Shakespeare’s Sonnet 62 is unique among the other sonnets in that it posits the speaker simultaneously as both the subject and the object of the intense love described throughout the poem. In Sonnet 62, the subject is at once and immediately constituted as the object of his or her own self-love, and at the same time disassembled because the self that the speaker worships does not exist anymore and has not existed for quite some time. The entire sonnet focuses on how much the subject believes that he or she is perfect and entirely beyond reproach, and that none other can compare. However, it is at the very end that the subject realizes that the object of the subject’s love is a very distant version of the subject itself – the youthful version of the subject viewed through the lens of old age. In this act of the love being displaced from a tangible object onto a ‘self’ that not longer exists as anything but a fleeting memory, the sonnet manages to call into question the identity of the lover who loves himself by illustrating that the beloved self is nothing but a long departed memory.
The subject is simultaneously constituted within the text of the sonnet as two distinct entities: the subject that speaks of its love and the object that receives its love. Here, the subject of the sonnet is the same as the object of the sonnet. This is possible because the sonnet is about narcissism, the act of self-love. In this manner, the self exists because it loves and is loved at the same instant. “The sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye” (1); His “eye” sees nothing else because it is entirely focused on the image of the self. Furthermore, the subject adds, “And all my soul, and all my every part” (2); that is, the subject speaks of how the act of loving the self consumes his entire being and overwhelms his sensibilities and efforts. The love is expressed therefore as a consummation of his faculties: his tangible senses, his soul, and everything in between are all united toward the object of his love. The subject acknowledges that “for this sin there is no remedy” (3), implying that since there is no remedy he shall never be cured and shall in fact continue to love himself for as long as conceivably possible with nothing to stand in his way, for “[this sin of self-love] is so grounded inward in my heart” (4). The self-beloved is so worthy of this affection because there exists “no face so gracious” (5) and “no shape so true” (6); the image of the self that the subject sees is perfect and entirely beyond comparison, and it is the subject itself.
It is important to note how the sonnet constructs not only the beloved, but also the worth and sublime nature of the beloved: “for myself mine own worth do define” (7). In this manner, the sonnet not only constructs the subject as the one that loves and is loved, but also constructs the subject as the one that defines worthiness and is defined by that worthiness. That is to say, the subject when contemplating the object is the agent to define the worth and value of what it beholds, and since the object is in fact that subject – sine the subject loves that which is itself – the subject is constructed by the worth and value that it ascribes to the object. And since the subject “all other in all worth [surmounts]” (8) then the sonnet not only constructs the subject-object but constructs the subject-object as the ultimate, the unsurpassable. Hence, the sonnet operates on several levels in relation to its construction of the subject and the object. As a subject, the speaker comes into existence at the same time as the self-love the poem speaks of comes into existence. The self-love not only lends agency to the subject in making the subject that which loves, but also lends existence to the subject as the one that is loved, therefore making the subject into the object. This dual-existence embodied by the subject-object or the self-beloved is interesting in that as the sonnet constructs these entities, neither can exist without the other. Either the subject and the object both exist, as they do once the “sin of self-love” (1) is spoke of, or nothing exists. Furthermore, since the love for the subject-object does “all other in all worths surmount” (8) it is to be seen as paramount – anything less undermines the existence of the love as set forth by the sonnet. In this way, the sonnet constructs the subject to be the one that loves and also constructs the subject as the object that is loved, and makes it clear that the love expressed is of the loftiest and most sublime kind. This is crucial to the way the sonnet works because one could argue that if this love is not the highest and truest kind, that it undermines the real-ness of the subject-object that it gives existence to.
However, the sonnet also manages to deconstruct the subject-object/self-beloved by virtue of the same way that it constructed the dual entity. Both the subject and the object are intimately linked and inextricable because one creates the other and is at the same time created by the other. The subject is that which loves, and the object that the subject loves is the self because that is the nature of the “sin of self-love” (1). And it is precisely the sin of self-love wherein lies the destruction of the subject-object. As the subject discovers in the later lines of the sonnet, the self-beloved that the subject-object worships and reveres is the self-beloved that is viewed by an older self that is “beated and chapped with tanned antiquity” (10). That is, the subject is an older self who loves the object that was the younger self. With this shift, the sonnet becomes a different kind of poem in that it is now about the love of youth that may characterize old age, and the speaker voices this revelation and admits that afterwards, “mine own self-love quite contrary I read” (11). There is a difference now in the love for the self because if the self is a younger self, the self isn’t the same self anymore. In the previous understanding of the poem in which the subject was seen as loving the object that was its contemporary self, there was no difference between the Self and the Other because the two existed in the same time and in the same self, so to speak. However, now there does exist a difference in that the younger self seems to morph into the Other; there exists a disparity of age between the two selves created by the sonnet. “‘Tis thee, my self, that for myself I praise, / Painting my age with beauty of thy days” (13-4): the concluding couplet emphasizes the fact that the subject-object loved the subject-object, but was attempting to unite two different conceptions of itself into yet another, more intangible and even more fleeting subject. And it is in this shift that the sonnet manages to deconstruct the subject: the object that is loved by the subject is a younger version of the subject. Therefore, the object itself does not exist anymore except in memory. The subject is now an older figure remembering his youth with narcissistic fondness, but the very fact that he is older now reinforces the fact that youth is fleeting and has long since fled away. Because of this, the subject loves a mere memory of its previous self, a phantasm: the object of the subject’s love, the self-beloved, does not exist anymore. And as discussed earlier, neither the subject nor the object can exist without the other: if the object of the love does not exist, then neither does the subject that loves. And since the object is not a real object outside of the context of personal memory, then the object cannot exist and therefore the subject cannot exist without the object of its love. In another interesting twist, the very fact that the object is not a real object separate from a fleeting memory means that the object is also no longer a subject! In this manner, the sonnet manages to disassemble the subject in taking away the object of its love. Also, it becomes clear at this point that the object never was the object of its love because of the time difference; that is, the object was always one step behind the subject. Therefore, this also negates the subject because there is precisely no object for it to love. The “sin of self love” as expressed in Shakespeare’s sonnet appears not only to be a sin because of the implication of intense personal pride – pride, which is the root of all evil, of course – but perhaps also because it calls into question the validity and existence of the self itself. Shakespeare’s Sonnet 62 constructs the subject not just as the subject, but as the dual entity of the subject-object; because we are at first led to believe that the subject is the one that loves and the object that is loved is the subject itself, the subject encapsulates both itself and the object of its agency. The subject-object is constructed by the sonnet as that which loves and is loved – as both the agent and the recipient melded together. However, the sonnet deconstructs the subject/subject-object in precisely the same way that it constructs the dual entity. If the object that the subject loves no longer exists, just as youth no longer exists for a figure in old age, then the subject cannot possibly exist. That is, one cannot love if there is nothing to love, and if there is nothing to love then there is no one to love it. The subject is always subject to an object that is lost. It is in this manner that Shakespeare’s Sonnet 62 both constructs the subject as a lover, and then deconstructs it upon making clear that there is nothing to love anymore.
No comments:
Post a Comment