Shakespeare's famous
"Procreation Sonnets"[1]
(Sonnets 1-17) are poems addressed to a beautiful young man whom the speaker
tries to convince to have children so that he may bequeath his beauty to the
world. This is general
consensus among interpreters of Shakespeare's sonnets; hence the epithet those
first seventeen sonnets have been given. But it seems to me that those poems
are not just about procreation, that
there is more to the speaker's exhortations. There is a very striking parallel
between the young man and the Narcissus from Ovid's Metamorphoses[2],
one which seems unlikely to be accidental, given Shakespeare's several
references to Ovid and the Metamorphoses in
his plays and other poems and sonnets; nevertheless, to my knowledge, this
parallel has not yet been carefully examined by critics, although some have in
fact mentioned Narcissus in passing in connection to the procreation sonnets
and to the young man. Perhaps then a somewhat close analysis of this parallel
would be fruitful, as it could allow us to see whether there is indeed more to
the sonnets in question.
Let
us start therefore with a recollection of the Narcissus tale from the Metamorphoses, from which we will move
on to seek Narcissus in the sonnets. Narcissus is a beautiful young man of
sixteen who is desired by men, women, and nymphs, and about whom the prophet
Tiresias has said that he should live a long life as long as "himself he
does not know." Perhaps because he is desired by many, and perhaps also
because of his proud nature, he does not give himself to anyone and has never known
love. One day, as he is hunting deer in the woods, he comes upon a beautiful
meadow and a pristine water spring, untouched both by man and beast. When he
lies down near the edge of the water so as to drink and quench his thirst,
there on the water he sees his reflection for the first time and falls ardently
in love with his own image, believing it to be a different person. He stares
intently at it, and it stares back at him; he then tries to hug and kiss and
touch the object of his love, but whenever he touches the spring, the resulting
ripples in the water disturb the image. So he is confined to contemplating the
object of his passion without ever having his desire for it satisfied, until at
length he realizes that the object is himself. Desolate, yet unable to give up
his love and go back to where he came, he withers away and dies, and his corpse
is transformed into a flower−the
daffodil or narcissus.
Now,
where can we see Narcissus in the procreation sonnets, or when is the young man
ever identified with him? There are no explicit references to Ovid's character
in the poems. However, his presence is there from the very beginning. Sonnet 1,
which, as Helen Vendler has said[3],
serves as a preface to the rest of this subsequence because it introduces the
theme and most of its imagery and metaphors, gives us very clear indications
about the parallel between the young man and Narcissus. In line 5, for
instance, the young man is "contracted to his own bright eyes." This
is the first characterization the speaker offers us of the youth, and it is
cunningly−and
superficially−ambiguous.
The young man is either confined to looking exclusively into his own eyes or he is
betrothed to his own eyes, that is, he has a marriage contract with himself. In
both cases, the images imply that the young man only has eyes for himself, that
he only loves himself, and that is why I said that the word contracted here is only superficially
ambiguous. Is it not telling that the young man is first described as being
narcissistic?
Moreover,
in line 6, he is "feeding his light's flame with self-substantial
fuel." The obvious image here is that of a candle, which feeds its flame
with its own waxen body, with its own substance. But it is also a parallel with
Narcissus, as in lines 584-585 of Golding's translation of the Metamorphoses−which is the translation that plausibly Shakespeare
would have read−Narcissus,
after having realized that the image on the water is his image, says to
himself: "I do both set on fire, / And am the same that swelters
too." He is then, at the same time, the cause of the fire and the thing
that burns. He is like a candle; the young man is like both. And the parallels
continue in sonnet 1. In line 12, introducing the finance imagery that will
appear in the following sonnets in the subsequence, the speaker states that the
young man is a "tender churl" who "makes waste in
niggarding." Curiously enough, Narcissus employs a similar image to
describe himself in line 587 of Ovid's poem: "my plenties make me
poor." Not only does Shakespeare also use finance metaphor to talk about
the young man, but he does so in a similarly paradoxical way, in which riches
make for poverty, thriftiness for waste. These are, I believe, direct
references to Narcissus in that they use virtually the same language Ovid used
to describe his character.
But
there are also indirect allusions to Narcissus in this and in the other
procreation sonnets. The young man is also described in sonnet 1 as his own
foe, too cruel to his own sweet self, which means that the speaker regards the
youth's narcissistic love for himself as morally wrong, just as he would regard
Narcissus' love for himself as morally wrong. That the speaker considers this
love to be wrong is evident also from the prophesying couplet that closes the
sonnet. In sonnet 3, the youth's love and its consequence will make him
"be the tomb of his self-love," just as Narcissus was the tomb of his
own self-love. And in this same sonnet dying single entails the death of the young
man's own image, that thing which, like Narcissus, he loved the most, because
it was the one thing that allowed him to see himself as someone else−and, therefore, a
legitimate object of love. And the parallels go on; in sonnet 6, the youth is
told to "treasure … some place with beauty's treasure, ere it be
self-killed;" in sonnet 7; he will die "unlooked on," unless he
gets a son; in sonnet 11, if all the men were like him−that is, loved like him−, the world would end in sixty years, which
reinforces the reprobate character of this love. Many other points of contact
between Narcissus and the youth could be indicated, but I believe their
identification is now sufficiently clear so as to allow us to move on with our
argument.
We
see here that indeed procreation is what the young man should engage in
according to the speaker, but these sonnets are not simply about procreation.
It is not an end itself, of course; it is a means of perpetuating Nature's gift
to the young man. This is quite evident. But perhaps we do not fully appreciate
what this means. We have been asked by the speaker to imagine a young man so
beautiful that his beauty must be
passed on, because the absence of his beauty from this world would be a crime
against Nature. Furthermore, in sonnet 14, the perpetuation of his beauty is
not only good, but also truth. "Beauty is truth; truth, beauty," as
Keats has said; and, in this case, it is also good. Procreation then is the
solution to the youth's moral problem: by loving only himself, he is cheating
the world of his beauty, exactly like Narcissus. This is what I meant when I
said before that there seemed to be more to the procreation sonnets than only
procreation. These sonnets are not really
about procreation, they are about beauty−a
beauty so extreme that it imposes itself as a duty upon the one who has it
"in lease."
The
rejection of this duty is the reason, I think, for Narcissus' death. Only after
he consciously found out that he was the object of his own love did he begin to
wither away, because, with his love for himself, he had abandoned his duty and
therefore his purpose, just as the young man would abandon his if he could not
love others and procreate−therefore,
being single, proving none (sonnet 8). Maybe we would logically expect the speaker
in sonnet 8 to say "proving one," although that would be a tautology
and very likely a terrible ending to the sonnet. The fact that he does not
means that, for the young man, overlooking his duty would make him a nothing;
thus, in a sense, dead. That seems to be one of the reasons why the speaker is
so keen on convincing the youth to procreate.
In
the end, however, we discover that the speaker was not entirely correct in his
first judgment of the situation. Narcissus' beauty was not completely extinguished
upon his death; it was actually transfigured, originating a new being that bears
his original beauty. Narcissus did, in a sense, procreate, and his beauty did
to some extent live on. Perhaps Nature's power transcends the speaker's
imagination, or perhaps it is the power of Narcissus' beauty that does so. The
same is true for the young man, even though his beauty survived him under a
different form. And this is where we come upon another striking parallel
between Narcissus and the youth. Let us consider for a moment that Narcissus
gave place to a flower; next, let us look at the imagery taken from agriculture
that is present throughout the subsequence, but especially in sonnets 15 and
16. In sonnet 15, the speaker "engrafts" the young man
"new" with his verse; in sonnet 16, "many maiden gardens"
would bear the young man's "living flowers." In these sonnets the
speaker ponders on his verse as a potential new form of life for the young
man's beauty, comparing the youth's issue to living flowers and his own poetry
to a botanical technique, but still believes actual procreation to be the best
solution to his addressee's problem, and so he presses on with his attempt to
convince the young man to engage in it. And in sonnet 17, which is regarded as
the last sonnet in the subsequence, he envisages both solutions as viable, so
long as they go together: his verse would be merely complementary to actual
procreation.
Here
we come to another important point in my argument. Sonnet 18, notwithstanding
the fact that it does not directly say anything about procreation, should in my
opinion be included among the procreation sonnets. After trying to persuade the
young man to "increase" for seventeen sonnets, the speaker finally
gives up. He realizes that the youth's self-love is, like Narcissus', probably
past hope of redress, and that, nevertheless, his beauty will live on because
of the speaker's own verse. He returns for the last time to a botanical image,
stating that the youth will grow in eternal lines to time, as a plant that has
been engrafted grows according to its "host." The speaker thereby
identifies the young man to Narcissus once again−his beauty will survive, like Narcissus', as a
plant, although a metaphorical one. In this case, however, the perpetuation of
beauty is not natural or spontaneous, but artificial, carried out by art and
technique, so that the young man's plant needs to be engrafted−his beauty must be put
in "numbers" (sonnet 17).
Then,
as I had said, the speaker's first judgment was partially incorrect: the
youth's beauty will last, only in a different form. In the end, both Narcissus
and the young man−and
their beauty−lived
on; through the flower, in the first case, and through the speaker's sonnets,
in the second. Their beauty was so astounding and so powerful that, even though
they consumed themselves in self-love, Nature and art found a way to correct
their fault and perpetuate their beauty. This is perhaps, if I may say so, a
sort of "dramatic" irony in the procreation sonnets, or perhaps the
speaker was fully aware of
what was going on. The poet certainly seems to have been, as I believe to have
demonstrated. Be that as it may, the comparison between the young man in
Shakespeare's sonnets and Ovid's Narcissus has been very fruitful indeed, and it
has allowed me to better understand, as I think, the theme and argument of the
procreation sonnets. I do not know, however, how this reading would hold up if
the whole sonnet sequence was to be taken into consideration−finding that out
would require a much more careful and lengthy examination. But the cycle of the
procreation sonnets is probably where the parallel between Narcissus and the
young man is most significant, seeing as, having found at last a solution to
the youth's moral problem in sonnet 18, the speaker will move on to different
themes, different images, and different language.
Bibliography
Booth, Stephen (ed.). Shakespeare's Sonnets. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1977.
Lavelle, Louis. O Erro de Narciso. São Paulo: É Realizações, 2012.
Rouse, W. H. D. (ed.). Shakespeare's Ovid: Being Arthur Golding's
Translation of the Metamorphoses. London: De La More Press, 1904.
Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997.
West, David (ed.). Shakespeare's Sonnets. London: Duckworth, 2007.
[1] Booth, Stephen (ed.). Shakespeare's Sonnets. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1977.
[2] Rouse, W. H. D. (ed.). Shakespeare's Ovid: Being Arthur Golding's
Translation of the Metamorphoses. London: De La More Press, 1904.
[3] Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997.
