Aspects of Organisation in Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609)

109 Aspects of Organisation in Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609) MacD. P. Jackson The Quarto Arrangement: A Brief Survey of Opinion Ezra Pound once defined poetry as 'language charged with meaning' and distinguished three traditional means to the end. H e called them phanopoeia, logopoeia, and melopoeia — the creation of visual images for the inner eye, 'the dance of intellect a m o n g words', and the exploitation of rhythm and melody. In Shakespeare's Sonnets all these energizing forces cooperate as equals, in an ideally balanced mix. The poems are rich in imagery, presenting a kaleidoscopic metaphorical display; linguistically inventive, exploiting multiple meanings, exulting in paradoxes, and using the significant word less like a note in music than a chord, so as to stimulate intellectual activity; and, as W.H. Auden said, they are 'the work of someone whose ear is unerring' and w h o creates a sequence of sounds, cadences, stresses, and tones that modulates to express various shades of thought and feeling. Pound also wrote of an 'architectonic' impulse that makes for coherence and completeness.3 This is the shaping, unifying faculty that subordinates the part to the whole and strives for a satisfying temporal progression: beginning, middle, end. 1 Literary Essays ofEzra. Pound, ed. by T.S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1954), pp 26. 2 W.H. Auden, introduction to Signet William Shakespeare: The Sonnets (Ne York: N e w American Library, 1964), ed. by William Burto, p. xxvi. 3 Literary Essays, p. 26. 110 MacD. P. Jackson Individual sonnets show ample evidence of this organizing power. Each comes in its o w n neat fourteen-line package. But this is not just a mechanical matter of metre and rhyme-scheme. Each poem has its own inner dynamic, developing as a logical structure of ideas, attitudes, and emotions that are resolved, as in a piece of music, in the couplet close. 'In its Shakespearean incarnation', says Helen-Vendler, 'the sonnet is a system in motion, never immobile for long, and with several subsystems going their way within the whole.' But each 'system in motion' achieves its point of rest and closure. Vendler, in her recent book, is chiefly concerned with h o w each sonnet is organized, and with certain structural principles that are c o m m o n to nearly all. She points, for instance, to what she terms 'the couplet tie', by which the Shakespearean sonnet form's concluding couplets — often judged redundant or unconvincing — are integrated into the total scheme as an enactment of shifting feelings. Key words in the preceding quatrains are almost invariably picked up in the last two lines. Vendler provides a brilliant analysis of those sets of relations among syntactic, metrical, imagistic, grammatical, and lexical units that give such extraordinary variety within the constraints of the iambic pentameter, three-quatrainplus couplet form. Her introduction has a section headed 'The Architecture of the Sonnet'. A Shakespearean sonnet is fraught with Pound's 'architectonic' intent. But what of the whole Quarto sequence? Does it show similar evidence of Shakespeare's shaping hand — of organization, architecture, design? Is it, in any significant sense, an artifact, greater than the s u m of its component parts? Are those carefully formed fourteen-line units built into a larger structure, or is the Quarto l i t t l e more than a rubble-heap of assorted bricks? Shakespeare's Sonnets, numbered 1 to 154, were published in a Quarto of 1609, together with the 329-line poem in rhyme royal 'A Lover's Complaint'. Because the enigmatic dedication was signed with the initials not of the poet but of the publisher, Thomas Thorpe, and the text suffers from many misprints, i t has been widely assumed that 4 Helen Vendler, The Art ofShakespeare's Sonnets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 22. Aspects ofOrganisation in Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609) 111 Shakespeare was in no way responsible for the Quarto publication. In contrast, the early narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, were openly dedicated to the Earl of Southampton by Shakespeare himself and were virtually error-free. So the Quarto order of the sonnets has been judged unauthoritative and...