Gabriela Villanueva Noriega

HL4

Other Voices

A problem that will hardly be solved through biographical approximation is that of  poetical voice. Through biographical approximations one might end up with the dangerous and, above all, simplistic notion that in Shakespeare’s sonnet 129 “el poeta experimenta una fuerte sensación de desagrado hacia el amor físico que le lleva a clamar contra la lujuria” (Abad 255-256). Likewise, Sidney’s active protestantism has lead some to believe that the poet sought nothing more than moralization, aside from artificial virtuosity.(Lozano 293) The problem with these  approximations is that they tend to neglect important parts of the working structure of the poems in order to make sense of them in a biographical way.

If one was to believe that there is only one voice in Shakespeare’s sonnet 129 and in Sidney’s sonnet 5  the poems remain contradictory and ambiguous. On the other hand, by paying attention to specific words and the place and way in which they are uttered, certain ambiguities and contradictions are solved. The ambiguity lays in the fact that the one voice that dictates the principles in the first part of the sonnet, is not too evidently separated from that which will contradict them later on. Still,  through the structure and tone one may infer the presence of separate voices and make a more fortunate guess at which one is the poet’s voice.

The particular structure of the sonnet is often used in such a manner that a whole body is built up only to collapse in one or two final lines. We only have to think of Gongora’s “Mientras por competir con tu cabello” to find a very clear example. We can, as well, find other examples of this in Shakespeare and in Sidney, for example in Shakespeare’s sonnet 19 and in Sidney’s sonnet 71. In the sonnets we are looking at, the same process takes place: both poets enumerate a number of principles to finally throw them down in the final lines.

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The first 12 lines in sonnet 129 deal with the ambivalent nature of “lust in action” where one craves desperately for that which, once had, only makes one miserable.  The poet contrast momentary bliss to the length of suffering that precedes and follows after lust, he writes “A bliss in proof; and proved, a very woe”. Finally he concludes that,

     

All this the world well knows, yet none knows well

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.  

 

In Sidney’s sonnet,  the poet enumerates in the first thirteen lines the various Platonic ideas: ...

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