Close Reading : Sonnet 60
The ‘Unseen’ in A-level English Literature
AQA Syllabus A
Paper 1 Two Unseen Poems
Paper 2 Unseen Prose
AQA Syllabus B
Paper 2 Unseen “passage”
Cambridge International A-level English Literature
Paper 2 Unseen “literary material”
Answer one question from choice of two
The passages cover two of the categories from prose, poetry and drama.
Pearson Edexcel A-level English Literature
Paper 3 includes a question involving making a comparison between an unseen poem and a poem of the candidates choice from a set poetry text.
OCR A-level English Literature
Paper 2 includes a question based on an unseen prose extract.
WJEC A-level English Literature
Paper 1 comparative analysis of two unseen poems.
As you can see from the above, all the A-level exam boards include a question on unseen “literary material”. The ‘unseen’ element should not alarm you (too much!) since the close reading skills that are required should have been developed through your study of the set texts – as well as through classroom practice in discussing and writing about unseen material. One can say that the ‘unseen’ is one way of examining the close reading abilities developed throughout your literary studies. Though it is ‘unseen’, it is not to be regarded as an unknown quantity.
Let us imagine that your exam paper presents you with the following unseen poem and with this question, ‘Paying close attention to the poet’s use of language, discuss the various ways in which the poem explores the theme of time.’
Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
Avoid working your way through the poem line by line and paraphrasing the content. See if you can find a way of describing the poem’s overall design or structure. In the case of this poem, you may well have spotted that it is a sonnet and that it is a sonnet that is structured in such a way that it consists of three groups of four lines and ends with a rhyming couplet. From your experience of wider reading and classroom teaching, you may know that there are two main types of traditional sonnets: the Italian, which divides into two parts, an octet with eight lines and a sestet with six lines; and the Shakespearean which consists of three groups of four lines and concludes with a rhyming couplet. Whether or not you know this is not that important, but what is critical is that you can see how the poem is structured. So a good starting point is to identify the overall structure of three groups of four lines with the last two lines forming a rhyming couplet. A useful literary term to have at hand is that of a quatrain. A quatrain is a group of four lines. With this structure identified, you could develop this point further by pointing out that each four line group, each quatrain, is made up of one sentence with a final sentence in the couplet, making a total of four sentences. This is not strictly true, since the last six lines do form a single sentence, but one can see the colon at the end of line twelve as almost amounting to a full stop.
Now that we have a way of describing the poem’s structure, we can turn to how that structure helps the poet to develop his thoughts concerning time. We can see that each quatrain deals with its own aspect of time. The first deals with minutes; the second deals with the stages of life from birth to death; the third with Time’s actions upon the human body ¬– note that Time in this quatrain and those following begins with a capital letter that indicates that Time is now personified. The couplet then makes the claim that his poem, or perhaps his poetry as a whole, his ”verse”, will not be subject to Time’s changes. I say, his poetry as a whole because of the presence of the person implied by “Praising thy worth”. This person suddenly appears in the final line of a poem about time. Other poems amongst “my verse” must therefore be where we find him “praising thy worth
We are now in a position to summarise the poem’s overall design and its content. This is a sonnet about time. It divides into three quatrains with a concluding couplet. Each quatrain develops its own statement about an aspect of time. In the couplet the poet seeks to draw some comfort from the thought that his verse is not subject to Time’s “cruel hand”.
So far this reading of the poem has stepped back a little to give an overview of its structure. Having done that, we are now in a position to begin a ‘close reading’ of the poem, a granular approach in which we focus on particular words and lines. With this poem we can begin our analysis with the first quatrain and work our way through in the given order. Such an approach should not be regarded as the norm. With other poems it may well be better to begin at some point within the poem. You have to make that judgement. With this poem, the first quatrain presents us with a similarity between the way “our minutes hasten to their end” and the movement of waves towards a “pebbled shore”. Each minute as it passes to its end is replaced by the subsequent minute, just as each wave is followed by the next, and each wave will have its end on the shore. The rhythm of line four manages to enact the meaning of the line. Here I assume that you have come across some of the terms used to describe poetic rhythm and metre. In this case, we have a line in regular iambic pentameter. That is a sequence of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable repeated five times (stressed syllables are in bold):
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
This orderly progression imitates the orderly forward movement of both minutes and waves. There can be no deviation from this, no halting of the process, no exceptions: ‘each and all’ must be carried forward. The rhythm of the preceding line (“Each changing places with that which goes before”), although also in iambic pentameter ¬¬– though with an extra syllable – is significantly different. There is, from “… that…” to the end of the line, a quickening of pace as the line hurries to its end. This hurry is fitting for the swift succession of the minutes. Line four, however, is such that as we speak it, we give a more emphatic stress to each of its stressed syllables. When this is coupled with the associations of “toil” and “contend” we are likely to think of the material, ‘heavier’ movement of the waves rather than the abstract idea of minutes swiftly passing. The quatrain began explicitly with the waves and ends, implicitly, with them. The minutes like waves simile is thus emphasised and draws attention to the force and power of nature that impels the movement of the minutes. We are made to feel that all nature lies behind this movement of time. It has to be so.
“Nativity” in the second quatrain calls for a gloss. Here it means ‘birth’, the birth of any human being, not simply the birth of Christ and the feast day to celebrate that birth. “Main” can mean the open sea and it is used metaphorically here for the world of sunlight that the child is born into as it emerges from the womb’s darkness. The infant’s first movements, its crawling, is extended beyond infancy as it “Crawls to maturity”. Thus the time period between infancy and adulthood is compressed, as the earliest movement on all fours is presented as if it is carried through to adulthood. All the in between stages are left out. Arriving at maturity is seen as a moment of glory as one is “crowned”. However, no sooner does one arrive at this peak, adverse influences, seen as “crooked eclipses”, are at work. An eclipse literally covers a light source and we also use it figuratively for putting something or someone into the shade: in this case, depriving the crowned person of “glory”. “Crooked” suggests that there is some ill-intentioned agency behind this eclipsing of the newly crowned. This suggestion of something ill-willed, perhaps perverse, is continued when the capitalised (and so personified) figure of Time confounds, overthrows and reduces to nothing, that which it has given.
“Time” personified suggests Father Time, who is, by convention, depicted as an old, bearded man carrying a scythe and an hourglass: the one to cut you down and deprive you of life when your time, as measured by the hourglass, is up. Having introduced Time in line 8 as one who “confounds” what he has given, he is then seen at work in the third quatrain: “Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth”. Transfix means to pierce through, usually with a pin or similarly sharp instrument. To transfix a flourish is difficult to take literally, though taken figuratively such a painful penetrating action is in keeping with the poem’s overall presentation of Time as a cruel agent who seems to give only to deprive. Time’s similar action in the next line, its delving “of the parallels in beauty’s brow”, its wrinkling of the skin, as it digs into the brow and leaves parallel ‘lines’, can be more readily pictured. Presented over three adjacent lines, there is an emphatic, cumulative effect as each line, in quick succession, transfixes and delves and devours. Once the flourishes, the beauties, the rarities have been dealt with, Father Time takes on traditional form as his scythe mows down what is left.
Some attention was given to metre and rhythm in the comments on lines three and four. Another point that could be made on rhythm is the way lines 6, 7, 9, 11 and 14 begin with a stressed syllable rather than the unstressed syllable that would be the norm with iambic metre. So Crawls, Crooked, Time, Feeds and Praising are given a rhetorical emphasis as a result of this initial stress. In this way these key words are given fitting emphasis.
Rhyme is sometimes taken to be synonymous with poetry. This is a mistaken view. A lot of poetry does not use rhyme; however, rhyme is an important part of the poetic art. One way to explore the effects of rhyme is to consider how bringing together two rhyming words has an effect beyond that of sound. Putting one word alongside another with which it shares an acoustic identity but with which it has contrary semantic connotations, is one way of adding a depth and complexity of meaning. For example, in this poem “confound” is rhymed with “crowned”. A word suggesting a summit of achievement is made to react ironically with a word suggesting an overthrowal, a defeat, a reduction to confusion. Rhyme could also be used to have a contrary effect since it could emphasise agreement and harmony. Here I point to the way “youth” and “truth” enhance each other and in doing so help to underline Time’s ”cruel hand”.
The sonnet ends with a rhyming couplet. So far, Time has mowed everything down and nothing is left standing. However, the poet has, as it were, the last word with a neat, compact couplet that offers a contrary power to that of Time. That contrary power is his art. The poet, with a degree of confidence suggested by the orderly neatness of the couplet, states that there is one thing that may still stand in future time and that is his other verses, the ones praising someone he particularly values whether it be his friend, his lover, or his wife. “Times in hope” could be future times which, it is hoped, will come; it could also suggest a hope that his verses will stand the test of time and find appreciative readers.
You may have known this from the start, but this is Sonnet 60 from Shakespeare’s Sonnets. There are 154 sonnets in his collection.