Shakespeare SONNET 1 | Close Reading, Summary & Analysis
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- čas přidán 31. 01. 2022
- A reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet 1 ("From fairest creatures we desire increase") followed by commentary.
Introduction to Shakespeare's Sonnets: docs.google.com/document/d/1P...
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Thank you so much! I'm not a native English speaker, and this really helps a lot for me to appreciate Shakespeare's works.
Thank you, sir, for this lovely contribution to Booktube. It’s intriguing to see how some commentators are quick to slap their own interpretations onto this sonnet. I think this approach is harmful, not only to the artwork itself (it’s like forcing a square peg into a round hole; I fear many a beautiful piece will sadly be lost in the shuffle), but also to the reader’s poetic pleasure.
This reminds me of a tale about two French luminaries, the poet Mallarme and the painter Degas. Degas, who dabbled in poetry in his spare time, once bumped into Mallarme and bemoaned his inability to pen a poem due to a lack of ideas. Mallarme’s response was enlightening: “My dear Degas, poems aren’t crafted from ideas, but from words.”
I believe that’s the key point that many non-poets struggle to grasp when it comes to reading poetry and the whole experience. If we set out to decipher what Shakespeare is conveying in this sonnet (and I do think we should do that, too), or any other poet in any other poem, we’re missing the mark, we fail to truly appreciate what poetry is about. It’s about language, sound, rhythm, mood, shape (consider the sonnet as a form, as a contrast of black and white, as a set of lines, often with the same number of syllables, with pauses in the same place, with rhymes, internal or at the end of line, etc), associations, conscious and unconscious reactions of our mind and/or emotion, it’s an author reaching out to us and we imagining back to him/her.
It’s a splendid, boundless, eternal exchange of numerous forces of intellect, passion, logic, prosody, hearing, seeing, even smelling, etc. - it’s a universe in verse, and yes, it can sometimes be inverse, but so what! We’re not there to play detective and solve a mystery; we’re there to revel and unravel, to live, and to take flight, for which we all have deep, deep yearnings at our winged core. I tip my hat to you, gents, and shall say no more.
Beautifully said!
I am a high school student, and I have two years to graduate. I intend to study English literature at university, become a university professor, and change the education plan in my country, or at least in the college that I will enter.
*I am not a native English speaker. My mother tongue is Arabic, but I love English
thank you for you'r videos
That was very helpful, thank you. It's amazing what we miss if we don't know where and how to look.
Thanks for your reading and breakdown. Very helpful for gaining insight into the meanings. I love how it's sparking thought and conversation too.
Thank you so much for the lesson. Your setup is so aesthetic. It makes me wanna read every poetry in the world. ❤
Dude , I’m so glad you did this
Thanks for this; and also for the document in the description with further references.
A great attempt at explaining a genius masterpiece.
Sharing this is incredibly open-handed of you. Your lectures on literature are excellent, better than most I paid a king's ransom for in university: it isn't just that you're knowledgeable, articulate, and well-prepared. Your love of the subject really comes through. Bravo sir.
This is very kind; thank you! I'm so glad you enjoy them.
Thank you!!
Thank you Adam from Lisboa, Portugal. Your way of doing this is gracefully honest and genuine. These days, to say no more, I guess it is all about empty content overridingCZcams videos begging for money in the name of whocaresanythingoesmeimy. Blessed you be.
This is so generous of you. Thank you, Paulo!
Great video. made the messages of one of my favorite sonnet clearer, also pointed out poetic devices I overlooked before.
Thanks so much - I'm glad you liked it!
Thanks a lot. You explain very clearly.
This is wonderful! Thanks!
Love this thank you !
Thank You for helping me study for my Lit test. Appreciate you making this video.
Thank you for your thanks! Good luck on your test!
thank you for the video!
Thank you good sir for such useful video, i suggest if you had the time to make a complete beginner to advance series of videos because i am totally new to english literature and don’t seem to find a proper series of lessons to follow up with. Thanks ❤
Thank you, very clear and helpful.
Exactly the kind of channel I was looking for. Thank you!
i love this, your voice is so caming
Well explained
Very helpful
great stuff! I know 80% of the words as a non native speaker, but understand 0% of what the poem expresses. Thanks for analyzing
New subscriber!
Thank you!
In a sense, it is also a carpe diem poem.
“Die”, “memory”, “eye”, it should be noted, would have also rhymed.
Thanks for adding this!
I have a question: Once the Christian tradition is also a influence on this sonnet, as it is the Greek mythology, can the word "beauty" be seeing not only as physical beauty (Narcissus fell in love with his own external appearece) but also as "spiritual beauty"? If the Old Testament talks about "increase", the New Testament, specially the Gospels, is more concerned, I think, about spreading the word and how to cultivate purity of soul, true faith, and then the young man's crime would be against these two missions. Does it make any sense?!
I did this through school as well I know a bit willows snakspri
what do these words mean ( feed'st and mak'st) ????
"feed'st" is like the modern English "feed," like "feed myself" (to eat) or to "feed a fire," to put tender on a fire. "Mak'st" is like the modern English "make" (to do). I hope that helps!
@@closereadingpoetry yes i got it , it’s like ancient English or old fashioned. Thank you alot prof ❤️🧡💛
@@closereadingpoetry but i just want to make sure of something , once i took that the meaning of make can’t have the same meaning of do ; because the meaning of make means ( producing something) and the meaning of do means ( performing something ).
6:30 Are you sure it's conTENT, not CONtent?
I am there's
Shakespeare would definitely like femboys if he was alive now 👍🏻
It is a thinly disguised pornographic writing.... where the narrator is luring and seducing a young male virgin to give up his virginity.... Renaissance poetry are coded, they have two meanings, one for the public audience, the other for the patron, the private sponsor - another encoded meaning... 11. Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
content = substance. Also, probably, pleasure. GBE suggests that content also = semen, and probably there is here a secondary meaning of masturbation, self-pleasure, as opposed to the pleasure of procreation. SB mentions that Shakespeare exploits the possibility that rosebuds were phallic in appearance. (p.324. note to 12-13). Content(s) even today has the double meaning of a) happiness, pleasure, and b) that which is contained in something.
12. And, tender churl, mak'st waste in niggarding:
tender churl - probably a phrase indicating affection, rather than criticism, rather like 'silly fool', or 'yer daft idiot'. The context makes all the difference to such forms, which spoken angrily can be insulting, spoken tenderly are terms of endearment. churl countryman, rustic;
mak'st waste = creates waste; lays waste, makes a desert; spills semen.
niggarding = being miserly, stingy. www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonnet/1
Two men can't make a baby dumb dumb so its defintley not about the author seducing a young man
@@Laocoon283 It is a SONNET, not real life. Don't get so sexcited. Yet. Calm down. Take a cold shower, man!
@@hokkiengospel I'm so fuckin horny I cant stop reading this poem without thinking about gay masturbation...
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@@hokkiengospel The only thing I'm gonna practice is beating my fuking meat while reading Shakespeare
Bro your gonna get canceled lmao
The narrator is writing a SONNET from BELOVED to a LOVER. In those days, narrators were male. The BELOVED was also a MALE. However, the wordings were made "straight" to avoid censorship and accusations of sodomy. The allegory of the ROSE thus has 2 meanings but the ROSEBUD cannot be as accurate an allegory of the phallus (glans) as it is to the emblem of the yoni. It is thus obvious illegal sexual preying on the young was illegal content in those days. The "sonnet" is a "seduction device" that the richer powerful decadent rulers who practised sodomy (illegal in a Christian society) despite church restrictions. The narrator is actually pleading with the Narcissus - the beloved - not to engage in solipsism (a code for male masturbation) - but to "share" his seeds of "Beauty" with the narrator. I.E. anal intercourse. This was a literary device used for sexual grooming of pre-pubescent boys / boys in early teens. The average life expectancy was around 40 in those days due to war and famine, and young boys were preyed on for free sex. Commercial sex in London was in bawdy houses (whorehouses) but the narrator and that population subgroup could not afford this. So this type of pornography became popular, sold. This was not allowed in the preceding era - the Middle Ages, but in the Age of Renaissance, this type of immorality became "tolerated" and mainstream. You are misinterpreting the meaning of the poetry because you have had a very censored literary education. Poems like these were not that "refined" or "literary" in those days. They were considered mainstream, popular, vulgar. Refined works in those days were the Holy Scriptures and Latin / Greek classical works. Poems like these are equivalent to Mariah Carey songs of today. There is anachronism in the way you interpreted this sonnet.
Hey, thanks for giving us these thoughtful comments! Just a few points:
Simply because this poem is a sonnet doesn't warrant an exclusively homoerotic interpretation. These sonnets were composed in the middle of the sonnet craze in the 1590s, when poets like Sidney, Barnes, Drayton, Spenser, and others were composing sonnet cycles. Many poets experimented with the out-worn conventional use of this form by changing it up, addressing sonnets to God, to rivers, to their friends, or to their patrons. It didn't necessarily entail romantic relationship, although it could. The narrator's attraction to whomever he addresses isn't introduced until Sonnet 20--or possibly sonnet 15--but not here.
The language of this sonnet may very well be encoded as you say. Garden imagery had been used to represent love long before Shakespeare and the middle ages, but where is the evidence that this garden imagery here is used to persuade the young man to "'share' his seeds of 'Beauty' with the narrator. I.E. anal intercourse," as you say? The word "seeds" isn't in the sonnet. There is nothing suggesting anal intercourse. Nor is there anything in this sonnet that suggests that the narrator wants to be the object of the young man's desire (he asks him to "pity the world" not "pity me") or that the young man is the object of the narrator's desire. The narrator tries to persuade the young man not to channel his love and affection to himself (not to be "contracted to thine own bright eyes" (l. 11) and not to "eat the world's due" (14)). I'll grant that the making "waste" *may* entail masturbation but it doesn't at the exclusion of any other interpretation; and there is certainly no appeal by the narrator to the young man in this sonnet.
Since these poems were circulated privately during the poet's lifetime and published after Shakespeare's death, why should the poet be so concerned about censorship? You suggested below that Shakespeare was too uneducated to mean anything other than sex in this sonnet. Shakespeare knew enough French, Greek, Latin, world history, warfare, theology, travel, courtship, and botany to write his plays. Why shouldn't we expect such education and sophistication be present in his sonnets?
You think I'm sanitizing this sonnet of its hidden sexual meanings. Some scholars *have* done this, true, but I'm not. To say that this sonnet is the narrator's encoded pass at a young man for sexual attention is to misread the poem. But your concerns about homosexual culture in Elizabethan England and its significance to poetry and the arts has not been neglected by scholars. A lot of academics (the English Department types that you accused of misreading poetry) have explored the concerns of homosexuality and the lyric in Shakespeare's day. See the work of Robert Martin, Thomas E. Yingling, Barbara Lewalski and others.
You have to be careful of the danger opposite to that of neglect, that of reading too much into a poem that isn't there.
To claim that this poem is a sexual invitation to the young man that reads like a contemporary pop song, is also misleading. You miss the fact that this kind of argumentation--persuading young men to marry--was common in Shakespeare's times. Erasmus's "Epistle to persuade a young man to marriage" was a popular text and was available to Shakespeare in Thomas Wilson's translation and rhetoric manual.
This poem *is* about procreation, among other things. Let the sonnet speak for itself. The first quatrain establishes the theme of procreation explicitly as do the allusions throughout the second and third quatrains which allude to New Testament parables and use organic and inorganic imagery.
Thanks for your enthusiastic comments. In my videos on this channel, I try to model careful reading by navigating between the Scylla of neglecting what is present in a poem and the Charybdis of reading too much into it.
@@closereadingpoetry Man, if it's possible, I would like to talk with you some day. I'm Brasilian and I liked so much the video and your writing habilities here. God bless your whole life.
This poem is about homosexual masturbation in a time when sodomy was punishable by death. It's most definitely NOT about "procreation".
Tell us more about why you think so. What in the poem supports your interpretation?
The history of England.
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In modern US language, this poem may be simplified to a Justin Bieber song with suggestive lyrics, "Let's XXXX".... you are over-reading the poem and poisoning it with meanings that didn't exist at that time ... i.e. that it is super-rarefied, philosophical. Shakespeare was considered an uneducated vulgar playwright for the masses. He was not educated at Oxbridge and definitely not a Marlowe. Many academics misread his poetry to get more funds from the English department, the Philosophy Faculty, the Theatre/Drama Institutes, the Science Institute, etc etc