Paul Edmondson > Quotes

“The rest of the sonnet is more straightforward. Metaphorically it says that beauty ('the summer's flower') is sweet even if it does not propagate itself ('Though to itself it only live and die'), but if it becomes infected it is worth no more than `The basest weed'. What is the tenor of the metaphor? And the couplet appears to be trying to make a link with the octave: `For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds. I Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds'. (This last line is found also in the anonymous play, attributed at least in part to Shakespeare, Edward III. Though proverbial in tone, it has not been found elsewhere.) But what exactly is the link? The poem struggles to give an impression of profundity but its excessive use of generalization and metaphor inhibits communication.”
― Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“The last poem of the first group, beginning `O thou, my lovely boy', is not a strict sonnet, being a series of six rhyming pentameter couplets, as if the sonnet were entirely made up of conclusions.”
― Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“One feature of Shakespeare's collection that differentiates it from all others is that the beloved, though frequently idealized in the first part, is nevertheless faulty: `for the first time in the entire history of the sonnet, the desired object is fl'awed' (Spiller, p. 156). This is true of both parts of the collection.”
― Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“Most detached of all is the great but damaged Sonnet 146, which would be more at home in a religious than in an amatory sequence. It may be significant that it immediately follows the Anne Hathaway sonnet (No. 14S), which also seems irrelevantly imported into the collection. The antithesis between soul and body has occurred earlier, and will be repeated in a grosser context in Sonnet 151 (see pp. 53, 71, below). It is a Renaissance topos; Love's Labour's Lost might be regarded as an extended dramatization of it. Shakespeare develops it here with consummate skill in a perfectly formed poem, marred only by the textual dislocation in its second line. The couplet is worthy of
John Donne ('Death, thou shalt die', Holy Sonnets, 6) and anticipates Dylan Thomas's `Death, thou shalt have no dominion' (itself biblical in origin):”
― Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“What exactly is it saying? The first two lines refer to people who restrain themselves from causing hurt even if they `show' the desire to do so. The next two indicate, however, that these people remain impassive even while `moving others'-to what? Then we are told that these people `rightly do inherit nature's graces', as if the qualities we have been told they display deserve reward, which is not entirely evident. Lines 7 and 8 seem as if they should sum up what has so far been said: `They are the lords and owners of their faces, I Others but stewards of their excellence.' Is impassivity a virtue? In what sense are
people who cannot control their expressions `stewards of their excellence'? Are they stewards of their own excellence, or of the excellence of those who are `lords and owners of their faces'?”
― Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“Though the poem has something of the typical sonnet structure (discussed in Chapter 5, below), in its original printing it is followed enigmatically by two pairs of brackets. Although for many years the general assumption was that the parentheses were simply a printer's aberration, or his way of indicating that the poem appeared to be incomplete, more recently they have been relentlessly interrogated,
yielding an extraordinary range of interpretations which must derive rather from the reader than from the author. They have been compared to the (empty) marks in an account book; to the shape of an hourglass that contains no sand; to little moons that `image a repeated waxing and waning of the moon, pointing to fickleness and frailty' (quoted in Duncan-Jones, p. 126); to representations of a grave; and-because they stand in for a couplet-to the image of a failure to couple. They may be seen as marking a breathing space before the reader embarks on the second part; in their suggestion of curtailment they may indicate that the male/male relationship of the first part has petered out in insterility; they may even invite readers to contribute a couplet of their own devising.”
― Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“The twentieth-century scholar G. B. Harrison, believing the woman to have been black-skinned, proposed a prostitute named Lucy Morgan;”
― Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“Perhaps the happiest moment the human mind ever knows is the moment when it senses the presence of order and coherence-and before it realizes the particular nature (and so the particular limits) of the perception.... As he reads through the 16o9 sequence, a reader's mind is constantly poised on just such a threshold to comprehension. The source of that pleasurable sense of increased mental range is the same multitude of frames of reference that frustrate him when he looks for a single label or formula by which his mind may take personal possession of the sonnets. (Booth, Essay, p. 14)”
― Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare's Sonnets

“The next poem that lacks clear links to its companions, though it is relevant enough as a withdrawal from the particular to the general in a love sequence, is Sonnet 116, `Let me not to the marriage of true minds', an eloquent tribute to the power of love which nevertheless has a sting in its tail: `If this be error and upon me proved, I I never writ, nor no man ever loved' (U. 13-4). Does this mean that it is not an error, or that it is an illusion to which all lovers are susceptible? And, for that matter, do the last words stand independently as `no man ever loved' or refer back to `I' to mean `I never loved any man'? And is the poem a tribute to the power of love in general, or of love of man to woman (as generally supposed) or of man for man, as the context might suggest?”
― Paul Edmondson, Shakespeare's Sonnets