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Response to Sonnet 143

링크는 여기

Shakespeare’s (who never actually spelled his name that way in any of his signatures according to the Smithsonian) sonnet 143 stood out to me because of its unusual (for a sonnet, that is) extended metaphor. In the octet of the poem, he gives us the image of a baby crying for his mother who is chasing a chicken. In the sestet, he identifies himself as the baby, the beloved as the mother (rather than some angel or saint), and the beloved’s interest as the chicken. I think he chose this image to demonstrate how distraught over the beloved’s side affair/interest. Although I read many ‘classical’ books that use elevated and (now) antediluvian diction, I had felt that this piece would be easier to understand if I (to quote my sixth grade English teacher) “translate it in now terms.” So, this is what I came up with:

Just as a careful farmer’s wife runs to catch

one of her chickens that has escaped,

puts down the baby she was carrying and runs off in a hurry

trying to catch that which she wants to keep

while her abandoned baby crawls after her

and cries so that she doesn’t forget it (or cries to get her attention)

since she is running after that other care

and doesn’t really care about her crying baby right now

so you run away to that other man (*not Mr. Halback)

while I crawl after you like an abandoned baby

but if you ‘catch’ that other man, remember me

and be kind and love me (like a mother?)

so I pray you have that other man (or I pray you realize that you like me better)

if you come back and make me stop crying.

After I finished, I looked back on the “like a mother” line and wondered if he purposely made the babe (I assumed a boy since he compares it to himself) have an oedipal complex in order to make it clear that he has a dependence upon the beloved such as a young child depends upon it’s mother. I liked how he compared the other love interest as a chicken. I think he chose the image of a chicken because they are small, live only a short period of time (depending on its use; I read somewhere that there have been reports of chickens living up to twenty years) and run easily. I felt this because he mentions in the sestet the beloved coming back to him, saying the affair would be short lived (like a chicken) and the other man would run away to another lover (or die).

#William Shakespeare.#Sonnet 143.#Poetry Blog.#1D2011