2's appearance is described a little more fully. She is wearing a haire-lace, which seems to be a wig of some sort with a lace base. So she probably is bald, or balding, & her wig is dirty (& if the wig is dirty, she herself is probably not clean either). We are made conscious of her ass & her farts. It's a crude picture. Her familiars are a little crowd of black cats, of nasty disposition, scratching at the Moon, as if they would scratch it out of heaven. The moon is often associated with Hecate, a goddess who became associated with witchcraft, as well as with night-time & changeability. Hag 2 shoves her butt at the Devil & her cats claw at the Moon: she certainly seems to bite the hand that feeds her, but mostly in a crude, fairly nasty way: nothing insouciant here! She also haunts & hunts through the forest, but it's a little unclear what she's hunting for – whatever it is, she's out to harm; even Night & the Moon fear her hunting. Even the sound of hunting (so often invoked by composers) is ugly here: her horn is cracked (another unavoidably phallic reference, to a damaged instrument), producing a sound that produces fear & trembling. We have the feeling in both poems of supernatural forces, but with Hag 1 they seem at play & with Hag 2 at work.

Happy Halloween!

These poems are from The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, edited by Tom T. Cain and Ruth Connolly, published by Oxford University Press.

Poem of the Week 2024/43

Frost

Therefore, lest this inclement friend should maim

Your valued plants, plunge pots within a frame

Sunk deep in sand or ashes to the rim,

Warm nursery where nights and days are grim;

But in the long brown borders where the frost

May hold its mischievous and midnight play

And all the winnings of your months be lost

In one short gamble when the dice are tossed

Finally and forever in few hours,

– The chance your skill, the stake your flowers, –

Throw bracken, never sodden, light and tough

In almost weightless armfuls down, to rest

Buoyant on tender and frost-fearing plants;

Or set the wattled hurdle in a square

Protective, where the north-east wind is gruff,

As sensitive natures seek for comfort lest

Th'assault of life be more than they can bear

And find an end, not in timidity

But death's decisive certainty.

– Vita Sackville-West

There is a long history of poetry as an instructional tool, particularly for agriculture; this makes sense, as the rhythms & rhymes of poetry make it easier to memorize than prose (at least back in the time before we outsourced our memories to reference books in general & the Internet in particular), & instructions on how to grow things would be a life necessity in a time when a family's or town's survival might depend on one harvest. There is also a long history of using the garden as a metaphor for various human elements, including life in general. Sackville-West, a noted gardener as well as writer, calls on these traditions in this seasonal poem.

Even with global climate change menacing our lives & shaking up our habits & assumptions, this is the time of year when farmers & gardeners (even those who just grow a few green things in pots on the patio) have to prepare for oncoming winter. The nights, if not always the daylight hours, are colder, & the darkness lasts a bit longer each day as we gradually approach the winter solstice. The poet here offers solid advice on protecting your precious flowers, & perhaps yourself, from oncoming frost. But she doesn't see frost as an enemy; as part of the natural world & its cycle, it is what gardeners choose to deal with. So it is called a friend, though an inclement one; inclement would refer not only to the harsh weather of winter, but to the nature of frost itself: clemency is mercy, so inclement suggests there is something merciless about frost. It doesn't choose which particular plants to strike; it just strikes. Such is its nature. We all have friends (or know people) like that.

Sackville-West proceeds with some useful advice about burying the pots in a frame or box filled with sand or ashes; her language throughout is vigorous & active: plunge the pots in, sink them deep, up to the rim. She describes the effect of the frame as a warm nursery when nights & days are grim; a summation that easily extends to a view of human life: a nursery is not only a place where young plants are raised & sold, but a room in which young children are raised. When not only nights but also days are grim & cold, a retrospective look at the warm nursery we might have had as children can be a comforting memory.

The poet amps up her comparisons: the frost's mischievous and midnight play – a delightful phrase, reminiscent of Shakespeare in its yoking of two disparate but somehow harmonious modifiers, making one think of the frost as the personification Jack Frost or some other fairyland inhabitant – establishes a sort of casino in which you, the gardener, are, willing or not, one of the gamesters. Do you dare to risk your months of hard work, cultivating some rare or special (at least to you) bloom? The brown borders (that is, borders of bare earth; no summer abundance here, of either cultivated plants or weeds) give visual evidence that winter is coming. Your whole garden could, with one hard frost, turn into a bare brown plot.

She tells you how to hedge your bets: mulch, specifically a mulch of bracken (a type of fern), though not sodden; this dry mulch is light, almost airy; it is tough (it would take a longer time to decompose than more tender greens), it is buoyant. Again, the poet's language is astute and strong; you can feel the protective quality of the bracken, its resilience. You are throwing down the almost weightless armfuls (so, again, there's practical advice here: you'll need a lot of mulch); just as you plunged rather than placed the pots, so you throw down (continuing the gambling metaphor, of course) rather than place the bracken.

Or you could build a barrier using a wattled hurdle. A hurdle in this sense is a British term for a rectangular portable frame to be used as a temporary fence; the wattles would be twigs, reeds, or branches woven into a more or less solid barrier. Cover, comfort, protection from on-rushing roughness of wind & cold: here Sackville-West moves just a bit away from the garden into general observations on humanity (though her use of sensitive natures reminds us, with her astute use of natures, that humanity is, whether we admit it or not, inextricably part of the natural world). She says that these sensitive natures (as a member of the Bloomsbury circle, Sackville-West would probably be thinking of her artistic, emotionally & socially daring friendships among the cultural elite) seek comfort, not out of laziness or self-indulgence, but as a protective cloak, a way of bearing with life's hardness & cruelty, which can beat such natures down (resulting in the timidity she mentions) or even lead these natures towards suicide, as a way of seeking rest from uncertainty & hazard & finding some sort of peace in the decisive certainty, the finality, of death. A garden is not just a luxury or indulgence; it is one of those comforts that help us stave off hopelessness.

I took this poem from the anthology Garden Poems, edited by John Hollander, in the splendid Everyman's Library Pocket Poet series.

Poem of the Week 2024/42

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west.

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou seest the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the deathbed whereon it must expire,

Consumed with that which it was nourished by.

    This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

    To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

– William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73

This sumptuous & celebrated sonnet is, on the surface, deceptively simple. Each of the three quatrains takes a standard trope indicating waning energies / the end of life – the autumn of the year, sunset &  night falling, a fire dying into embers – & works it into a vivid poetic statement, followed by a concluding couplet suggesting the recipient, seeing these things, can only feel love strengthened by impending loss.

The first quatrain portrays Fall not in the usual terms of fields bared by harvest but by the dying leaves (there's nothing fruitful here). Yet there's something odd in the second line when the poet initially says no leaves are left on the boughs but then immediately amends that to "well, maybe a few" – why the self-revision? Why the insistence on some remaining energy? It's not a word order necessitated by rhyme, so something else must be going on.

After this odd moment, the poet returns to the description of Fall: cold (the coldness of Winter / Death) is approaching, which makes the boughs shake (almost as if they were human limbs shivering). The boughs are likened, in a famous phrase, to bare ruined choirs, likening the natural world of trees stripped of leaves to the surrounding English landscape dotted with monastic ruins. It's worth remembering that those ruins were, just a few decades before Shakespeare was born, vital institutions, until Henry VIII decided he was better off without them. Again, this is perhaps a suggestion that beneath this image of wasting away is some underlying vitality, at least until quite recently, which is what late means in this context (as when we refer to a recently deceased person as the late X). Associating himself with the choirs is also a way of emphasizing that the speaker is older than the recipient, perhaps of a generation that could remember back to the choirs when they were, like the poet, singing. Is there something a touch histrionic in the sweet birds, especially coming, as they do, after a sere series of terms: dead leaves, stripped boughs, shaking with cold, bare, ruined: even words that have a different function, like hang & late, carry overtones of suffering & missing out.

The second stanza runs along much the same lines: the speaker compares himself to twilight; the busy day has sunk out of sight, & by and by black night (oblivion, & not just the temporary oblivion of sleep, Death's second self) covers all. By and by also seems perhaps a touch melodramatic, indicating an impending darkness that is less imminent than it actually would be at that time of day.

The third stanza follows a similar pattern: it opens, as does the second, with In me thou seest, followed by an elaboration of a basic metaphor for ending: this time, it's a fire dying out. The fire, reduced to a glow, is at the stage where it is being consumed by the ash it has already produced, the ashes, specifically, of a spent youth. The metaphor is strengthened by the invocation of a deathbed. But, again, there is an emphasis on the strength that was there, & which has not quite entirely disappeared, though the end is near.

So what is going on here? It's important to remember that Shakespeare's sonnets were initially circulated in manuscript (this was not an unusual practice) & when they were published, it was, apparently, without the poet's agreement or supervision. No one really know why or to whom Shakespeare wrote the series (though theories, of course, abound). This sonnet is part of the series traditionally held to have been addressed to an unknown young man, though there's nothing in the phrasing of this particular poem that genders the recipient, & the order of the sonnets as they've come down to us may be by someone other than the poet.

Clearly, though, a single individual is being addressed here: the thou who is repeatedly conjured to notice the impending end of the speaker must be not only an individual, but an intimate (thou strikes a modern reader as formal, because it is archaic, but in Shakespeare's day it was, like the French tu, the singular second person, used for an intimate or social inferior). One of the many unknowable things about the sonnets is when exactly they were written, but scholarly speculation is that he wrote them, give or take a few years, around the age of 30. Even considering that death came earlier then for most people (Shakespeare himself was 52 when he died), it seems a bit odd for a man in his 30s – out of his youth, but one would think in the prime of his life – to draw repeated & elaborate attention to his oncoming demise. And he seems aware that his recipient is maybe not giving him his full attention; each quatrain opens with instructions on what the recipient is supposed to be seeing, & the speaker feels the need to make his point three separate times, in three separate ways, though always with some similar adjuration: thou mayst in me behold or (twice) In me thou seest.

After repeatedly telling his apparently younger friend that the end is near, the concluding couplet sums up the lesson, as it usually does in sonnets with this three-quatrains-and-a-couplet construction: all this I'm telling you is going to make your love for me even stronger, as you won't have me around to love for much longer. But the phrasing is notable: this thou perceiv'st: perceive means to become aware or conscious of something, to come to a realization, to interpret or view someone or something in a particular way: in other words, this is not something the recipient is realizing on his own (otherwise, why would the speaker have to reinforce the image repeatedly?) but something the speaker hopes the recipient will come to realize, a learned response, an insight he will, at some point, achieve – someday, when I'm gone, you'll wish you'd loved me more! Also, given the preceding quatrains, all of which suggest it is the speaker who will be leaving, the last line suddenly makes the recipient the one who will be leaving. Is the speaker perhaps aware that the recipient is drifting away from him, & the whole sonnet is, essentially, a dramatic speech warning him that the speaker won't be around forever & he should keep loving him while he can? Does the strange shift in who is leaving intimate that the speaker knows, perhaps on a not-quite conscious level, that the recipient is planning on leaving him?

Another thing no one knows about Shakespeare's sonnets is what relation, if any, they bear to his life. There is an assumption that they are autobiographical (if only we could crack the code!), but that may or may not be true – we are, after all, talking about probably the greatest dramatist in history; clearly he was able to imagine himself into all sorts of moods & situations that have little, no, or tangential connection to the facts of his biography. There seems something a touch theatrical, even slightly comic, but also deeply moving, about this sonnet read as a speech (& keep in mind that Shakespeare did incorporate sonnets into some of his plays, most famously when Romeo & Juliet meet for the first time): we have here a man summoning up dazzling rhetorical powers to persuade a younger & perhaps slightly uninterested friend that in fact his (the poet's) end is near & that's all the more reason to keep his (the friend's) love strong. Hence the underlying hints of on-going vigor beneath the eloquent, picturesque invocations of impending death. In this light, the poem, no matter what remove it is from Shakespeare's lived experience, is not only gorgeous, but also slightly comic, & also deeply poignant: comic & poignant in the way of all attempts to persuade someone else that their love for us should be as strong (at least!) as our love for them.

There are many editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, of course: I use the Signet Classic.