‘Policy in Love’: The Reversal of Roles II

Abstract

Close to the end of the young man sequence a group of five sonnets, 117–121, demonstrates explicitly and unambiguously the reversal of roles between the young man and the poet. In a significant way it stands as the sequence’s emotional climax, and, in Sonnet 121, presents one possible conclusion to it. It ought to be unnecessary for me to emphasise the importance of a group of sonnets in which the poet openly patronises the young man, for its effect upon the reader is revolutionary, bringing at last into the open what for so long had been the subject of innuendo and implication — but it is hardly an exaggeration to say that while Sonnet 121 has received some detailed critical comment, the group as a whole has been generally neglected. This is a pity, because as much as any other group in the sequence these five sonnets make the reader put into practise the whole of his craft of sonnet reading. Each sonnet compels attention to every phrase, and leaves at its finish a strong dissatisfaction, the feeling that something vital to the poem’s meaning has still not been absorbed.