A Cool Scansion Discovery
So yesterday I was talking with a friend about how much meter in poetry can reveal about meaning and how it should be spoken and so I decided to scan one of my favorite sonnets, Sonnet 57, and pay specific attention to the pronouns.
And y’all, I’m so glad I did. It proved my point so much better than I was expecting. Check this out: here’s a pretty basic scanning of the sonnet, only really diverting from the iambic pentameter where I felt it definitely had to:
Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require.
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu;
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought
Save, where you are how happy you make those.
So true a fool is love that in your will,
Though you do anything, he thinks no ill.
Look at those pronoun placements. There are 12 instances of you/your in this poem, 8 of which are stressed and 4 of which are unstressed. And of those 4, 3 of them are actually part of phrases referring to the “I” figure – “your slave,” “your servant,” and of course “your will” with the obvious pun on Shakespeare’s name.
In contrast, there are 7 instances of I/my in the poem, only one of which lands on a stressed syllable.
And maybe I’m just a dumb Shakespeare nerd, but this impressed me so much. You could read none of the words of this poem besides the pronouns and still come away with a clear sense that the “you” figure is much more important and valued than the “I” figure. The idea of this poem is so baked into the heart of the language. I already knew scansion was cool, but this kind of blew my mind.
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