William Shakespeare: Sonnets

Well, that was unexpected.  Naturally I had read many of these before, taught some to my students, and even committed a few to memory.  I certainly thought that I "knew" them; I was wrong. 

Reading the sonnets out of sequence and context deprived me of the story behind them, and there is no mistake that there is a narrative here.  There is no "stopping place", no division where one idea stops and the next begins, though there may be said to be a "pausing place" at the end of n.126.  And the narrative's content is as startling to this supposedly well-read English teacher as is the existence.  In my Shakespeare classes, textbooks, and teaching materials, there was occassionally a winking nod to Shakespeare's relationship with the "fair youth" of the first 126 sonnets that centers on the clever wordplay and metrical games of n.20.  "Teehee," the body of scholarship seems to say, "Wouldn't it be a gas if Shakespeare were just the teensiest bit gay?"  Hahahano.  Read consecutively, these sonnets are the gayest poem I have ever read.  The sonnets are not "occassionally homoerotic in nature," they are a queer pride parade on paper. 

"But, but, the dark lady!" one might protest.  "Surely she is evidence that Shakespeare liked the ladies . . ."  Sure.  His body did at least like the ladies.  But the tone of the last section is so starkly different, so comparatively rational and physical, that it is impossible to say that the writer felt the same way about her as he did about the fair youth.  The former (in the preceding sentence, not in sequence) are poems of lust.  But the desperate, pleading, spiritual emotion of the first 126 is Love.  I would go so far to say that any attraction the dark lady had for the writer is rooted in his feelings for the fair youth, and could not possibly have arisen on its own.  And if I were to go farther, and abandon adherence to what is provable in the text, I would go so far to say that the physicality of the last poems are a proxy for the physicality that he was unable to express to their true object.   Perhaps in the same way that my feelings about these poems are a proxy for the feelings I could not possibly allow myself to express in life.