The Fools Of Time

Reached a sort of ending in the great-sonnet-read-through: viz, I've just finished 126 which completes the part of the sequence that focuses on the Beloved with an extremely odd number indeed. 126 isn't really a sonnet, falling short by two lines and comprised entirely of couplets. Read it out of context and it doesn't seem particular note-worthy; read it as part of the grand design and it explodes with significance. As Paterson points out, even its number is possessed of resonance, 126 being twice 63, and 63 being the Grand Climacteric (9 X 7) with which the Elizabethans were deeply, deeply concerned. Of course, all this numerological malarkey means little to the modern reader, until you start to notice it and read from the perspective of one of those numerically obsessive-compulsive citizens of WS's England and then you get bitten too - well at least I did. 

All of which points towards a strange truth of literature (and other ways of making art.) Expose yourself to a single fine artwork and you get the whuummph of that work, assuming you are capable of response. But put that work next to another and the effect is not simply doubled. Effects and meanings multiply. And once you go beyond two we start to move into vertiginous territory.

Let me give a simple example from 126. The reference to the lovely boy at the beginning would be curiously touching, and not a little shocking, if we just had the single poem. (In fact, it's my lovely boy, of course, and the possessive pronoun works its own deranged magic in the light of the numerous claims to a kind of possession - and denials of anything of that nature - that have preceded it.) But the sudden reminder of what the whole obsessive, tortured, delirious sequence has been about, the vulnerable directness of the phrase, especially in view of the gathering sense of darkness and aging haunting the sonnets immediately leading up to this and the desperate attempts to salvage something from the wreckage, send the phrase and what it does to the alert reader into overdrive.

In some sense this is a writer's trick that fools us every time - and possibly fools the writers themselves. Poems that may have written at entirely different times are made to rub up against one another to generate something that could never have been in any sense intended at the moment of making - yet something new and strange and rich is made.