On Shakespeare’s Sonnet 50
How heavy do I journey on the way,
When what I seek (my weary travel’s end)
Doth teach that ease and that repose to say
“Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend.”
The beast that bears me, tiréd with my woe,
Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,
As if by some instinct the wretch did know
His rider loved not speed being made from thee:
The bloody spur cannot provoke him on,
That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide,
Which heavily he answers with a groan,
More sharp to me than spurring to his side.
For that same groan doth put this in my mind,
My grief lies onward and my joy behind.
William Shakespeare
Sonnet 50
Five Levels of Metaphor
I perceive five levels of metaphor in this sonnet. At each level, the three quatrains and the couplet refer, by turn, to the poet’s soul, body, and spirit, and to their eventual destination/destiny.
A Journey
On the most superficial level of this sonnet, we have a poem about a man taking a journey away from a loved friend and toward some unnamed destination that will hold grief for him-not so much because of the nature of that place, but because of its distance from the friend.
The plodding quality inherent in unadorned iambic pentameter-which, in other contexts, is sometimes used for comic emphasis-is here subdued into becoming the plodding beast that carries us through the poem. This is accomplished by the use of words and sounds that, combined with the meter, create an atmosphere of foot-dragging weariness, heaviness and woe (e.g., the sighing outbreathings of “How heavy,” and “When what”).
In the first quatrain, he seeks ease and repose at the end of the difficult journey, but the very ease and repose for which he hopes seem to mock him by turning out to be the measure of his loss (they say, “`Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend.’”) The world offers no rest for his emotions, do what he will.
In the second quatrain, the animal he rides is laboring under the weight not only of its rider/writer, but under the weight of his woe, as well. The beast, “by some instinct,” knows that his rider is not really in a hurry, even though he occasionally, in a burst of anger at the fate that decrees this separation, bloodily goads the beast on with his spurs.
In the third quatrain and couplet, the horse’s groan that answers the rider’s angry slash of spurs stabs him with pangs of grief worse than the wounds in the animal’s side as, in despond, he ponders the love he has left behind, and the lonely times ahead.
Love Lost
On another level, the sonnet describes a journey over the roads of mind and time. It tells of love lost and unregainable.
In the first quatrain, the poet, on his journey through life, feels he will never pass this way again. At his journey’s end ease and repose will escape him, for memory will still exert its powerful influence, as it measures each moment by its distance from his loved one.
In the second quatrain, each moment, each step, inexorably carries him further and further from his loved one. The heaviness of his soul is a weariness to him. He can’t bear life, and Life is having trouble bearing him. His body “plods dully on,” his heart beats, but his torment makes his body groan with the weight of having to live with such a burdened soul. He drives his body to perform its usual duties, lashing it with anger that but adds to the burden of physical distress it must bear.
In the third quatrain and the couplet, his flesh staggers under anguish of spirit: thinking that, perhaps, if he had done something differently…. Groans escape his lips, surprising and piercing the tortured mind that contemplates his joyful past and measures his bleak future.
Aging
At this level of metaphor, the poet seems to be taking stock of where he’s been as he travels along Life’s road toward death.
At first it seems he had some innocent hope that he might receive comfort in old age (find ease and repose), perhaps by the popularity and praise of his work-his oldest and truest friend-or perhaps by sweet memories of friends and loved ones he had known.
Death, his sought-after destination, teaches him by its very nature-once he dares contemplate it-that each moment’s move into the future takes him just that much further from longed-for peace of mind.
In the second quatrain, his life is a weariness to him. His daily routine seems a beast of burden that somehow carries him through the hours, but only just. His body and his daily round of work falter; the sense of wanting to retreat from death-the “journey’s end” for all who journey here-overwhelms him to the point, one can almost say, of terror.
The third quatrain seems to say that, even if he wishes for Death to come now, and get this weariness over with, “the bloody spur (of impotent raging) cannot provoke him on.” Short of committing suicide, his life will plod out its appointed time, hasten it by dark passions though he will.
In the couplet, he contemplates the groan evoked by his anguish at his will’s inability to accomplish grief’s surcease-this from a Will whose will had accomplished much! And there is no release in that groan, for it merely serves to remind him of his increasing weakness as his end draws near.
Homosexuality
A word about my background is in order here. For many years, I did personal counseling. For four of those years-1969 to 1973-hundreds of my clients were from the student body of a university near my home. Fully two-thirds of them were members of the Gay Liberation movement. They said they sought my counsel because my love for people-regardless of their beliefs or their life condition-had recommended me: I was a sympathetic ear connected to a caring mind and honest language.
The bravado they displayed in chat and protests dissolved in private moments in my office. Then each of them in turn, in answer to my caring question, said that if there were a button they could push to change their sexual orientation, they would do it in a moment. But they believed there was no such button. So, to put a good face on what they believed to be inevitable was the only avenue to peace of mind they saw.
Their poignant testimony has shaped my understanding of this poem.
At first, I decided to read all the sonnets, in order to choose a sonnet with which I could sympathize-yet avoid the ones from which our class had sucked the marrow. Beginning with the first, I intended to weigh each in turn till one seemed promising. The fact that I found none till I reached Sonnet Fifty gives some measure of the difficulty of my choice.
My problem stemmed from the fact that-while most of the sonnets, read in isolation, might be interpreted in many ways-when read in order, as a single work, one overarching thought, one subject, is obviously intended: the frustrations of homosexual love-which frustrations are, the writer makes clear, nevertheless preferable to the heterosexual variety.
The first quatrain is preceded by forty-nine sonnets, in many of which the writer urges his beloved to have children-“one or ten”-in order to leave behind him a living memento for the writer. “You had a father; let your son say so” (Sonnet 11).
A memory is not enough; a painting is not enough; a poem is not enough. Only a living child can give the poet the three-dimensional gratification he will seek when the beloved is dead and gone. (He seems to give no thought to the possibility that the longed-for child might be a girl-unthinkable thought! Perhaps he pictures only a boy because boys are what he loves.)
He writes that many women would be only too glad to bear his lover’s child or children-even going so far as to say, in Sonnet 20, “…And for a woman wert thou first created, Till nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting.” Further, he promises not to be jealous: “Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their [women’s] treasure.”
Thus, in the first quatrain-beneath the levels of a simple journey, or life’s journey far away from love that’s lost, or the journey that he takes away from youth toward age-I see the poet’s mourning over his journey through a life where there is destined to be no replacement of his lively love.
Perhaps the friend has died? I haven’t read the sonnets after fifty, so I don’t know if that is what is meant. But surely the eventuality is there, if not the fact. This quatrain speaks to me of the emptiness of a life that’s fixed on affection rather than duty, and how easily such a life is stripped of meaning and of comfort.
In a normal life, the vicissitudes give one physical and mental strength as one’s posterity is contemplated. The wife, the children, the grandchildren, the extended family that result, all spur a man on-partly as his heart is moved by their trust in him as provider and protector, partly by the necessity imposed on him by his acceptance of that trust.
In the second quatrain, the writer contemplates the sterility of homosexual mating, where nothing is created except the relationship. And be the participants to that relationship ever so brilliant, beautiful, and wise, they travel a narrowing road toward loneliness and extinction.
The last quatrain and couplet convey his realization of the endless, lonesome journey into sorrow. He could turn back, but he’s determined not to do it. Instead, laboring angrily, beneath the shadow of a lover who refused to reproduce himself, and whom the writer could not force to do it, the poet groans aloud and shocks himself by the meaning of that groan: his future’s set; it must be lived alone.
Shakespeare was convinced that children could be the bearers of their father’s gifts: “How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use if thou couldst answer, `This fair child of mine shall sum my count…’ proving his beauty, by succession, thine.”
This makes me wonder what would have happened if he had poured into his own children the concentrated power of love, devotion, intellect, wit, and determination to succeed that he evidenced in his relationship with this man. Might he have had an illustrious successor to his laurels?
Apparently, he never thought of his own children in this way.
Rejecting One Man’s Love for Another’s
The fifth level of metaphor depicts the writer’s anguish over his decision to reject Jesus’ rule and friendship in order to justify his froward way of life. And yet, he has decided.
Now, blinded by self pity, he cannot see a way back, but only forward-into greater and greater separation from his onetime Friend. The ease and repose another might hope for in death cannot be his, he thinks, because he has taken a road that leads away from hoped-for comfort.
The second quatrain seems to indicate that it was the “beast that bears” him-his fleshly instincts-that have carried him away from friendship with the Lord. His flesh falters, by instinct knowing that it is headed in the wrong direction. Yet, it plods on beneath his angry spurs that challenge God.
Pangs of conscience (third quatrain and couplet) tear at him. His very flesh disintegrates under the onslaught; he cries aloud with pain. Yet he plods on in what he knows to be the wrong way, even as he realizes that the anguish of his feelings, flesh and spirit-and of the godly part of his own intelligence-are signaling him their lack of confidence in his decision.
His will to be true to his own self-in error though that self might be-spurs him willfully toward the grief he knows awaits him. His body’s weakness portends his death-both temporal and spiritual.
He had chosen to live apart from God; he won’t come groveling now that death seems near. Pride and its resultant self-will-the sin of the fallen angels-is his choice, as well, and he expects a judgment like to theirs will fall on him. As Socrates-too honorable to beg for mercy when he’s down-he braces himself for what must follow death. Though not as Socrates, who happily died for his pursuit of virtue, but rather in dread of Hell for his pursuit of vice.
Pity he never thought on his True Lover’s love-the Door that’s never closed to a change of heart.
Summary
I believe Shakespeare’s intellectual development progressed while his emotional development didn’t. We find him, in mature years, still mooning over boyfriends like an adolescent ninny.
Thus the many levels of his poems, and their superb use of the language-unparalleled in my experience-are all shallow levels. He avoids encounter with reality, for he has no answers to give, and is afraid his dazzling language will not be enough to fool the discerning eye if he ventures along that line.
Instead, he fences with imagery he, himself, first conjures up. He deals in what were platitudes even at that time, but does it so strikingly wonderfully that no one seems to notice that he remains quite near the surface with each swipe of his agile sword.
The typical teenage custom of holding a number of mutually contradictory and paradoxical opinions on the same subject seems somehow special when we fall under the silver-tongued spell of Shakespeare.
But homosexuality keeps its victims shallow, forever adolesecent, because eternity cannot be contemplated honestly and comfortably from that vantage point; he lets the bucket of his soul down in the well of Spirit, but never reaches water: his bucket comes up empty.
When at St. John’s to Bogacz’ class I came
And turned unlearned gaze toward Poetry,
I was dumbstruck by her repute. Her fame
Unnerved this tyro’s heart through mystery.
Then taking heart of hope I buckled on
The armor that my God had willed to me:
Protection for my soul ‘gainst myrmidons
Whose one desire seemed that I not breathe free.
The Helm of Hope I set to guard my mind,
Breastplate of Truth gave courage to my heart,
Sword of the Spirit to my tongue was kind,
And Shield of Faith quenched all their fiery dart.
Yet, met, this Muse’s man was not heartwhole:
He’s master of the pen, but not the soul.
N’omi Orr
Sonnet 1