Sonnet 73
Author(s): Richard B. Hovey
Source: College English, Vol. 23, No. 8 (May, 1962), pp. 672-673
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/373787
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672
COLLEGE
ENGLISH
PAN AND BUFFALO BILL
David Ray, in a footnote to his article
on "The Irony of E. E. Cummings" (Jan.
1962), interprets the "goat-footed balloon
Man"as a symbol of the tainted adult world
waiting to betray the childhood world of
innocence. Aside from the fact that nothing
of the sort happens explicitly or implicitly
in the poem, and aside from the difficulty
of associating the wild god of the woods
(Pan) with a world of "shady adult knowledge," Professor Ray's reading of this poem
is further refuted by Cummings'own comment on it in i:six nonlectures. There he
refers to the balloonmanas "a roguish and
resistlessMore Than Someone," a "Turbulent Individual Incognito"-in short, the
erotic Spirit of Spring, "obedient" to Nature's "each resurrection" (33-34).
Indeed, I would question Professor Ray's
lengthy reading of the Buffalo Bill poem
as well. It is not necessary to find irony
in Cummings either to differentiate him
from Sandbergor to rescue him from English reviewers. No one is more critical of
the hollow aspectsof American culture than
Cummings,but I doubt whether he thinks
Buffalo Bill is one of them. He has always
loved the circus and its performers: the
whole poem is a celebration of deathless
skill, a skill which, like all good art, transcends mortal limitations. If there is any
irony in the poem, it is directed at Mister
Death.
NORMAN FRIEDMAN
University of Connecticut
REPLY
Mine is a frankly Freudianapproach,one
that admits latent as well as manifest meanings; Freud observes in his essay "The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming" that
if we ask the poet to account for the source
of his material he can give no satisfactory
explanation. The poet has a preferential
but not final authority in explicating his
own work; Cummings'statement is not at
all contradictory to my thesis, given my
premises.However, Friedmanis content to
read the poem the way the T.L.S. critic
did; if the poem is really that simple I
see no need for its explication at all. Furthermore, even if one were not a Freudian
it would be difficult to ignore the evidence
of Bill's historical loss of face, a fact familiar to Cummings when he wrote the
poem (See Henry Nash Smith's Virgin
Land); Bill was hardly a heroic figure when
the dime novelists finishedwith him. As for
the Sandburg poem, I thought it provided
an interesting juxtapositionfor teaching.
DAVID RAY
Cornell University
SONNET 73
It is perhaps ungracious to feel disquietude after pondering James Schroeter's
critique of this Shakespeareanpoem (CE,
January 1962). For all that erudition, diligence, and ingenuity can do to fourteen
lines of verse, Mr. Schroeter has done.
Nevertheless, I fear that his abilities as a
scholar-critic have got between him and
the poem.
My first objection is that he reads into
Shakespeare'simagery a post-card prettiness
which the text in no way implies. In Sonnet 73 the poet-narratorcompares his state
with three things: autumn, the passing of
day, and the burning out of a fire. To each
of these comparisons Shakespeare devotes
a quatrain, a quatrain which develops a
metaphor.Mr. Schroeter insists that in each
quatrainthe "primary"metaphor designates
what is cheerful and optimistic; and that
only the "secondary" metaphors suggest
the painful and pessimistic.In other words,
only after the richness of the harvest are
we reminded that now the boughs are
"bare, ruin'd"; only after the tranquility
of the sunset do we encounter "black
night"; and only after the fellowship of
firelight must we recall that the blaze "must
expire." Our error, says Mr. Schroeter, has
been to concentrate upon the melancholy
REBUTTAL
"secondary"metaphors. In this error, evidently, most of the pre-Schroeteriancommentatorshave persisted.
In the first place, I challengeMr. Schroeter's assertion that images connected with
autumn, twilight, and fire are always, or
even generally, cheerful and pleasant. Mr.
Schroeteris certainthat the Bard used them
as indicators of sweetness, pleasure, and
cheer: "fall with abundanceand the harvest
season, twilight with rest from labor, firelight with conviviality, warmth and good
cheer. All are visually picturesque . . . and
in the same way-in their connection, for
example, with warm and glowing colors:
the brilliantreds and oranges of the autumn
foliage, the hazy reds and oranges of the
sunset, the special kind of orange-red glow
of burning embers."
All of this is fine and desirable.But none
of it is in Shakespeare'ssonnet. The glorious
autumnfoliage exists only in Mr. Schroeter's
imagination;for in Sonnet 73 "yellow leaves,
or none, or few, do hang upon those
boughs." It is likewise hard to see where
Mr. Schroeter found his red and orange
sunset. Shakespearedoes not compare his
condition to the splendors of the sunset,
but to "the twilight of such day/ As after
sunset fadeth in the west." As for the fire,
it lies "on the ashes of his youth." Usually
ashes are black or gray or whitish and quite
without any "orange-red glow." At any
rate, this is a fire which is personified;and
it lies on "the death-bed whereon it must
expire." Moreover, if these images are so
bright and cheerful, why, we ask Mr.
Schroeter, did Shakespearenot accompany
them with gayer verbal music, rather than
so many slow and prolonged vowels?
Shakespeare'sthree metaphors point to
universally natural and human phenomena
-to an inevitable part of existence as we
know it. We cannot escape the facts of
transience, decay, and death. These are
bitter and painful to contemplate. How,
then, has Shakespeare made our tragic
awarenessa little more bearable?His resolution here is an act of faith: affrontingthe
universal gloom, he asserts the supreme
value of love. And because he bodies forth
this assertion in music and imagery of
austere beauty, he hints that love endures.
My chief quarrel with Mr. Schroeter is
that in glossing over what is unmistakably
tragic, he has virtually ignored what is so
obviously the heart of this sonnet: love.
RICHARDB. HovEY
REPLY
Mr. Hovey is undoubtedly right to be
vigilant, skeptical and hard-headed about
new interpretations.Every scholar owes it
to himself to be cautious in accepting new
views, especially about such well-settled
matters as Sonnet 73. But it ought to be
pointed out that his insisting that Shakespeare's three quatrains can in "no way"
suggest any beauty or warmth, not even
latently, leaves him with two questionsthat
demand an answer.
First, how is one to account for the choice
and progression of the images? Why does
Shakespearedecide to write about autumn,
twilight and fire rather than winter, night
and ashes, and why are the images chosen
so as to progress from least warm (autumn)
to most warm (fire), and from least red
(yellow leaves) to most red (burning embers)? Why, furthermore, do all three
images form part of a whole and increasingly intimate context in which the presence
of one part increases rather than decreases
the beauty of the others?
673
University of Maryland
Secondly, where does the "supremevalue
of love," which Mr. Hovey finds in the
couplet, come from when one denies the
presence of any loveliness in the quatrains?
Is not this "supreme value," which Mr.
Hovey thinks suddenly affronts the "universal gloom," merely a shallow deus-exmachinaunless it has been preparedfor by
everything which comes before?
I quite agree that there is no "post-card
prettiness" in Shakespeare's imagery. Its
strength comes from the fact that autumn,
twilight and firelight, which could so easily
be softened and sentimentalized,never are.
But one should not fail to keep in mind
that it is, after all, autumn, twilight and
firelight with which Shakespeareanalogizes
old age, and that the "love" is based on this
analogy rather than-as in Arnold's "Dover
Beach"-a blind "faith"suddenly affronting
a "universalgloom."
JAMESSCHROETER
Temple University