Barbara Everett on "Objective Attentiveness"

I don’t think I had ever heard of Barbara Everett until I ran across her piece on “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Sonnet” in the May 8 issue of the London Review of Books. As a sample, here is Shakespeare’s sonnet 57, together with a comment from Barbara Everett. First, the sonnet:

Being your slave, what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require.
Nor dare I chide the world-without-end hour
Whilst I, my sovereign, watch the clock for you,
Nor think the bitterness of absence sour
When you have bid your servant once adieu;
Nor dare I question with my jealous thought
Where you may be, or your affairs suppose,
But, like a sad slave, stay and think of nought
Save, where you are how happy you make those.
So true a fool is love that in your will,
Though you do any thing, he thinks no ill.

Everett observes:

Shakespeare wrote at moments more richly and deeply than this. But Sonnet 57 is the voice of the man, the man who achieved both great comedies and great tragedies. The poem is not actorish, it is quiet and private but—with its formidably intricate rhetoric—it is entirely in the round: it is full of feeling but has a poise and control at once humane and removed. It’s doubtful whether any love poetry of the last four hundred years sees more than Shakespeare’s, or sees it more levelly. When read, 57 will sometimes seem comic, sometimes tragic, it will sometimes sound abject, sometimes angry, sometimes bitter, sometimes ironic, sometimes amused, sometimes tender, sometimes dry. But always it has an extraordinarily objective attentiveness that says “What is this, and what am I?”

That’s Barbara Everett in the LRB. Worth seeking out more of her, perhaps here (although it is sometimes a challenge to know whether you have the right author or not).