The Passionate Pilgrim – “When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies...”

The Passionate Pilgrim – “When my love swears that she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she lies...”

By the end of 1598, Shakespeare had moved out Bishopsgate and moved to St Helen's where he probably resided until around the time of Queen Elizabeth's death. 

Shakespeare probably got no money for any of his poems that appeared in the 1599 anthology entitled ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ which was published with his name on the cover. Only two sheets of the original edition still exist though somewhere from 40 to 100 copies were probably originally published of the 1599 edition. Of the 20 poems in the collection, five are probably written by Shakespeare. These are two sonnets (Sonnet 138 and Sonnet 144 ) and three poems from ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost  (Longaville’s sonnet written to Maria in Act 4 Scene 3, Berowne’s sonnet to Rosalind in Act 4 Scene 2 and Dumaine’s poem to Catherine in Act 4 Scene 3). This type of publishing theft or plagiarism was common in Shakespeare’s time, but not quite as common as illegal downloads today. Still, the publisher, William Jaggard would have had to make some outlay for the material, unlike most modern downloaders. He would have had to pay someone to scribe down the ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ poems during a performance and would probably have seen and copied (or paid someone who had pawned a stolen sonnet or two) for the two sonnets. The interesting thing is that he chooses to attribute all the poems to W. Shakespeare on the cover. This shows us that Shakespeare had gained enough of a reputation in 1599, that someone wanted to steal from him and cash in on his name.

Let’s first look at Sonnet 138 ‘When my love swears that she is made of truth’. The sonnet is done in Shakespeare’s standard 14 lines made up of three quartets and a final rhyming couplet. The poem is about the poet’s relationship with the ‘dark lady’ and about his contemplations about his own misgivings about growing older. The poem depends on the irony of the double meaning in the word ‘lie’ both as meaning to be deceptive and as meaning to have sexual intercourse or a sexual relationship. The poet takes his lover's lies about her fidelity as naive and almost a compliment to him since it is as if she thinks of him like an “untutor’d youth”. He plays along with the game of these lies since it humours him as he grows older. He contemplates why they both lie and he decides that “… love’s best disguise is the pretense of truth…” The sonnet ends with the beautiful, but ironic rhyming couplet:

“Therefore I lie with her and she with me,

And in our faults by lies we flatter’d be.”

The Passionate Pilgrim – “Two loves I have of comfort and despair…” (Sonnet 144)

This sonnet is normally paired in a reading with the lighter more playful Sonnet 143 so it is bizarre that it appears in this anthology on its own unless Jaggard was drawn to its dark tone (or perhaps that is all his poetry thief could steal on a cold day in 1599). Sonnet 144 has the atmosphere of a Morality drama where the poet is companioned by the personifications of Vice and Virtue and rather than choosing between the two, sees Vice and Virtue couple off and exit his room with lustful intentions. Perhaps Shakespeare was thinking of Marlowe's 1592 play ‘Dr. Faustus’ when he wrote this. It could even be the beginnings of a longer poem or an attempt at a play on the same ponderings. Either way, this poem which may seems whimsical when referred to, is darker and more somber in its tone when read.

The poet starts with contemplation on his state of mental anguish where the personified Virtue and Vice (“a man right fair” and the worser spirit “a woman colour’d ill”) seem both like muses but also players in a love triangle at whose apex is the poet. It seems that the poet suspects that his “worser spirit” is tempting his “better angel” away from him and that his “better angel” is being corrupted or “turn’d fiend”. The poet does not know for sure that this is what is happening:

“Suspect I may, but not directly tell…”

It is interesting that the poet refers to both as angels. The male companion, perhaps the Earl of Southhampton, provides camaraderie, love and a muse for his soul and his writings, while even in this short sonnet we get the sense that the ‘dark lady’ provides physical, sexual and lustful fulfillment and nourishment for the poet.

The sonnet ends with the poet reinforcing his despair because he lives with suspicion of the affair. The final mention of “fire” in the last line is interesting and suitably allusive in its meaning. Perhaps the poet means that his mistress will bring damnation to his male lover or maybe he believes that she will inflame love in his male lover such that he will cease to love the poet or perchance this is a simple reference to venereal disease (which was quite prevalent in Elizabethan times in London) and the fact that the poet thinks that his female lover will eventually give his male “better angel” this disease whose major symptom is a burning sensation or “fire”:

“Yet this I ne’er know, but live in doubt,

Till my bad angel fire my good one out.”

The Passionate Pilgrim – “Did not the heavenly rhetoric of thine eye… persuade my heart to this false perjury…” (Longaville's sonnet to Maria in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’)

This is a sonnet which Shakespeare writes for the character of Longaville when Longaville is writing secretly to Maria in the play ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ with the intention of winning her love. Since it appears in a play, it is sometimes difficult to see it as separate from the context in which it appears in the play where Longaville, one of the King of Navarre’s three noble kinsmen, having taken an oath to study rhetoric and all the knowledge of the world, fast and have no contact with women for three years, promptly falls in love with Maria and writes and sends a love letter to her in Act IV Scene 2. Since it appears in ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ as a poem, I will try to treat it as a love poem, however, the irony of the context of the play, where the poet having sworn off matters of women and love, uses logic and rhetoric to argue that his falling in love is logical, is ironically humourous. When I refer to the poet, I mean both Longaville and Shakespeare as voicing his sentiments through the character of Longaville.

The sonnet starts with the poet drawing an analogy between logic and rhetoric and the act of falling in love with his love. The use of the oxymoronic “false perjury” in line 3 serves to gives some irony to the analogy. The use of words like “rhetoric” and “argument” when describing affairs of the heart adds to this ironic underpinning. The poet, who in the play is trying to study matters of the mind and reason, validates at the end of the first quartet, his breaking of his vow to not see women or delve in matters such as love for three years, by stating that, “Vows for thee broke deserve not punishment.”

In the second quartet, the poet takes his logical explanation of his illogical love further. He claims that his initial vow to swear off women was an earthly vow and argues a technicality that, because his female lover is heavenly that his initial vow is outside her heavenly jurisdiction and thus he is cleared or “cured” of all “disgrace”. 

The third quartet extends the metaphors by stating that his initial vow was insignificant, “My vow was breath, and breath a vapour is…”
and that the lover, personified in the metaphoric sun, disperses “this vapour vow”.

In the final rhyming couplet, the poet conclusively claims that even if he broke his first vow, then it is wisdom that made him do it because, as he finally rhetorically asks himself:

“… what fool is not so wise
     

To break an oath, to win a paradise?”

‘The Passionate Pilgrim’ – “ If love make me forsworn, how shall I swear to love?” (Berowne's sonnet to Rosalind in ‘Love's Labour's Lost’)

The character of Berowne who writes and speaks this sonnet is an interesting character who deserves some preface before we look at this poem. Although Berowne is the second in command to the King in the play ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’, he drives much of the action in the play. He acts like a Chorus in the play commenting on the naivety of his fellow oath takers. He believes in the power of instinct as well as the mind. Berowne does not think that a man will find the answer to life solely in a book. He is Shakespeare's double, the reflective glance that Shakespeare catches in the mirror of his words. It is serendity that Berowne falls in love with a woman who is his verbal gymnastic match – Rosaline. In the play, his love poem is revealed and read just after he has berated the King for his hypocrisy. But when Jacquenetta delivers Berowne’s love letter to Rosaline to the King, the hypocrite-accuser is shown to be the biggest hypocrite of all.

In this sonnet, the poet starts with a conundrum which is made ironic by the clever elastic use of the word “swear”. He carries this notion of elasticity further when he says that thoughts such as “faith”, forswearing and “oaths”, though seeming as immovable as an oak to the poet, become like osier willow bows (which are pliable enough to be used to weave baskets) in the hands of his love.

The poet then uses a run-on line into the second quartet where he plays with the meaning of bias as both inclination and the weighting used in a bowl. This serves to emphasise the notion that he believes that there is much to learn about love in the eyes of his Rosaline. He claims that if knowledge is all that is to be attained then, “…to know thee shall suffice.” He then praises Rosaline’s verbal skills and the way she “commends” herself.

In the third quartet the poet leaves the constraints of contemplation for proclamations of praise declaring, “All ignorant that soul that sees thee without wonder…” Then, unusual for the self-assured Berowne, he retreats into a type of humility seeing himself as deserving some credit for him being able to (or allowed to) admire “thy parts”. He then uses hyperbolic metaphors to compare his love’s eyes to Jove’s lighting and her voice to his thunder which the poet ironically sees and hears as “music and sweet fire”. It could be argued that this point the poet has arrived at a higher stage of his spiritual journey understanding the transformational nature of love.

The final rhyming couplet is almost apologetic for the earthly inarticulateness of his praise for his love who he sees as celestial or heavenly. This apology serves to lift the simple humility of the verse to heavenly heights.

“Celestial as thou art, O do not love that wrong,

To sing heaven’s praise with such an earthly tongue.”

The Passionate Pilgrim – “On a day (alack the day)…” (Dumaine’s love poem to Catherine in ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’)

In ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ Dumaine along with Berowne and Longaville are kinsmen of the King and they all take an oath to study and fast for three years swearing off, among other things, women. Dumaine’s oath to the king in the opening of the play gives some sense of his character. His oath is more flamboyant and elaborate than his fellow kinsmen and when he swears off earthly concerns. Undertake the King's oath, he swears ''To love, to wealth, to pomp, I pine and die…" Of course, he subsequently falls in love with Katherine. In this sense, we can see this poem as part love poem, part parody of a love poem.

It is a sonnet and but is written in the 18 line Heroic sonnet poetic form which was invented by the father of sonnet-hood the 13^th century Sicilian Giacomo da Lentini. It uses an iambic beat but not a pentameter. It has two Sicilian octaves with a rhyming couplet in the middle dividing them (poetically a different poet form which acts as a transition like this does, is called a pivot). The repeated use of rhyming couplets throughout the poem make it seem forcibly clumsy and over-simplistic poetically. All this is meant to give the sense that while Dumaine is caught up in the heavenly poetry of love, his poetry meanders through a terrestrial swamp.

The poet starts off by setting the scene for his lament of love. In the second and third lines, he clumsily personifies Love as spying “…a blossom passing fair…”. He uses the imagery of the wind gentling touching and playing with his love (the fair blossom) and Love wishes that it could so easily touch and “gan passage” to such a blossom as the wind which he now metaphorically refers to as “heaven’s breath”. The poet wishes that he, ironically objectified as the personified Love, could “triumph so” over the “fair blossom” like the wind does. Dumaine is obviously imagining his love as a flower - an inamorata. We get the sense that Dumaine is also writing himself into the poem as he becomes increasingly jealous of the wind and the liberties it takes with the female object of his desire. Shakespeare is too good as a poet to not be mixing metaphors and twisting perspective and personification for the purpose of parodying some love sonnets and mocking the character of Dumaine.

The irony then expands such that the poet starts to get sexually more crude and explicit in his imagery but perhaps Dumaine as the character supposedly writing this poem, seems naively unaware of the sexual innuendo lurking blatantly beneath his flowery but heavy handed verse. Here some knowledge of the play is necessary because Dumaine has sworn to have no physical contact with women yet complains that as a young man he is ready to “pluck a sweet “:

“But, alas! my hand hath sworn


Ne'er to pluck thee from thy thorn:


Vow, alack, for youth unmeet,


Youth, so apt to pluck a sweet…”

The final four lines cap off Shakespeare’s parody of love poems through using a barrage of classical allusions to the point of parodying the form as well as the character of Dumaine who speaks (and wrote) this verse.

“Thou for whom Jove would swear


Juno but an Ethiope were;


And deny himself for Jove,


Turning mortal for thy love.”

We assume "thou" means the person who is the object of Dumaine’s love, Katherine, the “blossom” in the poem, and that the poet believes that Jove or Jupiter, the Roman King of the Gods (ironically also a word for euphoric love in Shakespeare’s time) would swear allegiance to his love. He then calls his love Juno, Jupiter's wife, who normally has a dark cloak but is described as dark skinned here (normally thought to be not so attractive as a quality in Shakespeare’s day). Then he confusingly either says that Jove (Jupiter) would turn mortal to be with this woman or that he, the poet Dumaine, would deny himself the immortality of Jove (or the immortality he already believes he possesses) and turn “mortal for thy love”. This confusion is, of course, intentional. Just remember when reading this love sonnet that Shakespeare is a good sonnet writer mocking bad love poetry through a character who is inarticulate, over-verbose and in love.