What Silent Love Hath Writ: A Psychoanalytic Exploration of Shakespeares Sonnets

Martin S. Bergmann

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Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me. Are windows to my breast, wherethrough the sun. Yet eyes this cunning want to grace their art: They draw but what they see, know not the heart. The poet clearly describes the way he fell in love with the young man as an aesthetic, or rather, an artistic process. In other words, even though the Fair Youth is the originator of beauty, the poet remains the only originator of love.

As Vendler puts it in most illuminating terms: This etymological pun is central. The image of the sun serves the metaphorical expression of this process. As far as this image is concerned, both Vendler and Knight 33 consider the sun as an allegory, i. Moreover, it has been demonstrated so far that the sun is a common metaphor in the Sonnets standing for the eye of the young man. Understanding this image in this way leads us forward in our analysis. This indeed is interesting as it creates an imbalance in love, one which permeates the sequence as a whole.

The lover looks at the beloved, but the beloved, as he looks through the poet, only looks at himself. The very nature of their love, so depicted, is therefore a one-way relationship; it has two subjects but only one object: This kind of consideration is common in Elizabethan sequences. The mistress is always considered as a stony heart, incapable of loving anyone but herself. She is a chaste Diana Cynthia: Richard II , ii. The state of emotional fulfilment felt by the poet is only made possible when visual contact is achieved: It has been argued that the poet considers love as a case of artistic representation.

Yet, in the couplet of 24, he raises a problem with regard to the representation of love. Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war. My heart doth plead that thou in him dost lie,. But the defendant doth that plea deny,. And says in him thy fair appearance lies. A quest of thoughts, all tenants to the heart ,. And by their verdict is determined. This sonnet reaffirms the basic dichotomy between essence and appearance, one that is constantly worked out in the sequence and everywhere else in Shakespeare by the way. Both eye and heart are condemned to see the Fair Friend only in part, they no longer benefit from a complete vision of him.

Nevertheless this conflict is only momentary, and in 47 an amiable truce is finally managed. The division is abolished: Betwixt mine eye and heart a league is took ,. Or heart in love with sighs himself doth smother ,. And in his thoughts of love doth share a part. So, either by thy picture or my love,. Thyself away art present still with me: For thou not farther than my thoughts canst move,. Or, if they sleep, thy picture in my sight. Here also the language is intensely visual and artistic. The point of view is no longer that of presentia depicted in 24, but that of absentia.

His body serves the artifice so as to counteract this melancholy. This, indeed, is essential. Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind ,. And that which governs me to go about. Seems seeing , but effectually is out: For it no form delivers to the heart. Of his quick objects hath the mind no part,.

Nor his own vision holds what it doth catch: The mountain or the sea, the day, or night,. The crow, or dove, it shapes them to your feature. Incapable of more, replete with you,. My most true mind thus maketh mine eye untrue. In this sonnet, the poet perceives all the aspects of the outside world through the privileged prism of his friend. His love turns to obsession, but at least, he remains safe and succeeds in enduring melancholy.

Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors. The one correct point of view. Hans Holbein, The Ambassadors detail. This consideration becomes increasingly important as the sequence unfolds. His love is, in some ways, a mirror image, hence the notion of perspective, which is itself an artistic representation of another work of art. As such, however transcendent the aesthetic experience of love expressed in the Sonnets , it remains nonetheless locked within the world of Nature and Time. High birth, vigour of bone, desert in service,. Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all. To envious and calumniating time Troilus and Cressida , iii.

The idea expressed here is one of inevitability, as though fate had decided that everything in the world was condemned to inescapable decay and extinction. Everything in nature unremittingly forecasts the dissolution to come and therefore, it is in a most paradoxical, and thereby typically Shakespearean way, that life itself becomes a veritable memento mori: When I do count the clock that tells the time,.

When I behold the violet past prime,. When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,. Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard: Then of thy beauty do I question make ,. That thou among the wastes of time must go,. Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,. And die as fast as they see others grow, He provides us with seven different avatars of time in the next seven lines: All these images follow one another with unrelenting rapidity, which creates a growing tension in the sonnet.

All of these depict the coming of death, yet they are all desperately vibrant with an ultimate breath of life as if the world intended to struggle against its own fate or destiny. What is very interesting here is that the poet extensively relies on verbs of visual perception: Yet all he sees in the world leads him to an overwhelming question which pops up in verse 9 and unfolds until verse He has discovered that everything it created was condemned to decay.

When sometime lofty towers I see down razed,. When I have seen the hungry ocean gain. Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,. When I have seen such interchange of state,. Or state itself confounded, to decay,. Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate: That time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death, which cannot choose. But weep to have that which it fears to lose. Here also the poet emphasises his own individual perception. Yet, even though the poem is in many ways similar to that presented earlier, Shakespeare nonetheless introduces here a major reversal in the tone he uses.

Indeed, the poet introduces a past tense: In other words, his visual perception of natural processes has begun to influence his very understanding of life itself, and most poignantly, his very understanding of love. He is at once committed to both a visual and a psychological kind of sensory perception. The speaker no longer analyses the world with crude objectivity and detachment, he is now involved in an intensely subjective internalisation of the natural processes he observes.

From his visual perception of the world of Nature — the creator of the young man — the poet has drawn a conclusion: This is perhaps the most essential verse in the whole sequence. In itself it symbolises the connection between love and time. It has been said earlier that, for the poet, love is an artistic emotion, a perspective the correct point of view of which is that of presentia , and the incorrect one, that of absentia.

In other words, Time will lead to death, and death will be a substitute for absentia. This very thought leads the poet to melancholy suffering, to a near-death: Burton most powerfully makes this point in his treatise as he asserts: If parting of friends, absence alone can work such violent effects, what shall death do, when they must eternally be separated, never in this world to meet again?

This is so grievous a torment for the time, that it takes away their appetite, desire of life, extinguisheth all delights, it causeth deep sighs and groans, tears, exclamations. Later on he adds: This thought obsesses the poet and, indeed, he can only live a life of melancholy. Indeed, as the poet observes Nature he becomes aware of the transient quality of all its creations.

The bitter-sweet concomitance of love and threat, intensity and vulnerability is always exploited with an incredible pathos. All things are seen in their relation to time and the burden of extinction and absence is constantly perceived in what is present, new and alive. Most often, indeed, the cure springs from the intervention of her eye which is expected to show pity. But him that at your footstool humbled lies,. Smith also shows it well enough in his Chloris as he exclaims: Which in my hart is ever permanent,.

Until my Chloris maketh me whole and sound Chloris: This may, however, sound quite surprising. Then from her Venus, and bright Mercury,. And with a pleasing poison pierced me! Which, to these utmost sobs of death, did bring me ,. Here Barnes introduces the eye motif through his reference to the planets Venus and Mercury.

Elizabethan writers used to refer to the eyes of their beloved through this metaphor. Melancholia is again contemplated here in terms of voluptas dolendi. Here again, like cures like.

Burton himself introduces the same image in the opening pages of his treatise. As he explains the reasons and rationale of his writing in his notice to the reader, he asserts: Furthermore, Shakespeare also knew of this tradition as he introduces the same simile in Cymbeline. In Act 5, Cornelius asserts: Your daughter, whom she bore in hand to love. With such integrity , she did confess.

But that her flight prevented it, she had. Here again, sight is important. As when two raging venoms are united ,. Which of themselves dissevered life would sever,. The sickly wretch of sickness is acquitted. Which else should die, or pine in torments ever. Love was the flame that fired me so neere;. The Dart transpearsing were those Christall eyes. Deepe is the wounde, my sighes doe well report: Yet doe I love , adore and praise the same.

That holds, that burns, that wounds me in this sort. Yet least long travailes be above my strength,. Good Delia , lose, quench, heale me now at length. The intertwining in these sequences of two traditionally opposed medical theories in relation with the notion of sight and love-sickness is surprising; it is yet another Elizabethan specificity which does not appear in earlier English verse. This poetic treatment springs from the very particular cultural context of Elizabethan England which, as Debus demonstrates, was the only country in Europe where such a compromise between Paracelsianism and Galenism was ever achieved In many Elizabethan sequences, sonnet writing appears as a means to convince the lady of administering the cure.

Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show,. That she dear she might take some pleasure of my paine: Pleasure might cause her reade, reading might make her know,. Knowledge might pitie winne, and pitie grace obtaine. This informs us well enough as to the motivations of sonnet writing. This train of thought is perfectly perceptible in most Elizabethan sonnet sequences.

For instance, in Delia , Daniel exclaims: These plaintive verse , the Posts of my desire,. Which haste for succour to her slowe regard,. My humble accents beare the Olive bough. He thus concludes his sequence with the following words: These tributarie plaints fraught with desire. I send those eyes, the cabinets of love. From out this hell, which mine afflictions prove: Wherein I thus do live cast downe from myrth,. Pensive alone, none but dispaire about mee;. My joyes abortive, perrisht at their birth ,. I say no more, I feare I said too much. Muse of sadness, neere deaths fashion,. Too neere madnesse , write my passion.

Paines possesse mee, sorrows spill mee,. Cares distress mee, all would kill mee. Hopes have faild mee, Fortune foild mee ,. Feares have quaild me, all have spoild mee. Woes have worne mee, sighes have soakt mee,. Thoughts have torne mee, all have broke mee. Beauty strooke me, love hath catcht mee,. Death hath tooke mee, all dispatcht mee. The same motive of writing can be found in Sidney, Spenser, and indeed in most contemporaries. The lyrical selves of Sidney, Drayton, Griffin, Daniel or Spenser present their sonnets as a means to show their mistress the extent of their grief in order to have her see the richness of their love and the impact of the wound she inflicted upon them.

Like other Elizabethan sonneteers, Shakespeare writes in order to find a remedy for melancholia, but, because his melancholia springs from a different context, the rationale of his sonnet writing is different. This section will be dedicated to the procreation sonnets in which the poet tirelessly attempts to urge the Fair Youth to procreate, i. This process may very well be interpreted as a way to overcome the absentia imposed by Time. This argument is still made stronger when one considers the way the speaker addresses his motivations. In other words, he wants to eternise the aesthetic emotion of love and to enable forthcoming generations to contemplate the artwork the youth represents.

In these sonnets 1 to 17 , ocular images take on a new meaning. As he intends to urge the youth to transmit his beauty to his offspring, the poet resorts to a treasure trove of rhetorical devices in order to drive his point home. The poet unremittingly calls him to look upon himself objectively: Indeed, most of these sonnets follow a similar pattern: In other words, by means of this analogical patterning, he tries hard to persuade the youth to look at himself indirectly, through the mirror of the world, as if from a distance.

This train of thought is typical of Sonnet 3 wherein the mirroring process is explicitly referred to: Look in thy glass , and tell the face thou viewest. Now is the time that face should form another ,. Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest. Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother. Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry? Or who is he so fond will be the tomb. Of his self-love , to stop posterity? Calls back the lovely April of her prime: So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,. Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time. But if thou live, remembered not to be,.

Die single, and thine image dies with thee. Here, the poet tries to convince the young man to look at himself in the glass. He expects that this will lead to his acknowledging the necessity for him to father children so that his beauty may be renewed in his offspring. This kind of incentive is not typically Shakespearean. I once may see when yeres shall wreck my wrong ,. When golden hayres shall change to silver wier: And those bright rays that kindle all this fire.

Shall faile in force their working not so stronge. When if she grieve to gaze her in the glasse ,. Which then presents her winter-withered hew ,. Goe you, my verse , goe tell her what she was,. For what shee was shee best shall finde in you. Sighing and sadly sitting by my Love ,. To tell the cause which me so much did move. Love is the cause; and only love it is. That doth deprive me of my heavenly blisse. Love is the paine that doth my heart opresse. Looke in this glasse quoth I and there shalt thou see. The perfect form of my faelicitie. When, thinking it would strange Magique prove ,.

He straight perceived himself to be my Lover. In both sonnets, the glass turns out to be the touchstone for the beloved. In other words, she will recognise her past beauty in this mirror when this beauty fades. Whereas Daniel inscribes the process of recognition in the future, Barnfield inscribes it in the present. But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,.

Making a famine where abundance lies,. Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel. Here, as the bawdy, sexually-soliciting and over-sweating goddess attempts to compromise the unresponsive adolescent into a passive rape, she exclaims: Is thine own heart to thine own face affected? Can thy right hand seize love upon thy left? Then woo thyself, be of thyself rejected,. Steal thine own freedom and complain on theft.

And died to kiss his shadow in the brook. But even more important, perhaps, are the implications of this reference to Narcissus. Narcissus is of scornfulnesse and pryde a myrror cleere,. Where beawties fading vanitie most playnly may appeere.

The contagion of this mirror image is indeed most interesting as it also occurs with the same meaning in the Sonnets. Furthermore, in her Paradoxia Epidemica , Rosalie Colie puts forward a most illuminating statement about mirrors: This clearly enhances the dialectic of the palpable and the non-existent being, and that of essence and appearance which literally infuses the sequence. The young man looks in the glass at his own reflection and, this very reflection — which is not alive — looks back at him as through the very eyes of death.

This train of thought was made most clearly explicit by countless artists in the Renaissance visual arts. Therefore, in Sonnet 3, the looking glass becomes a most powerful metonymy for the hourglass: The youth is not merely split between observer and observed, he is also a mirror himself: As such, this sonnet has to be construed as a series of recognitions. First, the young man is called upon to observe his reflection in the glass and to recognise his beauty. Finally, the poet argues that the youth projects the reflection of his mother and that he is therefore a mirror himself.

This, indeed, is central to the understanding of this sonnet and to the understanding of the motives of writing expressed in the procreation sonnets as a whole. Each of them serves as a mirror. By their witty plays on analogy, all the procreation sonnets intend to have the youth look at himself from a distance, to get him look at death in the face and realise that he, also, like all those objects, will die. They are mirrors held up to the youth, intended to show him the reasons why he should preserve this beauty by transferring it from himself to another.

Nevertheless, it has been argued earlier that Time and Death can be considered as epitomes of absentia , as a threat to Love which cannot simply be healed with so simple a trick. However, things do not work out this way. Death in the mirror. Looking glass, hourglass 2. Hans Baldung Grien, The three ages of woman and death. The poet fails to convince the youth to procreate, and accordingly, the rationale of his writing changes.

The same idea crops up in Sonnet Give my love fame faster than time wastes life,. The poet holds a mirror up to the Young man — he gives him reasons to procreate — in order to have him show his beauty to others through his son. These sonnets are therefore designed to show the youth something. To some extent, this is also true for the immortalisation sonnets, for instance, in Sonnet 77, the poet exclaims: Thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear,. And of this book, this learning mayst thou taste: Look what thy memory cannot contain ,.

Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find. Those children nursed , delivered from thy brain ,. To take a new acquaintance of thy mind. These offices, so oft as thou wilt look,. Shall profit thee, and much enrich thy book. As he forecasts the future, the poet gives a great importance to the notion of memory. Nevertheless, two different kinds of memories are envisaged in this poem.

When the days of beauty are gone, the book will act as a reminder for the friend: His Sonnet 33 provides a similar treatment. Goe you , my verse , goe tell her what she was ,. Your fierie heate lets not her glorie passe,. But Phenix-like shall make her live anew. This is made particularly explicit in 81 as the speaker exclaims: Your name from hence immortal life shall have ,.

Your monument shall be my gentle verse ,. You still shall live, such virtue hath my pen,. Where breath most breathes, even in the mouths of men. This sonnet is particularly interesting as it synthesises the aim of the poet. As he envisages the day when one of them dies, he defines and construes his verse as an epitaph. His work will be a monument and survive the youth. In other words, poetry will celebrate the memory of the friend in the eyes of forthcoming generations. Here the reader is definitely reminded of Sonnet So long as men can breathe or eyes can see ,.

So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Nevertheless, contrary to other Elizabethan sonneteers who intend to show the extent of their grief to their mistress in order to seduce her and obtain the cure for their melancholy suffering, Shakespeare, whose melancholy springs from his fear of absentia, transforms the original aim of his Sonnets. They become a monument. In other words, he makes up for his fear of absentia by transposing his aesthetic vision onto the suspended, ever-present moment of a poetic emotion. Nevertheless, in 17 he questions the ability of his verse to do so: Who will believe my verse in time to come,.

If it were filled with your most high deserts? Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb,.

Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts: If I could write the beauty of your eyes ,. And in fresh numbers number all your graces,. So should my papers yellowed with their age. Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,. And stretched metre of an antique song; Sonnet 54 informs us well enough as to the way the poet intends to overcome these difficulties: By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!

When that shall vade, by verse distils your truth. Indeed, the aim of this sonnet is clear enough: He expresses such notions in the same imagery he already used earlier in 5 and 6, that of the distillation of flowers. The essence of the original principle is kept, but it is unpolluted, concentrated and enhanced by poetry. The sonnet itself therefore takes on a performative value as it literally distils and extracts the quintessence of the words used: In other words, poetry is presented as a means to extract the quintessence of the young man: The arrival of the Rival Poet in the sequence informs us as to the way this poetic distillation is performed.

For him, his poetry is unfaithful to his subject. This excerpt from Sonnet 82 is a good example of this: And do so my love; yet when they have devised. What stained touches rhetoric can lend ,. And their gross painting might better be used. Where cheeks need blood; in thee it is abused. It is very interesting as it opposes true art and artifice. Shakespeare goes on with this painting metaphor and definitely establishes the climactic condemnation of these uses in I never saw that you did painting need,.

I found or thought I found you did exceed. That you yourself, being extant, well might show.

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How far a modern quill doth come too short,. Speaking of worth, what worth in you doth grow. For I impair not beauty, being mute,. When others would give life, and bring a tomb.

Chapter 2 from What Silent Love Hath Writ by Martin S. Bergmann and Michael Bergmann

There lives more life in one of your fair eyes. Than both your poets can in praise devise. Here Shakespeare asserts the simple truth of his verse. Conversely, the Rival presents everything, claims everything real and as such, does not appeal to our imagination. The Rival creates nothing new, nothing individual, nothing universal, but rather copies what already is. Il y a de la trahison dans cette sorte de modestie: Even if the context is different, that is precisely what Shakespeare does for us in his Sonnets , and the impact they had on generations of readers shows it well enough.

He opens for us the highway to imagination. He isolates a moment of pure emotion, and turns it into shape on the physical texture of a piece of paper. Turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing. A local habitation and a name.

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The poet derives feelings and sensations from his visual, aesthetic observations. However, there is enough explicit metastylistic material in his plays and poems so as to provide us with a clear view of his own conception of art, of how he followed the artistic philosophy of his day and age, and to what extent he distinguished himself within and from it. As such, when confronted to the Sonnets, one is obviously called upon to consider the metastylistic explorations of Sonnet Here answering the laments of the fashionable Fair Youth, Shakespeare lauches into an apologia of his own.

As far as the eye is concerned, all of them extensively draw on older sources. Their works feature images which were already present with the classics, yet, these are newly adjusted to the Elizabethan culture. This comparative reading has nonetheless revealed that Shakespeare reverses this renewed convention. Like others he clads old words in the new robes of inventive novelty, yet, he does it in a very different way. He does not merely update old poetic topoi, he rather readjusts them it in his own idiosyncratic way.

In his Arte of English Poesie , Puttenham wrote: The very Poet makes and contriues out of his owne braine both the verse and the matter of his poeme, and not by any foreine copie or example, as doth the translator, who therefore may well be sayd a versifier but not a Poet All the sequences we studied so far only partially fulfil this definition. As far as the Sonnets are concerned, they are constantly informed by the Elizabethan literary tradition.

It clearly appears that Shakespeare is well aware of the literary tradition he uses, and that he uses it as a limit imposed only to be transgressed. The basic essence of his creation springs from his intensely personal use of a negative heuristic 52 with regard to the works of his predecessors and contemporaries. So doing, Shakespeare succeeds into injecting new blood into an already moribund, though popular, form of poetic expression.

Shakespeare breaks with this grammar of emotion: He utilises the best available literary models for the expression of love and makes them the appropriate vehicle for the entire scope of our human condition and experience, from the most basic behaviours to the subtlest states of emotion. His art becomes a veritable mirror held up to the true, essential, nature of love, one nevertheless framed in the oxidised copper squares of a poetic convention.

Wordsworth Edition Limited, Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy: Chaucerian and Other Pieces , Rev. D [], Londres, At the de la More Press, Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid , coll. Boden, The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms , Londres, Routledge, Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: Tel, Paris, Gallimard, Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: Robert Grudin, Mighty Opposites: Shakespeare and Renaissance Contrariety.

Berkeley, University of California Press, Wilson Knight, The Mutual Flame: Interpretations of Shakespearean Tragedy , Londres, Routledge, Platt, Shakespeare and the Culture of Paradox , coll. Christopher Pye, The Vanishing: Le Livre de poche, Paris, Editions de Fallois, Marguerite Tassi, The scandal of images: Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture , coll. Pelican books, Londres, Penguin books, Here is a screenshot of our application program while analysing The Merchant of Venice: For all the substantives in the list below, singular and plural occurrences were put together and as such appear here as undifferentiated.

Self-enclosed semantic units were considered as the minimal relevant units for the sake of this study, disregarding number. Mike is also a linguist; he understands the things linguists are trying to do. So, it is not really true that the way the program works is obscure. Culpeper refers to is: Unfortunately, we did not know about it when we created this software program. The concomitance of intromission and extramission, as defined by Tassi, can be construed as a metaphorical expression featuring sexual intercourse.

Although it is a tour de force, it is written in a manner that would be easy to read for almost everyone. I heartily recommend that every educated person read this book.

One person found this helpful. Quite aside from the tacit pleasure of reading Shakespeare's sonnets, many of which were unknown to me, I found this a well researched and illuminating study on several levels. The authors give us a statistical way of looking at the collected sonnets popularity, a good dose of other shakespeare scholars opinions as compared to their own, a historical placement of the ideas and language of both the sonnets and their more persistent interpretations, and tie it altogether in their unique discussion of the sonnets psychoanalytic implications mostly freudian based.

The work is both systematic and creative in its approach, and although the reader sometimes has to stumble through some awkward writing and excess repetition and re-explication there are many gems of thought in here to inspire scholars, students, and lovers alike. I was really looking forward to reading this analysis of Shakespeares' Sonnets; however, I was sadly disappointed by the writing. The text needed a polishing which only good editors could have provided. The syntax and cumbersome sentence structures present, in my opinion, hurdles which readers will find difficult to clear.

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