Sonnet 45

Hello Shakespeareans and welcome back to the Secret Five Act Structure of Shakespeare’s Sonnets Podcast.  This is Episode 5 of Season 2.  Today we’ll be discussing Sonnet 45 with a small recap of Sonnet 44.  I encourage you to read both of these poems before and after listening.  This way you can form your own opinions and decide where I’m right and where I’m wrong.

As such, in the last episode, we studied Sonnet 4.2.  It begins a six poem stretch of three pairs.  For convenience, I’m presenting them as a single six part stanza.  However, I understand if someone else looks at them as three separate couplets.  No problem, but I’m approaching this stretch as a single unit because I believe this sextet has a somewhat similar theme of man vs self.

For today, the big idea that I want you to get is that this poem and its predecessor are interesting.  I know we’re talking about Shakespeare, but many of his Sonnets have always been considered skippable because there wasn’t that much going on or they were too similar to other poems that were better.  I completely understand this.  However, by looking at this poem through the prism of the Secret Structure, we’re going to give this poem a purpose.  Not only does this poem have a deeper meaning, but it connects with the poems around it.  Now, I’m not going to lie and say this poem will change your life, but I will demonstrate that it’s got a lot more going on than you might think.  And, most importantly, as I just said, I think you’ll find it interesting.

In Sonnet 4.2, the Narrator is lonely because he’s separated.  The key that I’m going to hone in on is that he uses both second and third person pronouns in that poem.  This signals that either Shakespeare is a sloppy writer, which he isn’t, or else he is talking about two different things.  I don’t know about you, but I’m going with the second option.  As I stated in the last episode, line 10 is “To leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone.”  This suggests that he’s separated from the 2nd person “thou”, not the 3rd person “him.”  For that reason, if “him” is a personification of the poems, my proposal is that this means that the poems are separated from the structure.  Narratively, this lines up with what is actually happening.  Sonnet 4.2 is so different from Sonnet 4.1 that both are distinct from each other.  Furthermore, the ideas of 4.1 will clearly be revisited in Sonnets 4.10-4.12.  Right here in Sonnets 4.2 and 4.3, they aren’t as important.  So, Shakespeare is creating a new stanza when there shouldn’t be one while talking about being distant from the 2nd person “thou.”  So, while there’s not a lot, we do have something to work with.  

Now, let’s jump into Sonnet 4.3.  Here it is:

The other two, slight air and purging fire,

Are both with thee, wherever I abide;

The first my thought, the other my desire,

These present-absent with swift motion slide.

For when these quicker elements are gone

In tender embassy of love to thee,

My life, being made of four, with two alone

Sinks down to death, oppressed with melancholy;

Until life's composition be recured

By those swift messengers return'd from thee,

Who even but now come back again, assured

Of thy fair health, recounting it to me:

This told, I joy; but then no longer glad,

I send them back again and straight grow sad.

And to help you.  Here’s the No Fear Modern Translation: 

The other two elements, weightless air and purifying fire, both remain with you, wherever I may be. Air is my thoughts, and fire is my desire. The two of them slide back and forth between us swiftly and effortlessly. Normally I am made up of all four elements, but when my air and fire are off on their errand of love to you, I sink into depression and slide toward death, until air and fire return to restore the proper balance within me. Even now, they have returned from you to tell me that you’re well and in good health. I rejoice to hear this but then immediately grow gloomy from missing you, so I send them back to you and immediately grow sad again.

Alright.  So, before I dive in, I just want to repeat what I said last episode about the four elements: earth, fire, wind, and water.  I’m not going to say much about these because this is a medieval concept very foreign to us.  If you want to study that element of this poem, go for it.  There are plenty of resources to help you.  As for me, I’m only interested in how this helps us understand the narrative of Section 4.  Therefore, I’ll just say it: I don’t care about late Medieval Medical Theories and I hope you can forgive me.  Now, having given that disclaimer, let’s jump in.

I think the most important place to begin is the audience.  As we discussed earlier, Sonnet 4.2 has both 2nd person and 3rd person pronouns.  Sonnet 4.3 however, only uses the 2nd person.  Since these two poems are clearly a pair, we must use this information.  So, here’s the question we need to decide: is Shakespeare talking to the poems or the structure?  This is important for us if we want to decipher the poem.

In the last episode, I decided that the 2nd person character, to whom the poet is addressing, was the structure, and I still think that applies now.  That means my answer hasn’t changed.  Shakespeare is talking to the structure, not the poems.  For many people, this is just weird.  Classically, we’re in the Young Man section and every poem is supposed to be about and for him.  However, my assertion is that this is not correct.  That old way of looking at The Sonnets more or less assumed that the Bard wasn’t planning ahead and just wrote about whatever he wanted on any given day.  Well, my approach is that this view is just an assumption.  Not unreasonable, but readers need to be more open minded to see what is revealed by the secret structure.

So, if the poet is talking to the structure, we need to figure out, decipher, and decide: what is he telling her?

There are four substances: earth, fire, wind, and water.  The poet says that half are with the poems and the other half are with the structure.  In other words, they’ve split.  The poem really livens up in the second quatrain.  In it, he suggests that when the structure is removed, he is sad.  Then, in line 7, he’s going to refer to the numbers “four” and “two.”  Here’s the second quatrain again.

For when these quicker elements are gone

In tender embassy of love to thee,

My life, being made of four, with two alone

Sinks down to death, oppressed with melancholy;

Now, absent my secret structure, the numbers “four” and “two” have obvious explanations: they represent the four elements and the poet and his fair youth.  However, we can see more.  Remember what I’ve said many times: 4442.  This is three quatrains and a couplet.  So, is it a stretch to say that this is relevant here?  “My life, being made of four, with two alone?”  Or is it not?  Am I spouting pure numerology or is this a key to understanding the poem?

The line, “made of four, with two alone,” this could be a reference to how sonnets are constructed.  Furthermore, this is supported by what Shakespeare immediately says in the next line: “Until life's composition be recured.” “Composition” is a clear reference to writing.  Therefore, “life’s composition” is something similar to an artist saying quote, “this is my life’s work.”  Line 9 connects line Line 7 with the idea that the numbers “four” and “two” have everything to do with writing.  And with Sonnets, everything is fours and twos, except right now because we’re in Section 4.

All of this brings us to the last word in line 9, “recured.”  I looked up the word in the dictionary, and it’s not there.  For us, that means it’s a word that Shakespeare likely invented that didn’t stick in the lexicion.  However, it’s not impossible for us to understand this word.  We know what it means to cure something and the idea is that the four elements are out of sync and need to be cured again.  The difference for us and people who don’t know the secret structure is that we see different problems.  A classic reader of The Sonnets thinks the problem is unrequited love.  We, on the other hand, understand that the problem is that Shakespeare is breaking form and not using the 4442 structure in Section 4.  Therefore, it’s not the poet’s emotional love that needs to be recured, but rather, the arrangement of his poems.  Shakespeare is telling us that he is sad because his sonnets have jumped off the rail and he won’t be happy until they are back on course.

Obviously, there’s a lot of dramatic irony here.  We know these emotions are from the character of the narrator, not Shakespeare himself.  The Bard fully had the ability to write in a 4442 style and make Section 4’s 16232 format never happen.  Hence, he’s acting for dramatic purposes.  For readers, this is fine, but it does show us how important the structure is to Shakespeare.  Even if he’s using a melodramatic persona, he’s telling us, the readers in the know, that, the moment he stops using the structure, he is sad and wants to revert to the way things are “supposed to be.”

The last thing part of the poem I want to focus on is a word in line 12.  It’s quote “recounting.”  Here’s the line: “Of thy fair health, recounting it to me.”  Normally, a word like “recounting” wouldn’t be worth noting, but here, it is a notable word because we can extrapolate a new meaning.  Merriam Webster’s top definition is: “to relate in detail,” and I think we’re all highly familiar with that meaning of the word recounting.  However, I believe we can also use some poetic license.  “Recounting” could also mean “reordering,” as in: changing the order of numbers.  I’ll back this up by pointing out that, in this poem, Shakespeare also used the odd word, “recured.”  In essence, he’s putting the R-E “re” prefix on multiple words.  This further supports the idea that the structure is jumping off the rails.  It’s just one word, but it's worth noting because “recounting” is only used one time in the entire work, and that’s here in Sonnet 4.3.

Okay.  So let’s step back.  I’ve struggled with these two poems for a long time, and I wouldn’t say they are necessarily the easiest to figure out.  At the same time, if not for the Secret Structure, they are much less interesting than most other Sonnets and easily skippable.  That’s not my approach, and it’s why I’m making this series.  Section 4, as you know, is mostly a wasteland of forgotten poems.  Historically, the majority of them are only read by completionists and, individually, they don’t offer nearly as much to the reader as some of the more famous entries.  I’m not saying they are bad, but rather they lack the flair of the top 50 most anthologized sonnets.

But this brings me to a big point.  This is why I’m focusing on Section 4.  I want to show you that this forgotten barren wasteland is actually genius at a level that we’ve never considered.  It’s also so much fun because we get to read what traditional readers have never actually seen.  Do you remember when Sonnet 43 described these readers as having  “sightless eyes” and “unseeing eyes?”   Well, we’re not them.  So, while the narrator is sad that his secret structure is messed up, we are full of joy because we understand exactly what he’s talking about.  Or at least we think we do.

In the next episode, we’re going to move to our next pair, Sonnets 4.4 and 4.5.  These are Sonnets 46 and 47.  Instead of being out of balance, there will now be a war between the Narrator’s heart and the Narrator’s eye.  Without too much imagination, we can guess that this is a fight between the words and the structure over control of the poems.  Who will win and what will the poet do in the middle?

To find out, tune in next week.  Thanks for listening.