‘Power to Hurt’: The Young Man

Abstract

The reader’s flexibility of response is most strenuously tested when the sequence comes to deal, as it has always promised to do, with the young man’s character. In sonnet groups like 67–70 and 94–96 the poet’s strategy is to criticise and dissect while he preserves the gestures and expressions of sincere admiration; and this is not simply a matter of providing ironic or parody compliments, for these sonnets go deeper and analyse the actual nature of complimentary poetry. They use its forms of expression, metaphors, and images seriously — almost solemnly, at times — and in doing so reveal the viciousness inherent in the poet-sonnet-subject relationship. Later in this chapter I shall look closely at these two groups of sonnets, but I can begin to illustrate my basic point by first considering a pair of sonnets from earlier in the sequence, Sonnets 27 and 28. Their theme is a typical sonnet one, the poet’s absence from his lover. Sonnet 27 describes the poet’s inability to find rest, either by day or by night: