Reproduction as resurrection

Reproduction as resurrection December 1, 2016

baby-1414531_1280Peter Leithart gives a splendid reading of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 3, in which he is trying to persuade his “fair young friend” (contrary to the homosexual readings of the sonnets) to get married and have children.

Leithart shows how Shakespeare and his age thought of what it means to have children, including the connection of sexuality to nature (for example, the link between “husband” and “husbandry”) and the notion that the reproduction is an image of resurrection.

From Peter Leithart, Womb or Tomb | Peter J. Leithart | First Things:

The first quatrain attempts to shame the youth into reproducing his image by having a child. He can see his face and his youth in the mirror. Now is the time—now and not later, when he is too old or too ugly—to form another face like the image he sees. If he fails to do this, he will rob the world of a good; he will steal a blessing from the potential mother of his child. The third line emphasizes the renewal that he should be pursuing—fresh, repair, now, renewest. By having a son before he becomes too old, he will keep his fairness fresh and repair the mutability of this aging world.

The second quatrain is a rebuke to the young man. The first two lines emphasize his attractiveness. Any woman with an “unear’d womb”—a womb like a field that is not full of ears of corn—would have him. The analogy between the agriculture and sexuality reflects what older scholars described as “the Elizabethan world picture,” in which poetic analogies are built into the world rather than imposed on it. “Husbandry” means playing the husband to a woman, so she conceives; it also means caring for mother earth and plant life so they become fruitful. This analogy is not the poet’s clever juxtaposition, but inherent in nature and language.

“Tomb” is a somber rhyme for “womb,” the destination of the dead rather than the source of life. What is headed for the tomb? If the youth doesn’t reproduce, his own self-love will go into the tomb, and posterity will die. That is: It’s to his own advantage for the youth to have a child, and he can’t be so silly, insane or “fond” as to kill his own self-interest. If he is so fond, then he will become his own tomb, the tomb of his own self-love. The rhyme starkly sets out the options: Plough and fill a womb, or stand aloof and his body will become tomb of his own self-love.

The third quatrain explains how reproduction is in his own interest. Had his mother been as reluctant as he appears to be to form a face like his own, he would not exist. He would not be his mother’s glass. His resemblance to his mother is a blessing to his own mother, since he revives the “April” of her prime. Again, reproducing is linked to renewal, refreshment, the coming of spring, the time when things bud and bloom. Reproduction is resurrection.

[Keep reading. . .]

Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence focuses upon a fair young man and a passionate friendship of the sort that is not uncommon, though it is interpreted in sexual terms today.  But the sex talked about in the sonnets is always heterosexual.  Not just in the poems that urge the young man, probably the poet’s noble patron, to get married, as here.  Shakespeare, in fact, contrasts the platonic and virtuous nature of his relationship with the friend with the illicit sexual temptations of another character in the sonnets:  “the dark lady.”

In the course of the sonnet sequence, the fair friend runs off with the dark lady!  Leaving the poet bereft and betrayed by them both!

That plot twist makes many scholars think that the whole series of sonnets is nothing more than a fictional construction–perhaps a parody of the conventional love sonnets–by our greatest fiction writer.

At any rate, the themes of the sonnet are not fictional at all, but are true and profound:  time and eternity, the psychology of human relationships, and the unconditional quality of real love.

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