I. Two Parallel Phrases
V. First and Last
Letters of Lines (I)
C.
Gematric
Values of Whole Sonnet
This part continues the analysis of Sonnet 136, dealing with Contents, Structure and Gematric Relevance. The two parallel phrases to be first discussed are
(l.4) LOUE-SUTE, SWEET
(l.12 SOME-THING
SWEET
I. Contents of the Two
Phrases
1.
The poet is aware of an obvious
inconsistency in his lady's behaviour. On the one hand she enjoys other lovers
beside him (l.6), on the other hand she complaints of his too stormy love
desire (l.1). The fact that she has more lovers at the same time suggests that
she is more interested in sexual enjoyment than in true personal relationship.
With regard to the poet, however, she seems to demand a higher standard of
morality. Perhaps she wants to appear more moral than she really is.
2.
The poet tries to overcome the
problem in the first part of the poem, but feels that he is not able to bring
about a personal love relation of mind and body, as his lady is too far away
from this ideal or has no confidence in it. So he must try a new way of
convincing her in the second part of his sonnet. He wants to achieve an
inversion of relationship: He no longer strives to come near to her, but tries
to make her come near to him. He wants to give her new confidence that sexual
love is identical with personal love.
3.
The personal nature of love is
contained in the first phrase:
Thus farre for loue my loue-sute, sweet, fulfill
The poet calls his desire of a personal relationship love and expresses it by addressing his lady as sweet, which is a name of love.
The second phrase refers to the poet's physical organ that
he claims to perform personal love as a union of soul and body.
Hold/ that nothing me, a some-thing sweet to thee
The poet suggests that the sweet sensations that the
physical act gives to his lady are due to the feelings of his own heart towards
her. Thus the sense of the second phrase is semantically associated with the
first.
1.
Good poetry shows three
characteristics:
–
Each word is related to all the others.
–
No structural element is accidental.
–
Structural elements are linked together to a high extent
of condensation.
2.
Numeric structure refers both to
Contents and Form:
Contents is based on a succession, i.e. a
certain number of logically connected thoughts and expressed in syntactical
units. So there is a Beginning,
an End and a Between both of Contents. The successive units are countable.
Form
can refer to Prose or Poetry. Form of Prose is mainly
connected with numeric organisation of contents. Poetry depends on Verse, i.e. metric schemes and number of lines.
Therefore the number of thoughts depends on the poetic Verse Form, which also determines Beginning, Middle, and End of single Lines
and Units of Lines.
3.
Any Number as a whole can be subdivided
into Numeric Units. As
Number refers both to Syntactical Units
and Verse Form, there
is a certain interrelation between these two principles.
4.
Verse Form is filled with Words. Each word occupies a Structural Position within a given Verse
Form. A single structural position can have a number of Relations to other positions.
Related Positions can be
occupied with Related Words.
5.
Words consist of Letters. So especially Beginning and End can refer to the respective letters of a single
Word or a Line. First and Last letters also have Structural Meaning.
1.
There is no doubt that any good
poet knows the great importance of Structural
Organisation of what he wants to say in a poem and proceeds
accordingly. But this does not necessarily mean that he counts words and
letters.
2.
Once a poet embarks on Counting, however, he needs some Model of Reference to provide him with Meanings of Numbers. Here lies a crucial
problem and obstacle. How can the analyzer of a poem know about it? A poet will
hardly invent a complete system of his own but follow certain conventions of
his time. So reliable information about numerological conventions of a time
must be obtained, if possible.
3.
Provided a poet has a
comprehensive knowledge of the meanings of numbers, he can shape and determine
everything countable in his poem according to it.
A poem offers many ways of counting. Let us concentrate on
those that are most related to the term Numerology. There is a progression from
larger to smaller units, from Words
to Letters. Letters, finally, can have Numeric Values according to a certain scheme.
The most common – and simple – way is to give each letter the number that it
occupies in the order of the alphabet. Counting numeric values of letters is
called Gematria.
4.
There is a last important
question that leads us to Shakespeare. If a poet deals with counting, does he
do so totally or perhaps partially. As soon as starts
counting words, he may feel obliged to count letters as well, and if he has
figured out the numeric value of one word, he might feel
Principally a poet is free to decide how many Structural Elements he wants to make use of.
Counting words, letters and numeric values belong to structure as well, but they
are rather optional. So I am inclined to think that Shakespeare employed gematric counting in particular only partially.
As to Gematria I'm confining myself to Sonnet 136 only,
but would gladly encourage further studies in this field, especially regarding
Shakespeare's numerological frame of reference.
1.
We may assume that at the centre
of Shakespeare's gematric interest is his and his lady's name. As I have
pointed out in the first part of my study, Shakespeare plays on four names: WILLIAM, its short form WILL and the varying spellings of EMILIA and AEMILIA.
A first illustration of Numeric Relevance might be the 63rd
and central word of the poem in line 7, WE, consisting of the
initials of WILLIAM
and EMILIA.
Its numeric value is 21+5 = 26 = 2*13, the last word WILL has the value 52 = 4*13,
together 78.
If you add 15,
the value of the first word IF, you get 93 = 3*31. So Shakespeare has
contrived another example of inversion: the numbers 13 and 31.
The initials WE
show connection to the sonnet form if their gematric values are multiplied: 21*5 = 105,
corresponding to the sum of the numbers 1-14. The two letters get special meaning from LOVE again
if the ratio of the gematric value 50
and the value of the two number letters
2.
So far I haven't included the
name SHAKESPEARE into my
calculation, because there are different spellings, though today's spelling was
the most frequent also at his lifetime. Counting the letters of AEMILIA and EMILIA, the result is 13, the letters of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE amount to 18, totalling 31.
Number 13
is also contained in the numeric value (NV) of the poet's initials WS = 21+18 = 39 = 3*13. With change of position SW are the first two letters of SWEET.
The still lacking 4 letters of WILL add up 31+4
letters to 35, which
is one third of 105, the
sum of the 14 sonnet lines. The multiplication 4*31 is 124,
which can refer to lines 12
and 4 with the two phrases. In fact,
if the two hyphenated words loue-sute
and some-thing are
counted as one word each, the total of words is 124.
Following the ascending number of lines, one gets the
three-digit number 412, which
divided by 4 leaves 103,
which is the NV of SHAKESPEARE.
If, however, the hyphens are considered to mark two
separate words, the total number of words is 126, which is the combined NV of WILLIAM
(74) and WILL (52).
126 is 6*21 or 7*18, the NV of the poet's initials WS.
3.
The following table shows how
the 5 names, whose average
number of letters is 7,
are woven together:
|
|
NV |
|
NV |
LET |
|
WILLIAM |
74 |
AEMILIA |
48 |
14 |
|
WILL |
52 |
EMILIA |
47 |
|
|
|
|
SHAKESPEARE |
103 |
21 |
|
|
126 |
|
198 |
|
|
|
7*18 |
|
11*18 |
35 |
|
|
(7+11)*18 =
18*18 = SS |
|
||
18 is the numeric value of S, the square result of the 5 names 18*18 can be related to the two root words of SHAKE-SPEARE's name.
The factors 7 and 11 correspond to the letters of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE. The number of letters can be
grouped in 2+3
names with letters multiplied by 7
each.
4.
Number 31 is also contained in the numeric value of the two
phrases:
loue-sute
50+62 = 112 (16*7)
some-thing
49+56 = 105 (15*7)
217=31*7
V. Gematria (2): First
and Last Letters of Lines
1.
To give a string of Initials secret meaning has always
captured the imagination of authors. Investigating into the initial and final
letters of Sonnet 136, I was quickly successful. The problem is to have the
right idea of what kind of acrostic device might be found.
A first minor clue refers to the poet's and his lady's
initials already discovered in the word WE as the central word of the
poem. Line 5 starts with WILL
and ends with LOUE.
2.
The gematric result of the 28 letters is 255 = 17*15. This gives rise to the
assumption that the numbers of lines have to be included into the calculation,
as successive addition of 1-14 totals 7*15. The result (7+17)*15 = 360 suggests the sonnet being
comparable to a circle of 360
degrees.
The numbers 24
and 15 can be related to the sum
of letters of the poetic couple: WILL EMILIA
WILLIAM AEMILIA (24), WILL SHAKESPEARE (15).
Besides, the gematric sum of EMILIA +
SHAKESPEARE is 150. The 17
letters of the two names may have been a motive for Shakespeare to form the
product 15*17 = 255.
3.
Previous examination has already
shown that Shakespeare divides the sonnet into two parts of 7 lines. If one
line is alternately put in the first and the next in the second group, the
rhymed pairs of lines of the three quartets are kept together in their respective
group, one line of the final couplet is put in the first, the other line in the
second group:
|
LINE |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
49 |
56 |
105 |
|
initial |
I |
S |
A |
T |
W |
I |
I |
A |
T |
T |
F |
T |
M |
A |
77 |
86 |
163 |
|
final |
E |
L |
E |
L |
E |
E |
E |
E |
D |
E |
D |
E |
L |
L |
39 |
53 |
92 |
|
in+fin |
14 |
29 |
6 |
30 |
26 |
14 |
14 |
6 |
23 |
24 |
10 |
24 |
23 |
12 |
165 |
195 |
360 |
|
|
7*15=105 |
10*15=150 |
|
|
|||||||||||||
|
+LINES |
105+15 = 120 |
150+90 = 240 |
|
|
|||||||||||||
The two sums 165
and 195 are divisible by 15, their
ratio is
4.
Proportion also becomes evident
if the pairs of letters are grouped symmetrically:
|
LINE |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
|
|
|
14 |
13 |
12 |
11 |
10 |
9 |
8 |
|
|
sum |
14 |
29 |
6 |
30 |
26 |
14 |
14 |
133 |
|
sum |
12 |
23 |
24 |
10 |
24 |
23 |
6 |
122 |
|
|
26 |
52 |
30 |
40 |
50 |
37 |
20 |
255 |
|
|
78 |
120 |
57 |
|
||||
The ratio of the first two pairs is 26:52 = 1:2, corresponding to the numerical
values of the initials WE
and WILL. The
three central pairs have exactly symmetrical results. 8:6 lines have the ratio 135:120 = 15*(9:8). If you add 15 for each pair,
the ratio is again 195:165 = 15*(
5.
We may assume that Shakespeare,
for the praise of (A)EMILIA,
chose a number of lines with first and last letters fitting the letters of her
name. Half of the sonnet's lines, perhaps according to the 7 letters of AEMILIA, apply:
|
LINE |
1 |
3 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
13 |
14 |
31 |
21 |
52 |
|
initial |
I |
A |
I |
I |
A |
M |
A |
23 |
19 |
42 |
|
final |
E |
E |
E |
E |
E |
L |
L |
32 |
15 |
47 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
86 |
55 |
141 |
Again there is a symmetrical structure with a centre of
three lines and two border lines on each side. The sums 42 and 47
obviously represent the words MILIA
and EMILIA,
whereas the sum of line numbers refers to the gematric value of WILL.
The
total result 141, divided by 3, refers to EMILIA's value 47 again.
The
subdivided sums can be assigned to letters of the words they represent:
|
31 |
ILL |
21 |
W |
|
23 |
ML |
19 |
IIA |
|
32 |
MLI |
15 |
EIA |
The Roman number letters in the left and right columns
amount to 2202+3 = 2205 which
can be divided into the factors 5*21*21,
which in added form result in EMILIA's
gematric value 47. The 3
factors may be regarded as initials of EMILIA+WILLIAM+WILL.
6.
Finally the gematric values of
all the initial and last letters contained in AEMILIA can be added:
|
|
A |
E |
M |
I |
L |
|
|
|
frequ. |
3 |
- |
1 |
3 |
- |
|
7 |
|
value init. |
3 |
- |
12 |
27 |
- |
42 |
|
|
frequ. |
- |
8 |
- |
- |
4 |
|
12 |
|
value final |
|
40 |
|
|
44 |
84 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
126 |
19 |
The gematric values of the initial and final letters 42 and 84
have the ratio 1:2
again. 42
is the gematric value of MILIA,
the total 126
of WILL (52)+WILLIAM
(74).
There may be a curiosity. EMILIA was married to LANIER (56), or in other spelling, LANYER (70). The added gematric values also total 126.
Written: December 2008