`I Look Upon Fine Phrases Like a Lover'

On alternate nights before going to sleep, the friend of a friend, a retired English professor, reads one of Shakespeare’s sonnets or a letter by Keats. This impresses me as a sensible regimen. Some readers, reaching for a mystery, might object: “But I don’t want to think before I go to sleep. I want to relax and escape. I want to stop thinking.” Fair enough, but engagement with a literary text, especially a work we know intimately but also know we can never exhaust, is another species of relaxation. The quality Keats and Shakespeare share, besides genius, is an essential strangeness. By this I don’t mean eccentricity. They say things in a manner different from other writers, and in a manner that continues to resonate even after long acquaintance. Their language is simultaneously precise and suggestive. They find expression for thoughts we never suspected were possible. Take the best-known sonnet, No. 73:

“That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.”

What always impresses me is how quietly Shakespeare narrows time, starting with a year and tightening the focus until only ashes remain. The sadness is almost overwhelming, a sense heightened, not diminished, by its proximity to self-pity. A quarter-turn in the wrong direction and it would all melt into bathos. And why “black night?” Why is that not redundant, inserted merely to fill out the meter, but instead so frightening and final? We have a life distilled in 14 lines – perhaps two lives. This confirms the rightness of Keats addressing Shakespeare, in “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again,” as “Chief Poet!” On Nov. 22, 1817, Keats writes to J.H. Reynolds:

“One of the three books I have with me is Shakespear’s [sic] Poems: I neer found so many beauties in the sonnets – they seem to be full of fine things said unintentionally – in the intensity of working out conceits – Is this to be borne? Hark ye!”

The letters are peppered with Shakespeare. On Aug. 14, 1819, he wrote to Benjamin Bailey:

“I am convinced more and more every day that….a fine writer is the most genuine Being in the World – Shakspeare [sic] and the paradise Lost every day become greater wonders to me – I look upon fine Phrases like a Lover….”

With your permission, Professor, I will adopt your reading plan.