At some time or other life overpowers the strongest of us, and that
defeat we all treat lyrically; when the deepest depth in us is stirred
we cannot feign, or depict ourselves from the outside dispassionately;
we can only cry our passion, our pain and our despair; this once we use
no art, simple truth is all we seek to reach. The crisis of
Shakespeare's life, the hour of agony and bloody sweat when his weakness
found him out and life's handicap proved too heavy even for his
strength--that is the subject of the sonnets.
Now what was Shakespeare's weakness? his besetting temptation? "Love is
my sin," he says; "Love of love and her soft hours" was his weakness:
passion the snare that meshed his soul. No wonder Antony cries:
"Whither hast thou led me, Egypt?"
for his gipsy led Shakespeare from shame to shame, to the verge of
madness. The sonnets give us the story, the whole terrible, sinful,
magical story of Shakespeare's passion.
As might have been expected, Englishmen like Wordsworth, with an intense
appreciation of lyric poetry, have done good work in criticism of the
sonnets, and one Englishman has read them with extraordinary
understanding.
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