July 6, 2015 Issue - The New Yorker
June, Moon, Tune
What is this thing called love?
By Adam Gopnik
On a freezing noon hour in April, people gather in Central Park, as they do each year, to read and listen to Shakespeare’s sonnets, complete, out loud, and in sequence. Together, the readers narrate, episodically, one of the strangest love stories on record. First, the poet urges a handsome young man to get married and have sex with a woman not from love or even lust, the woman remaining unnamed and unpictured, but, weirdly, from a selfish desire to make more kids as good-looking as he is. Then the poet confesses that he is in love with the young man, while trying to convince himself that good looks have a good moral effect in the world.
The next set is all about the poet wanting desperately to have sex with a dark-haired woman—but then, having done it, the poet feels so insanely guilty about it that he doesn’t enjoy it anymore, or enjoys it only as he is actually doing it, while before and after he feels awful. There is a lot of obscure travelling back and forth, and exchanging of gifts, which tends to confirm a sense that the poet is of lesser social station than the one written to, or about. Then he sighs and shrugs, and makes a few puns about Eros. Not only is the story strange; it is also told in a language that, though lucid line by line, seems in each poem ambiguous to the point of murk.
The poetic conceits tend to get cancelled even as they’re introduced: the poet can’t say that his mistress’s eyes are like the sun without saying that they aren’t. Among the enigmas, lines of an unreal, fairy-tale beauty emerge: “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes”; “I summon up remembrance of things past”; “That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows / whereon the stars in secret influence comment”; “Not mine own fears, nor the prophetic soul / Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.”
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