Wednesday, Jan. 18 ~ Don't let your beauty die!!!!

Since we were talking about it, here are a couple of those feely love sonnets...

Journal 4: For each sonnet below, complete the three steps:

1. Crafty: What lines, words or phrases reveal Shakespeare's beauty and skill in his word craft? (and why of course). 
2. Curious: What parts did you have a tough time understanding?
3. Clincher: What is the most important line or couplet? How does it capture the meaning of the poem?

When you finish the journal, you may work on your projects.

SONNET 6

Then let not Winter's ragged hand deface
In thee thy summer, ere thou be distill'd:
Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
With beauty's treasure, ere it be self-kill'd.
That use is not forbidden usury,
Which happies those that pay the willing loan;
That's for thyself to breed another thee,
Or ten times happier, be it ten for one;
Ten times thyself were happier than thou art,
If ten of thine ten times refigur'd thee:
Then what could Death do, if thou shouldst depart,
Leaving thee living in posterity?
    Be not self-will'd, for thou art much too fair,
    To be Death's conquest and make worms thine heir.

ragged (1): rugged or rough.
treasure (3): enrich.
use (5): interest.
happies (6): makes happy - an unusual verb and the only time Shakespeare makes use of it. The children will be happy to pay Nature (note that the children themselves are payment), who will gladly receive the bounty. 

SONNET 12

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
   And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
   Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

count (1): count the chimes.
hideous (2): The exact meaning here is likely derived from the Old French hisde meaning dread. Thus we have a balanced antithesis in brave/day and hideous/night.
prime (3): peak; also a continuation of the extended time metaphor as prime was the first hour of the day, usually 6 a.m. or the hour of sunrise (OED).
sable (4): darkest brown. Note the extensive color imagery (as we also see in Sonnet 73) -- violet, sable, green, silver, white.
canopy (6): shelter.
erst (6): formerly.
summer's green (7): Shakespeare here uses a literary device known as synecdoche (by which a specific part is taken for the whole); thus summer's green is the bounty of crops.
girded up (7): tied up tightly (the first use of the term as such in English).
And...beard (8-9): One of the most striking metaphors in the sonnets. The harvested crops, carried on the bier, wrapped tightly with protruding pale hulls, are personified as the body of an old man, carried on a cart or wagon to church, wrapped tightly in his shroud, with his protruding white beard.
breed (14): children.
brave (14): challenge.