Helen Vendler's Analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnet 17

Nowadays, a lot of people are trying to analyze old poems written by great ancient poets. Among these poets, Shakespeare is probably the one we talk about the most in the 21st century. Helen Vendler is one of the people who actually had the courage to write a whole book on Shakespeare’s sonnets. Her book, The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, contains every analysis she did on each and every sonnet of Shakespeare. Although she did a pretty good job on analyzing his sonnets, a normal student like me can’t agree with her on every single point. After reading Shakespeare’s sonnet 17 and Helen’s analysis on it, I will do a quick summary of her analysis and I will comment her ideas by stating my own opinions when I don’t agree with her. To do this summarization, I will divide her ideas in 4 paragraphs. In my first paragraph, I will summarize her own thesis on this poem of Shakespeare. To back up her thesis, Helen stated three main arguments that I will summarize in my last three paragraphs.

Helen Vendler obviously has her own thesis on the meaning of this sonnet. As she would say, Shakespeare made the future “come alive” (V 117) in this poem. He does pretty well on describing the envisaging future until he put himself in the future readers’ eye by writing, in line 9: “my papers, yellowed with their age”. In that line, the future described by this poet becomes way more imaginative and clear to the readers. She then states that up to lines 7-8, the readers have already reached the “climax of future verisimilitude”(V 117) with Shakespeare’s use of the words “age to come”. This climax is completed in line 8 and perfected in line 9. Even though Shakespeare has already described perfection in his first few verses, he is able to describe something more perfect than what the readers already thought as being perfection in these lines. She summarizes her ideas by saying that the first climax is reached in the first two quatrains while the third quatrain just adds something more to this climax. She finally concludes her thesis by stating that this sonnet is like a series of “steps ascending to the future, and then descending from it” (V 117). With the use of three interesting arguments, she attempted to back up this thesis.

In her first argument, Helen thinks the way Shakespeare wrote these verses are meant to be written in a logical order. Shakespeare first starts by asking a normal question: “Who will believe my verse in time to come?” Helen doesn’t mention it, but I obviously think that this question is meant to introduce us to the subject. Without this question, the rest of this sonnet would not make any sense. That just proves how important the first line of this sonnet is. She thinks the verses are written in a logical order because Shakespeare wanted to represent that “sort of escalating praise he wants to put in his verse” (V 117), as she would say.
If it were fill’d with your most high deserts?
[…]
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
And in fresh numbers number all your graces

Helen obviously thinks that as the poem goes on, Shakespeare’s words to praise the woman’s beauty get more intense. In other words, Shakespeare wrote his verses in that particular order for a first simple reason: praise the woman he describes in an escalating way.

In her second argument, Helen Vendler pushes her thoughts way further by analyzing verb tenses of the two following lines:
The age to come would say, “This poet lies:
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.”

She mentions that if Shakespeare ever succeeds on describing all the beauty he sees in the woman he described, the “age to come” would think he’s a liar and that it is not possible for a woman to ever be that beautiful. Helen believes Shakespeare put emphasizes on the verb tenses of this poem. While I think she might be going too far on this assumption, I wouldn’t say I disagree with her. Shakespeare could’ve used the same verb tenses if he wanted to. I think it was actually intentional. By writing “This poet lies”, Shakespeare uses the present tense to say that people will always be accusing him of being a liar. Shakespeare’s use of the past tense in line 8 is meant to put the woman he describes in a historical time: “ne’er touched earthly faces”. The readers will understand that this beautiful woman only once existed. In Helen Vendler’s own words, “The present tense establishes the perpetuation of the living poetic voice in verse; the past tense establishes the irrevocable pastness of the beloved’s youth” (V 117).

Her final and third argument still relies on the future of this poem. Of course, I would think that in the verse “So should my papers, yellowed with their age”, Shakespeare simply talks about his current poems getting older as time advances. But according to Helen’s analysis of this verse, Shakespeare is putting himself in the future readers’ position by forgetting his own probable death. She suggests that when Shakespeare wrote the line “old men of less truth than tongue”, he was actually denying his own death by the time his poems would have gotten old, by the time they would’ve “yellowed with their age”. I don’t necessarily agree with her on that point. I think what Shakespeare meant by that line is that the future readers will compare his lies to the sayings of old men who talk a lot without saying any truth, the foolish ones. However, I do agree with her on another point. The line “Though yet heav’n knows it is but as a tomb” is meant to say that if the future readers don’t believe the description of the woman, the truth of her beauty will remain hidden, just like a tomb. She also brings up the idea of direct quotation and indirect quotation. While the perceptions of the future readers and the yellowing pages are clear, the perception of the future becomes less vivid when Shakespeare uses something Helen refers to being indirection quotations: “be scorned”, “be termed”, “that time”. Also, Helen believes that Shakespeare intentionally wrote the line “And stretched meter of an antique song” just before the couplet so that it can have a contrast effect to it. In other words, while the whole poem talks about how people will not believe Shakespeare and the beauty of the woman, the couplet basically says that nothing is lost if a child of hers carries on her beauty.

To conclude, although I pretty much agree with Helen Vendler’s analysis of sonnet 17, there are still some little things in which I am in disagreement. However, we both agree on the most important thing: Shakespeare obviously wrote his verses in that particular order to create those escalating ideas of the future and of the woman’s beauty. At the end of the day, I think Helen did a great job on analyzing this sonnet of Shakespeare without always going too far in her ideas.

Work Cited
Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press. Pages 116-117-118. 1997.

Cited: Vendler, Helen. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pages 116-117-118. 1997.