I was writing about what had long since be come utterable as my own speech and thoughts, and I could ask, “Why am I talking this way?” “What does it mean that these thoughts, and not the sort I was uttering five lines back, are coming out of my mouth?”
Helen Vendler, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Reading for Difference”
This week I deeply enjoyed a debut novel: Practice by Rosalind Brown. I was, admittedly, predisposed to buy this book: it fits in a favourite niche among my favourite novels, which is books set on a single day (Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine); its cover is attractively reminiscent of old Faber & Faber poetry books, with their hand-drawn lettering in Albertus font; and — last but not least — I know Rosalind Brown from the University of East Anglia, where she studied for the Creative-Critical Writing PhD that became Practice.
But the reason I enjoyed Practice so much is that its 200 exquisitely-written pages explore the experience that often brings me here: reading poetry, taking those words with me into the world of daily life, and telling a story about the thoughts that follow. More specifically, Practice explores the weird journey that most readers of English poetry go on at some point: losing yourself in the dark house of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and wondering who haunts it.
I don’t want to undersell the novel by implying that it’s entirely about reading poetry. The action — which might also be called the inaction — follows an Oxford student, Annabel, from morning to evening one winter Sunday as she tries to begin an essay on the Sonnets. What’s wonderful about the narration is its calmly honest, high-definition description of every mundane thing she does, including going to the toilet (arguably, a significant plot point towards the end), and the dry wit with which it renders the thoughts intermixed with these tiny activities (a tough piece of lamb served in the college dining hall becomes, as she chews the softer vegetables, “a background project”).
Inside this frame, almost like a novel-within-a-novel, there is another story — another background project — which is the psychosexual drama that Annabel fantasises in developing detail about two shadowy male characters known only as the SCHOLAR and the SEDUCER. All this eventually has a bearing on the cryptic first sentence of her essay, as written down at the end of the book. I won’t give it away in full, but it centres on the seemingly uncontroversial statement that sonnets “exist” — only to leave you considering the full implication of the idea that poems might be said to exist, like other living things.
Thinking about this phenomenon has, I realise, been my own background project while reading Practice. Annabel, we learn, is a Virginia Woolf fan, and I would guess Rosalind Brown is too — as the day of the book unfolds, there are subtle echoes of Mrs. Dalloway’s day. Practice, in fact, might have been written in defiance of Mr. Dalloway, who at one point “seriously and solemnly” expresses the opinion that
no decent man ought to read Shakespeare’s sonnets because it was like listening at keyholes (besides the relationship was not one that he approved)
And in Woolf’s next novel, To The Lighthouse, it is not a man, but a woman who is shown reading and appreciating a Shakespearean sonnet: Mrs. Ramsay. As I wrote in an essay about poetry and To the Lighthouse last year:
The realistic way that Woolf depicts the reading of poetry in To the Lighthouse means that we only ever see fragments snagging in a character’s mind — a line or two that resonates more than others. But the full description of Mrs. Ramsay’s response to [Sonnet 98] makes clear that she also understands the whole:
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose,
she read, and so reading she was ascending, she felt, on to the top, on to the summit. How satisfying! How restful! All the odds and ends of the day stuck to this magnet; her mind felt swept, felt clean. And then there it was, suddenly entire shaped in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here — the sonnet.
Practice contains several extended descriptions of reading the Sonnets which — like Woolf — combine mind and the body to make it an emotion lived rather than a meaning abstracted. Annabel’s morning coffee, for example, becomes a moment of high drama:
The coffee enters her like a hot dark phrase. […] It takes hold of things in her mind and starts to pull them steadily apart: showing through like silvery light is nuance, subtlety, intricacy. She loves the Sonnets, oh god, their plainness and glitteringness, they sparkle in her head like leaves in sunlight. Be where you list, your charter is so strong, That you yourself may privilege your time To what you will, to you it doth belong. As the caffeine turns things faster all these words seem to pant in her: a word like privilege spreads itself out until she is top-heavy, saturated: she could let her head thump forward onto the desk with the weight of it. Every thread is stirred by coffee, like a field of fine grass.
“Like a hot dark phrase” is great, I think — a single word turning the description of coffee into the stimulant that is language. It takes me to the other end of the book, where Annabel’s sexual fantasies reach an almost inarticulate scene of sadomasochistic encounter with a “green man” in a wood, who gags her with herbs and says “I like to see you munching on my herbs” — a bizarrely unexpected sentence which is also a perfect iambic pentameter, the rhythm that makes the Sonnets so memorable as “hot dark” speech (Annabel thinks of it as “a line” which “drained her”).
The unnerving fact that Practice brilliantly unfolds is how Shakespeare’s Sonnets take hold of their deepest readers: to read them is to experience a form of possession — the seduction of the scholar. This is, again, partly an effect of their combination of intensely disordered emotion and intensely regular patterning (fourteen lines with the same rhythm and rhyme scheme, repeated 154 times). As Annabel reflects:
For basic sense you can read each of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in a minute or two. For a little more chewiness and analysis, five or six minutes. The trouble is keeping them apart. Each one seems to annul the previous one: no longer that, but this. They dissolve into a mass of little qualifications and turns and particularities and withholdings and accusations and escapes. To make some speciall instant speciall blest. Let this sad interim like the ocean be. Nor dare I chide the world without end houre. Like the small wheels of a great mechanism, always clicking into new relationships.
This passage in particular took me back to a book acknowledged by Brown’s notes: Helen Vendler’s The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, a critical commentary published in 1997 — the year when I was that student, trying to write that essay.
I’ve never been very interested in the various theories — ranging from the biographical to the numerological — which try to solve the mystery of the Sonnets as a complete sequence. As far as I can see, it seems likely that they were mostly written in response to real emotional situations (Shakespeare’s power as a dramatist notwithstanding), and that the poet was probably not involved in the arrangements for their publication. These two speculations account for their paradoxical quality of concentrated looseness: each sonnet is its own polished moment of private feeling (Woolf’s “essence sucked out of life”), but read en masse they also seem to throw out lines of entangled, organic connection. And this quality, in turn, is why they are so hard to get out of your head once in there: their fourteen lines are always “clicking into new relationships”, both with themselves as individual poems and with each other as anonymised diary pages.
What impressed me about Helen Vendler’s approach to the Sonnets was that she attempted to understand this living quality, this “chewiness”. It’s a long time since I studied The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in detail — and at 650 pages it offers a lot of detail — but two things have stayed with me: one about her method and one about its findings.
In order to write about the Sonnets, Vendler ingested them whole. As she writes in her introduction
To arrive at the understandings proposed in my Commentary, I found it necessary to learn the Sonnets by heart. I would often think I “knew” a sonnet; but then, scanning it in memory, I would find lacunae. […] The recovery of missing pieces always brought with it a further understanding of the design of that sonnet, and made me aware of what I had not initially perceived about the function of those words.
And at some point in this memory marathon, Vendler arrived at what has always struck me as a revelatory insight: the concept of the “Couplet Tie”, by which “a word and its variants”, echoing across lines 1-12, are repeated in the rhyming couplet at the end. The example that has stayed with me is Sonnet 87, which attempts — as always, unsuccessfully — to accept the withdrawal of the loved person from the relationship, through metaphors of legal and financial contract:
Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing,
And like enough thou know’st thy estimate.
The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;
My bonds in thee are all determinate.
For how do I hold thee but by thy granting,
And for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting,
And so my patent back again is swerving.
Thy self thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing,
Or me, to whom thou gav’st it, else mistaking,
So thy great gift, upon misprision growing,
Comes home again, on better judgement making.
Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.
In her accompanying essay “Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Reading for Difference” (1994), Vendler comments on how the Couplet Tie here reaches punningly back into the last quatrain, pulling its lines of argument into a heartfelt knot:
Sonnet 87 secretes a king in “mistaking,” “making,” and “waking” in the body of the sonnet, thereby rendering true the closing couplet, “Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter, / In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.” Often, the reason for Shakespeare’s use of particular words (here, the -aking words) is not evident from letters alone; in this case one must hear “aching” in addition to having grasped Shakespeare’s scheme of written play. The sonnets, then, need to be read constantly both as written documents and as oral ones
And as Vendler modestly adds in her commentary on the poem, this pun “does not seem, for all its flagrantness, ever to have been noticed”.
Having the subterranean yet traceable workings of a poem shown to me in this way was one of the single most important moments of my undergraduate English degree. Here was a defiantly resigned statement about having once been “a king” in love which was also, whisperingly, a confession of “aching”. As Vendler continues:
Shakespeare is so expert at representing mental defences that we cannot suppose him unconscious of his own cunning. The stratagems of the mind’s excuses are one of the great themes of the Sonnets.
The mind’s excuses are also the great theme of Rosalind Brown’s Practice. Much of what Annabel does during the day is motivated by procrastination: putting off the essay, putting off decisions about her own relationships. Soon after drinking coffee, she suddenly decides to go for a walk, on the strange grounds that
This feeling of really moving […] is one thing the Sonnets do not do. Out here real strides can be made. She cracks a smile at her own non-metaphor.
This non-metaphor, though, gets to the heart of what the novel explores: the reality of the connection of mind and body — of SCHOLAR and SEDUCER— at every moment of our lives. All Annabel’s procrastination is a subconscious defence of the time and space she needs to understand this. Walking around Oxford as the winter day grows dark, she follows the story of the sexual tension between SCHOLAR and SEDUCER as far she can take it — at which point she sees that “they are both her”. Two pages later, her thinking about the Sonnets returns with its most three-dimensional metaphor yet:
An image comes to her: a cat’s cradle. A set of threads held tight — a pause — then one man reaches in and inserts his fingers, takes hold of crossed threads, and pulls them round into a new space of ambiguity and anticipation. The other examines the new pattern and smiles, seeing what has been done, devising a response. They pass the looped string back and forth, apparently having started this game without considering that a cat’s cradle has no end, it has no triumphant final position but just goes round and round the same four or five patterns. The unpleasantness of letting the string slacken and slither off their hands, that is the alternative, that is what would happen if they let each other go, or equally if they fell into each other’s arms for ever and ever. Either way, they would no longer need her. Their shimmering chaste fixation — her shimmering chaste fixation — would be over.
And as she nears the college gate, another thought: is not the cat’s cradle the very image of the Sonnets? A single loop of string arranged and rearranged, crisscrossing over itself in self-references, self-shaping. The poet with his four hands. And her, likewise a fantasist, with hers.
This is a critical insight, arrived at through fiction, that I will be thinking about for a long time. The metaphor of the cat’s cradle catches that quality of concentrated looseness I mentioned above. But it also complicates it by asking who is moving the string, looping the lines into new relationships: the writer or the reader? Thirty years ago, Helen Vendler observed that one side effect of memorizing all the Sonnets is that
the quatrains begin to behave in a strangely autonomous fashion, linking themselves into new sonnets that never were on land or sea […] What one finally possesses, in possessing the sequence by memory, is an artificially constructed total mind full of self-generating “thoughts,” “feelings,” “reactions,” “generalizations,” “reversals,” and so on.
It’s a fascinating observation to revisit at a time when everyone is wondering whether Artificial Intelligence might be called, or become, sentient. To possess the language of another living person in the way that poetry allows us to is also, at some point, to become possessed by it.
NOTES
The first pages of Practice can be read on the University of East Anglia New Writing site: www.newwriting.net/2024/03/practice/
Although I knew Rosalind Brown while she was at UEA, I didn’t know any of her writing until she submitted a prose poem to the issue of Propel magazine that I guest edited in 2022 — and I saw what an extraordinary talent for sentences she had:
https://www.propelmagazine.co.uk/rosalind-brown-the-courtyard
You can read my posts about Woolf, poetry and To the Lighthouse here:
Rosalind was one of my fellow students at UEA and an obviously brilliant one. I'm so delighted to read this piece. When I was studying English at York in the early 1970s we didn't usually speak to each other beforehand much about what we read for the seminars and tutorials, but when it came to Shakespeare's Sonnets everyone was absolutely buzzing with excited amazement.
Thanks Jeremy for an excellent article - the section about reading while drinking coffee really resonated with me - for the last month or so I’ve been listening to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme at least once a day, usually while drinking coffee. The passage of sonnet-related high drama you quoted could easily be describing my own experience listening to ALS. The excitement generated by this form of interaction (whether it is poet/reader or musician/listener) can, at its best, have a transcendental quality - great to read about such a successful attempt to capture this kind of elusive experience in words.