Joanne: Hello, I'm Joanne Diaz. Abram: And I'm Abram Van Engen. Joanne: And this is Poetry for All. Abram: Today, we're going to be taking a close look at William Shakespeare. Sonnet 29. Should I begin us off? Joanne: Yes, please. Abram: Sonnet 29. [To read this amazing sonnet, visit this website: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45090/sonnet-29-when-in-disgrace-with-fortune-and-mens-eyes] Joanne: That was a really good reading. Abram: I love this sonnet. Joanne: Why do you love it? Abram: Well, I gotta tell you one of the reasons why I wanted to do this sonnet. We wanted to do a sonnet together and I said, let's do Sonnet 29. And one of the reasons I picked this sonnet is because I was just meeting with a new friend of mine, a teacher at a local school here, who says he starts off his 7th graders with this sonnet. Joanne: Oh, why this one? Abram: The reason for starting with this sonnet is to get them thinking about what they actually want and how it relates to their relationships in school and how it relates to building a community and how they actually view themselves in relation to others. And to get them to begin to think about these larger questions as they launch. This is a school that starts in seventh grade and then goes all the way through high school. So as they launch their career at this new school, these are the things he wants them thinking about. Joanne: Well, and look at where the poem begins, “In disgrace.” I mean, any person at some point in your life is going to have that moment where you feel like you've fallen out of favor, when you've been disgraced or disgraced yourself. And how do you crawl up out of that feeling and the sense of isolation that comes with that feeling of being disgraced? I feel like those are really powerful questions, certainly for a young person who's at a transitional moment, but really for any of us at any time in our lives. Abram: Yeah. And when else do you feel more awkward and envious of others than in seventh grade? Joanne: Yeah. And also I think that to be a seventh grader in the 21st century is very different than maybe at other times, right? So if we're living in a culture where everything is caught on camera or we're living in a culture where everyone is using social media, you know, how many stories have we heard of kids in middle or high school feeling this sense of self consciousness about something that happens that maybe should have been quite small, but then becomes quite big. Abram: And a lot of the links between social media and depression have to do with this sense of comparison. What other people seem to have that I lack. But also this sort of increased sense of isolation and loneliness despite the fact that through social media (or because of the fact that through social media) you are in a certain sense connected to and comparing yourself to so many others. Joanne: Well, it's interesting you say that because, of course, it's fall. We both just started teaching, and I'm teaching a first year composition class this semester. And the first thing I asked students to read was the New York Times opinion piece by the Surgeon General about loneliness as a national epidemic. And I made them read it in class, and then we discussed it, and then I explained to them my “no digital technologies” policy in the classroom. And so this semester, after years of us being in a state of COVID learning, Zoom learning, everything else, I said, we're going to put away the laptops and the smartphones and tablets and earbuds, and we're just going to talk to each other and write a lot. And, so far, well, we'll see. They're nodding their heads now, but we'll see in a few weeks if it works. But my point is I instituted this new policy because I'm seeing the toll that it's taking on students and their quality of their thought and feeling and their sense of isolation. And I'm just so tired of seeing them feel destroyed by it. Abram: So, we've talked a bit about the what, what this poem is kind of getting at, what it's all about. But, you know, this is a poem that's 400 years old. And so, in some ways it's talking about a perennial sense. You know, social media hadn't quite gotten around yet. But maybe we should get into exactly how Shakespeare is talking about some of the same things that we're experiencing and undergoing today. As we go through, I just thought one thing to keep note of that kind of stuck out to me in this poem was the kind of vertical dimension. At various times, you'll see, you'll hear about heaven, and then you hear about the soul and earth. There's larks rising from the earth to heaven. There's songs rising from the earth to heaven. But also it's so much about rank and status, who's ahead of whom. There is this sense in which a kind of vertical line is drawn through this poem and so much of the imagery of the poem is moving up and down that line. Joanne: I love what you're saying. And am I mistaken? Depending on the edition of Shakespeare's sonnets that you're looking at, if I look at the 1609 edition, I see that this is a one sentence poem. Is that correct? There are other ways to punctuate it, but in the 1609 version, it's a series of clauses that are joined in one sentence. Abram: So we've talked many times in this podcast that one way to read poetry is to look for the grammar. Where are the periods? Where are the sentences? What are the movements? And so what do you make of the fact that this is an entire sonnet is written as a single sentence? Joanne: I'm thinking of the dramatic situation of the poem. Which is to say, if this is one sentence, and, let's imagine the poetic speaker giving us a monologue on the stage, what is the dramatic situation that has spurred him into utterance? And why does he feel compelled to link all of these clauses together into one giant unit? And what does that do? What does it tell us about his thought? And then what is the punctuation doing to either accelerate or sometimes slow down the quality of that thought? Abram: Where you put the emphasis depends not just on where the lines end, but where the sentence demands the emphasis to be placed. So, for example, “When, in disgrace”, you're expecting a “then I”, and where does the “then I” come? It comes in the very last line of this poem. This moment of disgrace and this despising, this almost despising of himself suddenly shifts and moves in a completely different direction. So everything is down through the first eight lines, and then everything is up. And what's interesting is that the down and the up, in the beginning of the poem, they relate to standard hierarchies, people who have higher rank, higher status, more friends, more features, whatever, right? In the second half of the poem, the rising has nothing to do with that. So the rising gets to the point where he scorns kings who are beneath him because they don't have this friend. Joanne: So maybe shall we focus on the down and then maybe we'll focus on the up because I don't know if it's as useful to focus on the traditional quatrains and such because it's more like this big sweep that brings us into that downward movement and then a big sweep back up. Should we just go with it? Here we go! “When, in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes, / I all alone beweep my outcast state, / And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries, / And look upon myself and curse my fate, / Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, / Featured like him, like him with friends possessed, / Desiring this man's art and that man's scope, / With what I most enjoy contented least,”. Already that's a lot. That's a big chunk of poem. Can you talk to me about the religious despair that this poetic speaker seems to be experiencing? Abram: Well, the “I all alone” just reminds me of that sort of passage in Job. I mean, there's all these passages in Job where he's all alone weeping his outcast state. As he's sort of stripping away material goods, he's not good looking, he doesn't have the popularity of other people, all these friends around him, right? He doesn't have this man's art that is that skill in that sense. He doesn't have that man's scope that is just the wide range of abilities or whatever. So one thing after another, it seems like everybody else excels at, and he doesn't. What does he have? Well, he has this friend and that begins to turn everything around. Joanne: Okay, I'm very interested in his aloneness at the beginning. “I all alone beweep my outcast state, / And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries”. I read that as prayer. I read that as a God that doesn't appear to be listening to his bootless or the cries that he's offering in vain. So if his cries are bootless, no one's listening. And it sounds like melodramatic language to us in the 21st century, but if you really think about and visualize a poetic speaker who's crying to a God that, that just shows no sign that he's interested, that's a sense of despair. But also here's another line that interests me “With what I most enjoy contented least”. The inversion of the syntax there might create a sort of sense of remove for us as contemporary readers. But the things you enjoy the most, when they bring you no joy, that's really sad. That's when you know you're in trouble. If you have a favorite meal, a favorite beverage, a favorite song, a favorite pastime, and you know that typically you can go to it and it brings you pleasure, but you're in a state that's so bad that none of that helps you, you know, you're in pretty bad shape, right? Abram: I just want to note a couple technical details that also bring this out. What is going on in these lines? We've talked many times about repetition, the importance of repetition, and this poem has certain great and important repetitions. So one is deaf heaven. In the beginning, you're talking about those bootless cries, meaning fruitless, meaning they're not doing anything. And then, you know, towards the end, when we're rising, when we're coming out of this gloom, then we're singing at heaven's gate. So deaf heaven becomes heaven's gate, right? And the outcast state at the beginning becomes a state that he wouldn't change with kings at the end. So there are all these repetitions, but in the middle, there's a phrase repeated back to back. “Like him”. Like him happens in the same line “Featured like him, like him with friends possessed”. In other words, it all comes down to comparison. I have some relatives that have this phrase hanging in their house that says, “comparison is the thief of joy”. And a lot of people have that phrase. Some people think it comes from the Bible. It doesn't. It comes from Teddy Roosevelt. He's kind of a mixed bag of a man, but nonetheless, it's a great line. Give him that. It's a great line. And it is, you know. If there's ever a poem that suggests that line, “comparison is the thief of joy”, this is the poem for it. The other thing I would point out in just a kind of technical detail is that so much of the language is centered around this materiality business. So even when it's about having lots of friends, it's friends possessed, not like him with friends possessed. That is with owning a lot of friends or having a huge network or rich in hope. So anyway, rich and wealth and possess and all this language around how much you own. And even that word “enjoy” kind of has an older meaning of the things that you own, the things that you enjoy or the things that you possess. And so, so much of this poem is setting up a kind of how much do I have versus what actually is needed for happiness. That's fascinating. Joanne: I love that. And maybe we could use that as a way to think about the direction of the poem as it goes back up. Right? So, then we have “Yet”. And “yet”, anyone who studies sonnets, and, but, if, and then. Those are all the words you need when you study a Shakespearean sonnet. As soon as you get to a “yet”, you know that there's a detour, a shift, some kind of new direction in the poem. “Yet in these thoughts, myself, almost despising”. Abram: Wait, can I stop you right there? Joanne: Yes. Abram: Can I jump right in? Because what I love about this turn is the word despising. Literally, the roots of that word, the etymology of that word means looking down. So in other words, right at the very bottom of this crater, with the whole first sweeping half of this poem going down, down, down, down, down, down, down, it ends with this turn in which Shakespeare literally says “almost despising”. That is almost looking completely down on myself and then up we go for the rest of the poem. Joanne: Oh my goodness. And we haven't talked a lot about rhyme yet, but isn't it interesting that Shakespeare rhymes despising with arising? Isn't that wonderful? Especially with what you just said. That's nice. Okay, look at this. “Yet in these thoughts myself, almost despising, / Haply I think on thee, and then my state, / (Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven's gate; / For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings / That then I scorn to change my state with kings.” Oh, isn't it wonderful? Now, what's nice about that is that he says “haplyI think”, not happily, but haply, (like by chance, by happenstance, I just think about you). I didn't plan it. It wasn't part of my day. I wasn't obsessed with the thought, just the mere thought of you came into my mind. And then my state went from sullen earth to heaven's gate. Abram: Yeah. And also it links back to that first line in a strange way. So he says, “When, in disgrace with Fortune” and fortune there has a capital F of course, that also relates to this language of riches and wealth and possession and so forth, fortune. But also fortune is sort of the God of happenstance. And so it's almost as though he's not quite right that he's completely in disgrace with fortune because fortune/happenstance is what then finally brings him the thoughts of his friends. So if there's this inversion from the disgrace of fortune to this, this sort of gift of fortune, this happenstance that he thinks on his friend and it turns things around. How do we get to this inversion in the last couple of lines? Or what do you see happening there in the couplet? Joanne: “I scorn to change my state with Kings”. The social and material concerns that were such a source of consternation at the beginning of the poem have now been inverted. And now he's like, you know what? I'm above a King. In my feeling, in my heart, when I think of my friend, this person I love so much, not only am I not worried about what a king thinks of me, I scorn the king. That's incredible, right? Abram: Yeah. You know, it makes me think of this very famous long term Harvard study of happiness. They tracked people, people's happiness over 80 plus years, and then their kid's happiness over 50, 60 years. And the sort of consistent finding is that when you're looking for happiness, what matters most is personal relationships. Not career success, not status, not rank, not money, not wealth, not occupation, but personal relationships time and time again. And not just for personal happiness, but even for bodily health. So they said at 50, a measure of personal relationships was much more predictive of long term bodily health. than cholesterol. Joanne: Stunning. That is truly stunning. And you know, that article in the New York Times by the Surgeon General basically said something similar. That you have a higher tendency towards strokes, towards heart attacks, toward high blood pressure, your mortality. All of it is related to whether or not you are isolated and lonely. It's extraordinary. Abram: It is extraordinary. Joanne: Let's go have a picnic. I mean, let, I think, let's have a party. Abram: It's time to end this podcast, read this poem again, end this podcast and go have a beer together. Joanne: I think that's a very good idea. No, in all seriousness so many of the sonnets are thinking about our proximity to one another, our distance from one another, so much of poetry does. But this reaching out to each other, it's absolutely essential. And I feel like this poem really foregrounds how valuable this dear friend is. Abram: Well, with that said, would you be willing to read this sonnet, Sonnet 29 for us one more time? Joanne: Yes, I shall. [Poem] Abram: Mmm, I love it. I love this sonnet. Joanne: I think I like this sonnet a lot more now that we've talked about it. It's true. Abram: It's a great sonnet. It's a great one. Joanne: It's pretty great, but now I'm thinking of those seventh graders reading it and now that brings me some joy to think about that. Abram: Well, if you like what you hear on this podcast, we would love for you to leave us a review, share it with friends, spread the word. Joanne: Yes, and we hope that you will follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Abram: Thanks so much for listening. Joanne: Thank you.