Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Sonnet 15

A Shakesperian sonnet, three quatrains and a couplet. This poem focuses on time’s effects on all things of nature, but particularly on his love. Everything fades under time, but Shakespeare creates immortality for his love in his poems. Even though everything in the world seems to want to take away his love’s beauty, Shakespeare knows he can keep her beauty in his mind and for all of perpetuity by writing it down, thus becoming more powerful than time or nature.

Sonnet 18

Similarly with 15, this poem focuses on how to keep his love’s beauty alive by writing about it. The interesting things I found about both 15 and 18 are the allusions to nature, which both use “grafting” as a metaphor. In 15, Shakespeare “engrafts” his love with his poem, allowing a new part of her (the poetic part) to grow from the old. In 18, it’s similar, only here his love is grafted to time itself through his poetry and has thus become immortal.

Sonnet 25

This sonnet is about fame and how it can be dangerous to use others, “stars,” to become famous because they can use their own power to demolish you. For Shakespeare, its much safer to have no power or influence, but to be relatively safe to make your own way in the world rather than use others to gain fame.

Sonnet 60

This poem is about how fast time moves and that life is over before you know it. There’s metaphor on metaphor in this poem, much of which has to do with the earth and Jesus.

Sonnet 97

A seasonal poem, Shakespeare feels as though its winter even though it’s summer because his love is absent from him. Even though autumn has come and the fruits of man’s labor have all come up, he cannot enjoy them because his love is gone. Nature itself seems to be in mourning, as the birds go quiet because she’s absent, and if they do sing, its because winter is on its way.

Sonnet 147

Shakespeare’s body is equated with the Earth, and his soul is the inhabitant. He wants to know why his soul, who spends so brief a time in his body, lingers and puts on such a show when heaven is waiting. Instead of spending all this time/money on food/eating which the worms will only eat anyway, he wants to instead start spending time preparing for divinity. Once he’s dead, death itself will be dead, and then he won’t have to fear dying.

Margaret Cavendish – “A World in an Earring”

This poem uses extended metaphors to get across the message that there may be many worlds beyond the one that we’re on, and, beyond that, that what is not visible to the human eye or tools of knowledge cannot be assumed. Cavendish explores the idea that the world, with its sun, planets, and surrounding stars, is contained within an earring on a woman’s ear. This world contains everything our world does, fish, poles, gardens, plagues, cities, life and death, etc. But all of these events pass the wearer of the earring by and she remains oblivious. The wearer of the earring is not the creator, and heaven and “Elysium” still exist, which indicates that there is a God, but that our understanding of the universe is focused too narrowly.

This poem speaks to gender issues and has a quasi-feminist argument, although its more of a matriarchal powertrip than a leveling equality that true feminism would have.

Some of the things that interest me are her mentioning diamonds, golden mines, spices, earthquakes, and plagues as they relate to my attempt at locating an ecocritical argument in the 17^th century.

Margaret Cavendish – The Blazing World

In this text, driven by her desire to be in control of a world and solve the world’s ills by conforming it to one language, religion, and culture, Cavendish creates not only one world, the Blazing World, but infinite worlds that exist alongside Earth. The story starts with the Empress being kidnapped by a man and taken in a boat towards the North Pole in a ship, but the men all die and she lives. The Empress is rescued by the bear-men who take her to the fox-men, who in turn take her to the Emperor as a gift. He, of course, marries her and makes her Empress over the whole world.

She uses the beginning of her reign and the majority of the book, to question the different populations and societies of the Blazing World. Each group, from bear-men to worm-men have different specialties and inform their new Empress as best they can. A good deal of her questioning centers around government, religion, and language as a means to try and understand the best form of government. Cavendish seems to be imparting her own bias here and her personal narrative can be read against the text with the backdrop of the English Civil War and the exile of her husband.

In many ways the entrance of the Duchess, a version of Cavendish, can be seen as way to deflect issues of religion (ie; the cabbala the Empress wants to write first as a Jewish cabbala) into the realm of the literary. By first making this move of the cabbala being an “imaginative” cabbala and then later following this up with the “perfect” world of the Duchess which has one religion.

This can be seen as a work of Utopia fiction then, but one that is fixated on forms of knowledge production, dissemination, and the ability for women to move in these spaces. Rather than other works of Utopian fiction, such as More’s Utopia, for example, the conversations the Empress has and information she has gathered allow her to actually change the government of the Blazing World. Htholoday, in Utopia, is an observer rather than a holder of power, but here the Empress worries about her subjects and desires to do what she think is best for them (as didactic as that may be).

Some of my own personal interests in the text surround the ways nature is seen, both in the animal-men who dominate so much of the text with their conversations about forms of knowledge, and also in the ideas of Paradise as a real place.