Please read H. Vendler's paper, and identify the different strategies Shakespeare uses in the sonnets.

Choose THREE strategies and find them in the poems you have read. Please do not use Vendler's examples. Helen Vendler identifies in her commentary of Shakespeares sonnets several compositional strategies which help the speaker of his sonnets appear as a real and believable voice to the readers, even today. As far as I understand, the classification Vendler constructs distinguishing into temporal, emotional, semantic, philosophical, perceptual and dramatic strategies, is a bit artificial. I am writing this on the basis that she is redundant inasmuch as all those are aspects of one and the same main strategy. I would rather say that Shakespeares main strategy is that of using the antithesis to construct a more complex interpretation of reality, playing with different and even contradictory viewpoints and sensitivities, yet complementary to some extent. He achieves that by presenting in the first verses what I can describe as the more immediate and simple cognition of emotions of the speakers persona, to be contrasted in the following quatrains with another. This is what Vendler means by saying that Shakespeares sonnet is a system in motion which evolves according to the trajectory of changing feelings. However, from her commentary I can distinguish three main manners in which Shakespeare achieves what has been described. First, I identify how she depicts the use of linguistic and stylistic ornaments as fanciful but not frivolous, paralleling the unfolding structure his exploration of some concepts and feelings. Second, the different sematic levels and fields that we can see interplaying, even contradicting different types of discourse (a constant fluidity of frames of reference). Finally, the use of the couplet as a sort of conclusion for a progressively complex approach to the issues concerning the specific sonnet. Taking sonnet # 66, I would first and briefly analyse Shakespeares stylistic ornament. Although ornament is typical of Renaissance lyric, as Vendler points out, it also acquires a relevant semantic function in Shakespeare and in this sonnet. For instance, since polysyndeton reinforces the speakers sense of unbearable wearing, its use does not seem vain. On the contrary, it reproduces on us that sense at the same time that it is helping the unfolding of a successively louder complaint. Furthermore, repetition of the same word and at the beginning of each verse (anaphora) adds to the sense of tedium, justifying why in the first lines he implores to die (Tired with all these, for restful death I cry) but disappearing abruptly when he realises the adverse consequence of leaving my[his] love alone. As for the contrast of different semantic levels, I would like to take sonnet # 119. Its quatrains abound in the contradiction between perceptual experience of love and the more spiritual conventions regarding it, as well as in its paradoxical charge of hopes and fears. With reference to medical field, he asks if madding fever is caused by potions made of the beloveds siren tears, and he he then outlines the physical symptoms of that evil. But after those hopes and gain are built anew, the speakers turn of viewpoint perfectly exemplifies that trajectory of changing feelings I talked about at the very beginning. Here, the semantic move towards rebuilding is not at random but echoing the intrincate and ambiguous dynamics of human relationships based on love: they undermine and re-create life on us.

Last but not least, and taking again sonnet #119, it is clear that the couplet achieves certain objective distance from what Vendler calls empathetic perception. The couplet is formulated as if it was a moral: he is not imposing on us the truth he has acknowledged by telling us a definition we are going to forget, he is instead transmitting us something he has learned after a long and painful process: So I return rebuked to my content. And he shows us his journey because we are closer to grasp all of this human feeling only when our experience (even when reading his words) recreates that non-linear trajectory from one stage to the other. That insight is what the author tries to offer the reader after having followed the entire sonnet.

Anita Steiner, 2B Ingls- IPA