Shakespeare's Sonnet Seven: It's not so bad

Reading with the critics

What Helen Vendler says

In The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets, Helen Vendler admits she runs the risk of being charged with overreading (what Don Patterson draws attention to) when she points out certain words play in the mirror-like structures of the Sonnet 7 quatrains. In gracious, sacred and tract Shakespeare scrambles the sun's car. The idea of the aging of the sun is also reflected in words like

homage, age, golden pilgrimage, (once again) age.

The word sun which the poet makes an effort not to repress finally bursts out as son, the final word of the poem. Shakespeare, Vendler claims, makes up for the conventionality of the conceits in the poem (the sun's movement in the sky and the loss of public respect) with his word-games. 

What Don Paterson says

How Vendler reads Sonnet 7 is a good example of the issue Don Paterson has with her criticism in his Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets. According to Pat, she reads into the Sonnets what is not there. The intelligence and word puzzles she credits the poet with are

her own formidable intelligence

and

the kind of word-puzzle she herself enjoys solving.

The "orthographic hiding" she uncovers in the Sonnets – strikes Paterson "as plain kabbalistic." In describing Vendler's overreading Paterson says:

There is a hidden threshold in the poem, a point past which you go on insightfully identifying things that are not there, and The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets saw Vendler cross it.

Rescue missions

Despite what the critics find wrong in Sonnet 7 (a "rather unconvincing poem," according to Paterson and a poem that "has little to recommend it," according to Vendler), both critics think certain functions can rescue the poem. 

I do too. In the different words Vendler says the "aging of the sun in the poem seems to generate" one sees the potential of the sun and (by comparison the young man) to lose its splendor and thus sink into oblivion. Shakespeare, one could say, was careful to strengthen this idea by placing the words in the first two quatrains (quatrains where it is not obvious the sun could ever lose its splendor) where the sun rises and is at its highest. 

 If humans do find pleasure in uncovering patterns, Shakespeare has certainly made the "well-worn" pleasurable. Paterson is more direct. From the poem we get to see "the way an extended metaphor works." However, readers get to decide why Paterson points this out when he later writes:

Usually it’s totally unimportant for the reader to know any of this stuff.