Now up to Sonnet 41 on the 2012 Shakespeare Sonnet read-through, and very pleased with myself for having discovered this way of approaching the Bard at his most personal. (As a result of Don Paterson's persuasiveness on this matter, I have to regard the sequence as definitely a personal outpouring rather than a kind of poetic drama enacted at arm's length, as it were.)
It's chastening to realise just how little I really knew the sonnets as a sequence, but it's as a sequence they need to be read, just as a really great album needs to be listened to in the sequence finally agreed upon by its makers (in the days when such things counted.) Sonnet 18, always a personal favourite, comes even more blazingly to life, for example, as it goes in a new direction from the first seventeen. Suddenly it's not just beautiful in itself, but a breakthrough into the previously unthinkable - and it thrills.
No comments:
Post a Comment