Christmas Gift: Glorious Morning

One of the grandkids presented me with a remarkable belated Christmas gift this weekend--a recitation from memory of Shakespeare's Sonnet 33, the one that begins "Full many a glorious morning...." (reprinted below). I assume it was done with a fair amount of maternal bullying, but he does have the gift of a pretty good memory so it can't have been an intolerable burden, and anyway, he has generally a good nature. Whatever: I couldn't have been more pleased. I've reached the age where I certainly don't need more stuff and I am delighted to be an occasion for the transmission of the culture. Besides, it is an old family tradition: I used to bully his mother into memorizing poems as gifts for my mother (who herself had a pretty good memory for verse). And so the past extends into the future.

I have to admit this is a sonnet with which I am not well acquainted: I guess I mentioned before that, though a big Shakespeare fan I am somewhat weak on the sonnets. On inspection, I see that it is actually rather tricky. That first line (see infra)--is it an adverb, as in "often?" No, on close scrutiny it turns out to be the direct object of "seen," as in "I have seen a morning." There are a couple of bracing disyllables: Full man /ya/ glor /yus/, etc. You get some touching echoes from elsewhere in Shakespeare. There's "rack," as in Prospero's "leave not rack behind"--turns out to mean (per Stephen Booth) "mass of scraggly, smoke-like, wind-driven clouds." Or "region cloud:" per Booth, "the clouds of that part of the sky where he is now"--recall Hamlet, "I should have fatted all the region kites/
With this slave's offal." And the couplet offers a matched set of feminine endings.

I'm also impressed with the insight that Shakespeare seems to have liked the dawn. Here is Horatio:

But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill:
Break we our watch up.

And the great over-the-top exuberance of Romeo:

But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!

With both, contrast the blunt simplicity of Duke Vincentio in Measure for Measure: "Come away; it is almost clear dawn." For my taste, though, none can match the shock value of a piece of unexpected poetry from an unexpected source: Don Pedro in Much Ado About Nothing:

Good morrow, masters: put your torches out.
The wolves have prey'd; and look, the gentle day,
Before the wheels of Phoebus, round about
Dapples the drowsy east with spots of grey.
Thanks to you all, and leave us: fare you well.

Anyway (with due appreciation to the recititator) here's the sonnet:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain-tops with sovereign eye,
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;
Anon permit the basest clouds to ride
With ugly rack on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
With all triumphant splendor on my brow;
But out, alack! he was but one hour mine;
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth.

Source: "Booth" is Shakespeare's Sonnets, edited with analytical commentary by Stephen Booth (1977).