#dark lady sonnets

[naheemc]

[randomberlinchick]

Found this in a little bookstore in Vienna. I received a gorgeous copy of the Sonnets many years ago for Valentines Day. Like most of the stuff I once owned, it's gone. I'm very happy to have found this one; it's lovely and well made.

As for the sonnet, who doesn't know what it is to be blinded by love? One of the Dark Lady sonnets (127-152), this is perhaps not as well known as some of the others (130,for example), but just as moving...

[you-belong-among-wildflowers]

Historical Couples → Shakespeare And  The Dark Lady

↳ The bath for my help lies Where Cupid got new fire; my mistress' eyes." Shakespeare was for all intents and purposes a mystery man. We have little to no concrete evidence about his personal life. Yet in 1609, a series of sonnets were published that have continued to leave a bevy of scholarly tongues wagging over just who was this mysterious Dark Lady that Shakespeare was writing about? The sonnets themselves reveal the author's madly passionate and borderline obsessive desire over a dark haired woman. Their relationship is often fiery, seemingly hate-driven at certain points, leaving the author in the throes of both passion and sorrow. Shakespeare was a married man with three children at this point in his life but would often leave home for London for long periods of time. Scholars have conjectured that there was little love lost between he and his wife Anne and that this Dark Lady was in fact the love of his life and so-called "London Wife." Some credit her with being the catalyst that sparked some of Shakespeare's greatest love dramas, like Romeo and Juliet and that because they couldn't be married in real life, he decided to place his feelings and desires into his work so that their love could and inevitably would last forever.

[ichrononaut]

Sunday Sonnet - 06 March 2016

Sunday Sonnet – 06 March 2016

A case can be made that Queen Elizabeth I ushered England into the Renaissance. That said, despite the Elizabethan explosion of Art, Science and Thought, it was an incredibly repressive society. And it was sexually repressive–to the point where it was dangerous to be too risqué. Shakespeare, though, knew just how far he could push it.

151

Love is too young to know what conscience is; Yet who…

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[ichrononaut]

Sunday Sonnet - 28 February 2016

Sunday Sonnet – 28 February 2016

If ever there were a Shakespearean sonnet appropriate for a Sunday, it’s probably this one.

146

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, […] these rebel powers that thee array; Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth, Painting thy outward walls so costly gay? Why so large cost, having so short a lease, Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend? Shall worms, inheritors of this excess, Eat…

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[ichrononaut]

Sunday Sonnet - 21 February 2016

Sunday Sonnet – 21 February 2016

Sometimes it’s delicious to watch a love affair blow apart with jealously, infidelity and threats, especially if you’re not one of the lovers.   I give you Shakespeare’s Dark Lady Sonnet Number 140:

140

Be wise as thou art cruel; do not press My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain; Lest sorrow lend me words and words express The manner of my pity-wanting pain. If I might teach thee wit,…

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[ichrononaut]

Sunday Sonnet - 31 January 2016

Sunday Sonnet – 31 January 2016

Early hints of the Dark Lady! This sonnet falls into the latter section of verses written to the Poet’s beloved Young Man. The poem’s full of chaos and a raft of competing images. But in the mix, if you look for it, you can find hints of a Dark Lady….

119

What potions have I drunk of Siren tears, Distill’d from limbecks foul as hell within, Applying fears to hopes and hopes to fears, Still…

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[ichrononaut]

Sunday Sonnet - 24 January 2016

Sunday Sonnet – 24 January 2016

Shakespeare wrote in an era where women were considered property. However, if one looks at the trajectory of his plays from his first in1589 to his later plays in the 1600’s, his female characters become more complex, more powerful and, indeed, more fully human. It’s in this deeply sexist society that Shakespeare began to break away from the Elizabethan norm. So too his Sonnets (published in…

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