Shakespeare, Sonnets, and Stewardship

This journal was adapted for online publication and subsequently published by Resilience.org.

Out of the intangible pall a gentle but thick grace of growth explodes from the depths. Why it surfaces here no one knows, but it does and it does so very well. Her first leaves are opposite ovals that cling like fungus to the brittle, brown stem. She is fragile when young and often ensconces far below the withering spring grasses, the tired, oxidizing canopy. Memories of verve, of leaf-lit life. Soon, she will transform into tall triumvirates of clustered triangles adorned with marshaled, white flowers. Soon, she will fuse her color and gathering strength into her base to weather well the upcoming summer drought. But not yet.

Sericea lespedeza, or Chinese bushclover, often visits this landscape when spring has sufficiently left and its animals are ready for a good cleaning—a good deworming. They often thank her as they nibble, ever so slightly, feasting on her phytochemically-packed medicine. But, for now, she waits. She is patient.

Life is the conjoining of the old and the new—new species, or maybe old species made new in its specific surfacing—but so also is art. Art and its poetry is the conjoining of the old with the new—old beliefs with new awareness, old happenings with fresh metaphors or colors. In this way, art is powerful because she is a coyote in sheep’s clothing as she is a sheep that is somehow also a coyote. But sericea lespedeza knows this, for she is both medicine and pollination, she is both old and new, she is beauty and health and clarity and creation itself.

It is sericea that often draws me to beauty and its art. Many wildflowers grow in the Wildland, our family’s pioneering, large-scale rewilding project here in Central Virginia, but it is sericea’s great trick that captivates me, subjugates my attention. Under the formless fever of summer’s humidity, the withering spring grasses now fully effaced, sericea triumphs and becomes the marvelous maid of the meadow. Her grace of growth, her marshaled flowers.

It should not surprise that the observant among us are drawn to drama and its many arts. Liberality is not merely directed by constitutions or communities or laws or patterns but is blessed by art’s education in private life.

That is, art’s drama delicately imbues a sense of intimacy among the general public, turning our shopworn minds from the business of modern life to the mystical business of life itself. Art is the hurdle to the humdrum, a trip to the tireless human trades of hurry and toil. It has been said that humans do what they do and think what they think, in part, because of the way particular works of art speak to them. Perhaps that is true. But perhaps it is more true that humanity’s words in reply and response to particular works of art speak the loudest.

Long have I been in conversation with poetry and her pupils, and long has her greatest spoken most deafeningly. Who is William Shakespeare? While he speaks to us via the heroes, villains, and overall foolery of his plays, we never meet the man. He wrote no Confessions or Discourses and so his enigmatic sonnets will have to suffice. That Shakespeare speaks is perceived in his plays; that he has no need to speak is observed in his sonnets.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets, their enigmatic qualities diverging from the perpetual puerility of his plays, provide a glimpse into the mystical and the intimate. His sonnets have no Dogberry, who in Much Ado About Nothing understands nothing, or Malvolio, who in the Twelfth Night appears pretentious but is the play’s poetic pun. Shakespeare’s heroes become villains and his villains become kings—but his sonnets care not for villains or power, and they care not to entertain kings. Shakespeare’s Sonnets are the heartwood of his work. And I like to believe that, while the sonnets were written of himself and by himself and to himself, they were written for ourselves. They provide a universal and lasting education of the intimate. They are the denizen’s diary. And they tell us how to live—how to steward Earth, how to be human in the rubble and the ruins, and how to rise again as a lasting, Earthen harmony.

Sonnet 94 invites us to enter the writing and working chambers of the bard. But we do not see him. His shadow flickers on the flame-lit and flaking wallpaper that grows from the dim corner of his room. A wooden desk abuts the wall opposite the door, and ageless wax spills in waves over its edges. It has burned for too long and, in some way, also not enough. While we may enter his room, we may not yet see him. We have work to do. He writes,

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow:
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

In only ninety-eight words, Shakespeare stylizes quite standard syllables into the secret soliloquies of his soul—of our souls. We need only to read the first few lines to witness the pain and the truth and the triumph and the pain of humanity’s inner life. Locked in a room called conversance, he begins,

They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show.

Shakespeare begins his inner work with a riddle. Who is the they? Who is this nameless force that can and does not hurt us? What they most do show echoes like a bad dream against the peeling walls of this antiquated room, which itself feels like home, or at least we strangely feel like we are at home in it, and these words draw us with as much grace and mystique as they chill us with their callousness.

Who has the power to destroy and does not do what they most do show? The sonnet begins with this harrowing unknown and then spends the rest of its ninety-seven words catching up. Are you ready for the chase?

Notice what our bard does not say. He does not say but will do none. No, that is too simple. That is too benign. It would mean that, while harm is the opportunity, no harm is the permanent reality. But community requires love and love requires the opportunity of hurt. Isn’t this what it means to love? To have the power to hurt and do none? To give away all of your secrets and truths and pains and past lives to the one who has the greatest power to hurt you? Isn’t this why it hurts the most when love turns its back on you? Love requires the opportunity of pain.

Community and its love require the power to hurt and it requires the complete self-limitation of that thing they most do show—the usage of this power. But it does not allow its eradication. Eradicating the opportunity to hurt is the eradication of love itself. It must be a choice. Love without power’s opportunity to do harm is not love but something else entirely—something else entirely less everything. And what is love but everything?

And this is why Shakespeare says what he says, for this sonnet is about love. He neither limits nor eradicates power but opens it up entirely to the will of the they. Who is the they?!

And will do none, Shakespeare writes, meaning that it is a decision and not a directive. It is an invitation. A seemingly indifferent choice of words—and, but—that neither benevolence nor sympathy restrains. Is love power enough? But Shakespeare’s room is becoming dark and his shadow is fading with the light. The darkness is winning, his quill-scratched words now cataract. He continues,

Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow.

Shakespeare now places this they above the poem. While they’s being is contained within the lines, their purpose is somehow external to the rhymes. They move others but, in this movement and maybe in every moment which moves, they remain unmoved, like a stone.

Stones are delineated not by time or weight or color or shape but by persistence. Where does one stone end and another begin? Yes, that is their delineation. A stone is fallen stardust, atoms made complete when they become, all together, grounded. Isn’t this what it means to love? To be here, in this place, with a persistent patience that is really just urgency enflamed by purpose? Who is the they?!

Shakespeare continues,

They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.

The power to hurt and the stewardship of nature’s riches are linked, they are intertwined in this great drama. Sonnet 94 shatters and shakes our literary inquisition, claiming that stewardship without the power to hurt is an echo of excellence and not excellence herself. Shakespeare is talking about virtue. Heaven’s graces are inheritable when we become the lords and owners of our simple and small-souled faces—when we understand the choice of and (not but).

In other words, Shakespeare is claiming that nature’s stewardship must be intentional, and it requires persistent and urgent dedication to purpose over time. It requires patience, and it is up to you. It is a choice. This is the choice of and. Here, in this fading, candle-lit room that is called conversance, Shakespeare is talking again about love.

But the room’s tapers are now too low and their fading light flickers tepidly this way and that. What light remains flashes the shadowed silhouette astride not the wall’s decadent trappings but the enclosing ceiling of the sonnet, and we recognize the original form. The fading light casts a new perspective. That is art’s great power: this is not Shakespeare’s room but one we know very well, for our old eyes the sonnet made new—who is the they? Why, it is you.

Art and its dramatist: the choice of and. To nurture is to have the power to harm and to do none. But the power is ours while not for us and that makes all the difference.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94 casts the role of the dramatist—you, me, the all of us.  It is the artist that does and does not do the thing they most do show. It is the artist that is the unmovable but moving stone. While speaking, the artist speaks not; while playwriting, the artist plays not; while casting, the artist is cast not; while depicting, the artist’s portrait is depicted not; while building characters, the artist’s character builds not. And yet, it is artists and their art that move us, compel us in reciprocity—or reciprocus, meaning quite literally forward and backward simultaneously.

But Shakespeare is not yet done—his job is not yet complete. He continues,

The summer's flower is to the summer sweet
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.

The we of this poem is now a flower, and we have one more choice to make. While flowers make the summer sweet, their deeds can make them weeds. Shakespeare is talking again about purpose. In this closing couplet, he defines the choice—the we that have the power to hurt and so also have the power to love must decide if that love is sweet or sour—a flower or a weed.

Does it inherit heaven’s graces or fester with infection meet? Notice that this choice is not for our own sake. Flowers make the summer sweet, and themselves only live and die. Yes, but sericea lespedeza’s selfless surge of beauty and purpose already knew this. Love’s choice can only be selfless. Isn’t this what it means to love? Isn’t this what it means to be a human, an earthling writ in her bloody grit?

What Shakespeare is saying, if he is saying anything at all, is that art and its drama is about love because it is first about the choice. And it is about you—the poem and her poet, the land and her artist, the they who choose to catch the pellucidity of the moment and not the moment itself. Love can never have; it can only hold, but it cannot hold tightly. Like fresh spring water deft in its gravity-subjugated descent through unwebbed hands, love has a purpose of its own. It can only cherish.

In this way, to be a human in Earth is to be the dramatist—to step into the poem, to enter into the land, to sit in the room called conversance, but it is to do so lovingly and to do so with urgency and purpose and intentionality. This requires relationship, but not the kind that supplements the busyness of our lives with social calls. Rather, she demands our lives—relationship is what we are, it is not something we do. We are relationship.

It is to be sericea lespedeza in the meadowland, the florid medicine that beauty enthrones. Art and its artist is not the conquest of nature, either belligerent or benign. To be an artist is to be this choice—not to conquer nature or do that which we most do show, but to have the power to destroy and then to make visible the beautiful and passing moments of nature’s graces. To be relationship is to be this choice, steeped richly in the love and power of summer’s marshaled beauty.

Art is the transcendent and cosmic drama made tangible by the artist, but it is not the artist’s transcendence into the cosmos. The Creator instills nature with beauty; the artist elucidates nature’s beautiful abundance but is not the wellspring of its weight. Art is the recognition of beauty; it is to be the grandchild of God. The artist is temporary; the art is forever.

Robert Frost claims that art and its dramatist intends to “trip the reader head foremost into the boundless.” Yes, this is the role of the human and this is the choice of the dramatist—to see truth, to witness its drama, to accept the opportunity, to have great power, to hold loosely its abiding weight, and then to trip headlong into the boundless triumphs and pains and beauties made and gifted everlasting in the love of land, of the all of us.