Sonnet 87 and the feeling of worthlessness

Finally, I want to consider a poem that describes a complex affective state for which it is hard to find a label in the English emotion lexicon – it literally creates an “objective correlative” for something which provisionally could be termed the

“feeling of worthlessness.” Unlike the previous examples, this poem does not make use of embodied metaphors. Instead, it exploits a set of source domains one would hardly associate with the experience of intense emotions, namely the semantic fields of trade, finance, and bookkeeping. Nevertheless, it is one of the most beautiful and moving poems of the sequence.

Farewell – thou art too dear for my possessing, And like enough thou know’st thy estimate, The charter of thy worth gives thee releasing;

My bonds in thee are all determinate.

For how do I hold thee but by thy granting?

And for that riches where is my deserving?

The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting, And so my patent back again is swerving.

Thy self thou gav’st, thy own worth then not knowing, Or me to whom thou gav’st it else mistaking;

So thy great gift, upon misprision growing, Comes home again, on better judgement making.

Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter, In sleep a king, but waking no such matter. (87.1–14)

This poem stands out from the rest of Shakespeare’s Sonnets in several ways.

Unlike the majority of the poems that express a hopeless devotion to an aloof and self-sufficient young man of exquisite beauty, sonnet 87 presupposes the tempo-rary fulfilment of the speaker’s desire and marks at the same time, and only two-thirds of the way through the sequence, the end of this liaison. The separation has not come about through any decision or action of the addressee. The speaker himself is convinced that his beloved has committed a clerical error (“misprision”) in his emotional reckoning and that he himself no longer fulfils the requirements of the contract or bond connecting them. Whatever relationship existed between them, he concludes, must therefore be terminated.

The poem contains twenty-two nouns, eighteen of which have a financial or legal connotation. The first stanza invokes the microeconomic technique of dou-ble-entry bookkeeping and the complementary discipline of arithmetic. One part of the double-entry system, aside from a memorial and a double ledger, was the inventory – a meticulous list of items and possessions that, in sum, constituted the net worth of an estate. The speaker’s reference to the beloved’s “charter of […]

Emotion Metaphors and Literary Texts   25 worth” suggests an inventory of his qualities whose final balance exceeds his own worth and thus “releases” him from all obligation. By mentioning the meta-phor of the “bond,” the poem invokes the discourse of usury and money-lending, thereby suggesting that a love relationship is a temporary business connection.

Whatever passes between two lovers must be eventually repaid with interest, at least according to the speaker’s reasoning, which is unable to accommodate the paradoxical logic of the gift and insists on balanced amorous accounts instead.

What exactly is the emotional equivalent of the disturbingly profane business venture that constitutes the relationship described here? On a conceptual level, the poem illustrates the emotion component of cognitive appraisal: it activates the source domain of finance and reckoning, and literally performs an economic appraisal of the self, thereby suggesting that there is an inherent connection between affect and the concept of value. However, unlike the previous poems, this one does not actually name the feeling it is discussing. Aside from a wistful

“farewell” in the first line, nothing in the extremely logical calculation conducted by the poem indicates the speaker’s emotional response to the inevitable conse-quence of his reckoning. Nevertheless, the profanity of economic calculation is undermined by the poem’s remarkable sound structure and prosodic features.

Whatever affective state is objectively correlated on the level of figuration is also encoded on a phenomenological level in the stylistic configuration of the poem.

How does it achieve this effect?

The poem’s most significant and distinctive feature is its unusual set of rhymes: as one of only two poems in the entire sequence, it has – with the excep-tion of one masculine line in the first stanza – feminine endings throughout. In addition to their phonetic resemblance as rhyme-fellows, these rhymes are pho-netically cross-connected as homeoteleuta by way of their unstressed endings in the syllable “-ing.” The consonance of the feminine cadences in twelve out of fourteen lines creates a tremendous homogeneity of sound that evens out com-pletely the extreme structural imbalance created by the single masculine rhyme in the first quatrain. It also compensates for the imperfect rhyme between “pos-sessing” and “releasing” in stanza 1.

In terms of metre, sonnet 87 displays, upon first glance, an unusual regular-ity: the metrical stresses prescribed by the pentameter line coincide through large parts of the poem with the natural word accents. However, there are two signif-icant disruptions of the iambic pattern in lines 5 and 13. The first hemistichs of these two lines, “how do I hold thee” and “Thus have I had thee,” contain a dactyl and a trochee, and thus follow the metrical pattern of the adonic, the conclud-ing line of the Sapphic ode stanza. They can be isolated as metrical hypograms that create the latent presence of a number of intertexts evoked by the Sapphic signature line. By way of these intertexts, the adonic is pre-coded with a specific

affect scenario similar to that described in the sonnet. In Sappho’s fragments, for example, the adonic line is used in poetic complaints to Aphrodite about a restless infatuation as well as for the expression of grief over the demise of the beautiful youth (Sappho 2002, 168). It is thus the metrical signature of a very specific sen-timent.

Sonnet 87 uses conceptual metaphors from the source domains of finance and reckoning to describe the appraisal structure of a particular emotion that applies the concept of value to the self. But the phenomenal qualities of that feeling only become accessible through the phenomenal qualities of the non-conceptual ele-ments of poetic language.

6  Conclusion

Using examples from Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence, it has been shown that poetic metaphors of emotion may be derived from basic conceptual structures, but that the communication of complex affective states depends on the combina-tion and variacombina-tion of those conceptual metaphors. Furthermore, conceptual meta-phors are not universal; metameta-phors derived from the source domain of the body, in particular, can have historically variable functions as emotion metaphors. Addi-tionally, it has become clear that emotion concepts, once they are correlated with the phenomenality of the poetic text, can invoke subtle affective states that would not be accessible to us by way of mere conceptualization.

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Kathrin Bethke is an assistant professor of English Literature at the University of Kiel. She is interested in the history and theory of emotions and is currently com-pleting her dissertation on William Shakespeare’s use of economic metaphors in the conceptualization of affective states. She has held scholarships from the DRS (Dahlem Research School) and the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) for research stays at Stanford University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.