Stages One through Four: Data Manipulation; Thesis Generation; Evaluation of the Poem's Quality in Terms of its Form and Content
I. What are the tensions in the poem?
The situation of the poem--who is "I" (the speaker, "Lover") and "thou" (spoken-to, "Beloved") and what is their relationship at the time of the poem, what was it, what is happening to it, and why?
Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing, / [ . . . ]
Thus have I had thee, as a dream doth flatter, /
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.
Speaker ("I") vs. Addressee/Spoken-to ("thou")--the second person familiar in C13-17 Middle and Early Modern English means the speaker is or was in an intimate relationship to the spoken-to. They might be friends or lovers, but this is a "break-up" poem of farewell. The alternative relationships are "parent-child" and "master-servant." In that case, the parent is admonishing a child or the master is dismissing a servant.
Other tensions: wealth/poverty (literally riches, or emotional or moral value); gifts/possessions (again, literal/figurative); deserving/usurping (again, literal/figurative)
II. What literary language does the poem use to describe the relationship and what is happening to it? How does the form reinforce or contest the language's prosaic meaning (if considered without line breaks or rhyme)?
Ambiguity, metaphor, connotation, implication--economic meanings are in tension with social/moral meanings; the language of commerce is being used to describe a love relationship.
Rhyme scheme at first connects economic ambiguities and metaphors at the end of the lines, but then (at "swerving") the rhymes are on participles made from verbs about action involving reasoning, not love. The rhyme scheme appears to vary as the stanzas examine possible reasons for the speaker's loss of the beloved's "gift," but only if we count the vowels before the "-ing" participial suffix. If we look only at the "-ing" rhymes, the poem's stanzas become almost obsessively mono-tonal: "releasing," "granting," "deserving," "wanting," "swerving," "knowing," "mistaking," "growing," "making." This makes the final couplet's "flatter/matter" rhyme surprising and climactically intense. The rhymes in the third stanza are about reasoning and construction: "knowing," "mistaking," "growing," "making." But the rhyme pairs are about opposing activities--knowing is the opposite of mistaking and growing (natural, organic) is the opposite of making (artifice). They might make us look back at the second stanza's rhyme words which seem to tip the relationship toward its end: "granting?"; "deserving?" [implied "no"]; "wanting"; "swerving" [implied 'yes"]. The moral sense with which Shakespeare has elsewhere used "to swerve" suggests that the "patent" is something unwholesome, flawed, and undesirable.
What does that imply about why it is happening?
Beloved's high power/status: "like enough thou know'st thy estimate"; "The charter of thy worth"; "how do I hold thee but by thy granting?"; "Thyself thou gavest, thy own worth then not knowing"; "thy great gift." Lover's low power/status: "My bonds in thee are all determinate."; "And for that riches where is my deserving? / The cause of this fair gift in me is wanting, / And so my patent back again is swerving." Or is this poem really about the speaker's/Lover's moral authority and psychological integrity regained after being corrupted by a bribe of wealth/power/status?
III. What non-obvious insight does that give us about the narrator's view of the relationship?
What was once love, understood as a "gift," is being broken off because it has become an implied relationship of economic/erotic prostitution. But who was the economic/erotic "whore" and who was the economic/erotic "john"? If the Beloved knows what s/he's worth and gave her-/himself away without caring about the difference in power/status, perhaps the Lover took the gift believing the difference in power/status did not matter, but now, apparently because of the Beloved's actions, it does. What was once free, now is understood as the Lover's indebtedness to the Beloved and love has become a "trick"--the Beloved has become the high-priced "whore" and the Lover, the impoverished "john."
The bitterness with which the Lover dismisses his own dreams is belied by the offhand language with which the final couplet closes, but the closing clause is still in tension with the remembered "dream" from which each line falls away into a mocking reappraisal:
Thus have I had thee,
as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.
The poem simultaneously addresses its audience about the dangers of love among social unequals while administering a savagely understated "economics lesson" to the former Beloved, who carelessly began love as if it were a transaction while allowing the Lover to believe it was a true gift, freely given.
IV. What does that insight imply about human relationships in general?
A Standard NC ("timeless" and "universal") insight:
Love should not be evaluated like a property transaction. Lovers should not weigh each other's "worth" as if they were commercial real estate. Love is a gift we give each other. Love does not really make "kings" of us, in fact; only in dreams does it seem so. Love only thrives among equals. The poem does not openly announce this (for Renaissance England) radical erotic agenda, perhaps out of deference for the real subject of the poem (assuming there is one), but it forces the readers to experience the Lover's rejection as if they were the Beloved, parsing the false praise of the economic metaphors to discover the bitter ironies within them.
A Hirschian NC / New-Historicist-NC insight ("The interpreter's job is to specify the text's horizon as far as he is able, and this means, ultimately, that he must familiarize himself with the typical meanings of the author's mental and experiential world" [1399].):
In addition to the basic New Critical interpretation (above), we could further refine the historical "horizon" of implication created by the patterned commercial and erotic metaphors in the poem. Shakespeare lived in an era in which poets typically sought "patrons" among the aristocracy. Patrons were protectors who would reward the poets' excellence, and the poets' occasional allusive or direct praise of their generosity/nobility/achievements, with indirect financial support. That support typically would include taking the poet into the patron's household where food, shelter, clothing, and indeed all necessities of life could be counted upon coming to the poet from the patron's largesse.
See Kent's joining Lear's household in disguise after his banishment. Even if the poet did not live in one of the patron's many households, the poet would "belong" to the patron's list of protected servants and could draw upon that protection and support when needed. Since medieval times, the lord and vassal/servant relationship often was described in writing using forms of the verb "to love," as in "my beloved lord/lady X" and "my much beloved and trusty servant Y." Increasingly, however, late Renaissance poet-patron relationships, like other servant-master relationships, became more like "a job," poetic work being rewarded with one-time gifts, at first clothing or even small estates, but later simply cash, a method of payment formerly used only to hire traitors, murderers, prostitutes, and landless day-laborers (Astington 429). This is why Kent hates Oswald, Goneril's "superserviceable" servant who, for the promise of money, betrays Lear, once his own lady's lord.
In this poem, readers dramatically participate in the speaker's disgusted realization that, although he entered the relationship believing the old rules still held true, the Beloved has not honored the implicit pledge of protection and reward that was due the Lover's service. By some word or gesture, the Beloved has invoked the lord/vassal or Beloved/Lover difference as a class difference based in vastly disparate levels of wealth and power, not as a "love relationship" socially understood, in which the mighty owed the weak a debt of "kindness" ("belongingness") as human beings. The Lover now sees, with radical clarity, the emptiness of modern lordship and its myths of "possession." In mockingly granting the noble Beloved the "freedom" which nobles take for granted as their birthright, the Lover implies that he never will be bound to a noble in such a bond again. That is the true desolation in the last line--freedom forever in a limitless desert of alienated humanity ruled, not by love, but by cash paid by the highest bidder. The final couplet cuts loose the speaker's "overheard" relationship with the readers as they, as if slapped, recoil from identification with the poem's inscribed reader, the social unequal/whore-Beloved.
This is a great poem, not merely a good poem, because its author links a long-lived human truth to a specific insight about his culture's transition from medieval to modern values. He makes nearly every noun and verb in the poem vibrate with connotations specific to this clash of cultures. For comparison (ala Brooks on Tennyson II), consider the triumphant speaker of Jack Rhoades and Dick Reynolds' "Silver Threads and Golden Needles [Will Not Mend this Heart of Mine]" who believes she can escape the power of wealth.
Work Cited
Astington, John H. “Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England (Book).” [review] Shakespeare Studies 2004 (32) 429-032. Web. 3/4/10 Available http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=14831378&site=ehost-live