Hello, everyone. And that very warm welcome to this term's professor search lecture in Sleep King.
My name is Professor Marion Turner.
For those of you who don't know me, I'm chair of the faculty both here and professor of English literature at Jesus.
It's an enormous pleasure to welcome you all and the fact that we can now do this lecture in two formats.
So we've got our live audience here, but also a big a number of people can join us on the livestream as well.
So being able to do it in hybrid form I think is really wonderful and it's a real pleasure to that.
Finally, we can have Alice back among us in person after the months of everything being online.
So I know that Alice Oswald really doesn't need much introduction from me.
She is our professor of poetry and one of the most eminent of all contemporary poets, having won very many prizes for her.
Many books of poetry, including the Forward Poetry Prize, the T.S. Eliot Poetry Prize, the Griffin Perch Prize.
Her title today is about sleep and sleep occurring.
And that immediately made me and I'm sure many of you who were here last year remember the moon poetry events, which I looked at,
and it was almost exactly a year ago when 500 people were sent a poem and we all went out and read a poem to the full moon,
I think it was on the 30th of November last year while we were all in one of our interminable lockdowns.
And I remember that moment very clearly going out into that, to the clear nights and reading to the moon.
I think that the time of sleep,
the transition between different modes of consciousness is something that we see in many of Alice's poems and collections.
I think in particularly of a Sleepwalk on the Seven of Falling Awake and the poem Tyson us in that collection,
a poem about the movement between the nights and the dawn.
I personally teach and research a lot about dream vision and I think a great deal about those liminal moments of creativity.
And for me, one of the great joys of coming to Professor of Poetry Lectures is that I feel they often help many of us to pause, to stand and stare.
Just to think about how literature comes into being.
So without further ado, can we welcome Alice until.
Thank you very much. It's so nice to be here is to be half here.
I know I'm somewhere else as well, which is quite a strange sensation, but perhaps appropriate for this lecture to be half online, half here.
So welcome. And my lecture today is called In Sleep a King and it is a sleep talk on the subject of waking up to the accompaniment of Sonnet 87.
So you'll notice that I intend to conduct the lecture in my sleep.
And this is the course. When I begin to write a lecture, I don't really know what I'm going to write about.
I sort of drift around and flail around desperately, and I start by writing about absolutely everything,
and then I just kind of chuck things that are going on.
And to my horror in writing this lecture, I discovered quite late on that I was actually writing a lecture about Shakespeare,
which is, you know, something, of course, I should not only do unless one has studied him for years and years and is an expert.
So I decided that really the only way to approach Shakespeare was in sleep.
So I'm going to dream my way through the lecture and I am very happy for you all to do the same, to listen with your eyes shut.
In fact, I would much rather that you listen in a state of dreaming than a state of thinking.
So I hope again by reading a sonnet that has always just obsessed me and I will read it first while you can see the writing on the whiteboard,
and then I'll switch that off and you can hear it is that's something I'm always very interested in,
is the difference between a poem when you see it written down and a poem and you hear it.
It is by Shakespeare. Not too much farewell.
Thought too dear for my possession. And like enough, I noticed that estimate.
The chatter if they were kids releasing my bonds in the are all determinant for how could I hold it but but I guarantee.
And for that riches. Where is my deserving? The cause of that therapist in me is wanting.
And so my patient back again is sweating.
They sell the greatest thine own words and not knowing or me to whom they gazed it else.
Mistake. So the great gift upon this present growing comes home again on better judgement making.
Thus have I happy as a dream doth Blatter in sleep a king but wake him.
No such luck. Farewell.
Thou art too dear for my possessing and liking a bout I estimate.
The Charter of they worth gives the releasing my bonds in the are all determinate
the how could I hold the I grow to and for that riches where is my deserving?
The cause of that therapist in me is wanting.
And so my patient back again is sweating. I said they'll get us.
They know worse than not knowing or me to whom they guessed it else mistaken.
So that great gift upon this Christian growing comes home again on Better Judgement Week.
Thus have I happy as a dream that flatter in sleep.
A king. But waking. No such.
Here is a curious fact. When Basil Bunting was studying poetry under Ezra Pound, he was given the task of correcting Shakespeare's sonnets.
Bring him up to date, he was told. Get rid of the superfluous language.
So Bunting produced Sonnet 87 with everything crossed out except the first two lines.
So I will start to defend my possessing and like enough though no estate estimate.
Very good. What more do you need? A romance is over because one person has higher status than the other and probably knows it.
One line of leave taking, one line of teasing.
And there you have the whole poem in paraphrase. Farewell.
Thou art to the for my possessing. And like enough thou nursed.
I estimate. Two lines might convey the sonnets meaning,
but they certainly do not convey its movement the way it's slow financial sleep talk suddenly wakes up and a king passes through the rhythm.
That is what you might call the gesture or action or living of the poem.
And for the past two years, in delivering these lectures,
I've been trying to describe similar examples tracing the movements of poems first through light, then through water, birdsong, pebbles, platforms.
They are very elusive.
All one ever finds are their effects what Mandelstam called the rumpled sheets, which prove that poetry has spent the night them.
Nevertheless, if I were such the Ezra Pound task, I would look for the poems movement, and I think I would be more radical than Basil Bunting.
I would reduce Sonnet 87 to the pause between lines 12 and 13 just before the final couplet.
Poems are full of pauses, but a true poem always includes one pause,
which seems to pierce the page like an opening upon which the language pivots and transforms.
And in Sonnet 87 that opening lines between the lines 12 and 13 and what follows is altogether altered by it.
Thus have I had him as a dream death that.
That is not iambic pentameter. I do not know exactly what it is.
Ancient Greek. Anglo-Saxon nursery rhyme, night language, sleep talk, magic spell.
Thus have I had the noli me tangerine, as I pronounce it.
I find myself glancing around to see who disturbs the same pattern.
And now that I have put my ear to the print space, an apparition floats up.
The same shape as the original speaker's lungs.
I am referring to the poem's voice, which is the body's voice amidst a breeze.
A compression of the air. Yes.
There seems to be something at work behind this poem which resembles a Jacobean wind machine,
the sort that would have been used to make the storm in King Lear,
with a man backstage turning a wheel on a length of cloth to produce a whistling, moaning sound.
You can turn fast or slow to alter the pitch, and something like that is definitely being manipulated in this sonnet machine.
The lungs pump, the throat pulse resonate, the tongue and teeth shape instant one syllable sound moves,
and that is how a king floats miraculously out of the mouth.
All the more miraculous, since he himself is a silent, is a photograph, and yet constructed out of sand.
Mobile app. Active. Ephemeral.
Gone bust. Had I had the as a dream?
Yes, there is a difference between a poem's paraphrase and its voice.
And I don't think Bunting's couplet is more than a paraphrase.
You might tell me that a sonnet is primarily a written down thing and that Shakespeare's sonnets in particular make use of the silence of paper.
They frequently mention ink and lasting notes.
They proceed like arcs of thought, not acts of performance.
But it is for that reason all the more startling when poems which begin as calculations evolve into declarations.
That is what happens in Sonnet 87.
A voice grows out of the thought process. A tiny oral poem is summoned into a printed one.
And it happens just before the last couplet does.
Have I had these as a dream? Just flutter in sleep.
I came. But waking. No such matter.
When I inhale to voice that couplet, a king floats into view luminously the lion asleep, waking up in confusion.
I think it was his stirrings that disturbed the sound pattern.
This king is really the only visible shape in the whole poem.
Lines 1 to 12 are all messed it up. I continually see charters and signatures through the Latinate words, and I can hear the whisper of leaf taking.
But I cannot see anything of the person being addressed.
Farewell. Thou art too dear for my possessing. And like enough.
Thou knowest I estimate. The charter of they were kids.
The releasing my bonds in the are all determinant.
It is semi humorous that a love poem should proceed like that in the jargon of the law,
courts and the marketplace transactional as if wanting to make turns with the world.
And yet, if I were the beloved, I would be offended.
It sounds as if the poet has his eyes shut the whole time, waves about like a sleeve, his hand trying to reach that final word.
Matter. How to wake up.
How to come to. And feel about. And make contact with.
Matter. How to sign up to the social contract.
Let's see. That problem presents itself over and over again in Shakespeare's plays.
I'm reminded of the King's Hand in a winter's tale, reaching out to touch a statue and discovering that it is his wife,
which is really what is trying to happen in Sonnet 87.
But there is no such battle, no statue, no wife, no beloved, no waking up.
Just this king. And there is some trickery in the last line which keeps the king in view,
or at least in earshot in sleep of king, but waking as if the sound would not let go of the crown.
Thus have I happy as a dream to flatten this.
It is a very twilight, very ambiguous sentence.
As a dream. The latter can refer backwards to the opening phrase, in which case it means as in a dream.
I flattered myself that I possessed you, or it can operate forwards, altering the grammar as it goes along as a dream.
Does the latter in sleep a king waking i.
I have had you in the same way that a dream flat as a sleeping waking king.
In the second version, the movement from dream to sleep to waking jolts the whole thought out of syntax.
It is a sentence made of misapprehensions.
It is a misprint. So in spite of the poem's results, I exit sonnet 87 in a misprint in a two sons.
One of them is weaselly and bookish, fully convinced that the infatuation is over, and one of them, the one deeper in the entrenched vegetal aural.
One still sullen, still with eyes shut.
That one is still asleep, lying in the space between 912 and 13, waking not backwards but downwards into deeper sleep.
Haunted. Let me lift the curtain of the sonnet and look at this figure lying in the dark hollow of its making.
Where nothing is visible except for. It is pitch black in that it is light.
It is nothing. No streetlights. The heir, according to a contemporary of Shakespeare's, is thick like tobacco.
Smoke and sleep is fitful because of the watches going past calling out the owls.
People have put on white linen smocks for sleeping.
They are lying together all over the city, trying to keep warm.
The queen lies next to a companion in a carved wooden bed, hung with Indian painted silk, or sometimes in a boat shaped bank with sea green curtains.
Travellers lie next to strangers.
Most people sleep on wooden benches or straw pallets with wooden pillows and sheets washed in urine, often with animals nearby.
The night is divided into a first sleep and a second sleep,
and between them there is an intoxicated time for praying, reading, conversing, making love, or making sonnets.
The brain flickers, according to doctors.
It is affected by vapours coming up from the stomach, which clog the senses and cause dreams.
You must be careful to lie first on your right side, then on your left.
And then on your stomach, but never on your back.
Naveen Islam is a Dutch doctor who claimed that so many asleep after that sort lie with their mouths open,
their eyes staring, their eyelids unclothed, speaking very quietly and without any refreshing ease.
They be oftentimes troubled with a nightmare and falling since.
It's easy to come this far to enumerate all the details of Elizabethan sleep right up to the eyelids,
and in so doing, to provide a list of the six things that were pressing against this summit.
If I were a scholar, I would keep going. Researching the visible and audible worlds until I had made an exact vessel for the poems during.
As a poet, I believe it's equally valid to attend to the unfixed things.
There is, after all, something else in the room besides furniture.
There is pretty. So they great guest upon miss prison growing.
There is no description of one person overvaluing another misprint of a king concealed in a sleeper waking most prison
of the is wealth growing inside the eyes prison of the moment resonating in the timeless Ms. prison of the word Ms.
Prison wavering to and fro in its meanings.
What a word it means both mistake and dislike.
It denotes the space between apprehensions, which is the space where this sonnet comes alive, moving from daylight through doubt into darkness.
There is tension in this prison. There is threshold and doubleness of the kind that manifests at dawn or at dusk.
When damp comes up out of the earth and matter grows misted.
There are mist prisons, moist prisons, things that are almost things that are missing, or these ambiguities are active in the sun.
It's half light between nine, 12 and 13 before it plunges into dream.
I'm told that Javanese puppeteers trained by running through forests at night at top speed.
And I think that would be an excellent, excellent training for poets,
since there is this draughty darkness flowing at the language which poems have to pass through in order to wake up.
Some poems seal their pauses and never dip beneath meaning.
For example, there's a sonnet, Infinite, Sydney's Astral and Stella,
which is structured exactly like Shakespeare's, but without any transformative pause.
Sonnet 39 a Sydney. Come sleep.
Oh, sleep the set and not a peace. The beating place of wit.
The balm of world. The poor man's wealth.
The prisoners released the indifferent judge between the high and low.
With Shield of Proof, shield me from the press of those fierce darts.
Despair me duster. Making me those civil wars to cease.
I will. Good tribute, Paul, if they would do so, take that with me.
Smooth tellers. Sweetest bad. A chamber.
Death to noise. And blind to light. A rosy garland.
And a weary head. And if these things as being dying by right.
Move not thy heavy grace. Thou shalt and me live better than elsewhere.
Stella's image. She. Come and sleep.
Oh, see? The certain not of peace. The baiting place of wit.
The balm of world. The poor man's wealth.
The prisoners release the indifferent judge between the high and low.
With Shield of Proof. Shield me from the press of those fierce dogs.
Despair me dust from. Oh, making me those civil wars to cease.
I will good tribute pay if they would do so. Take that with me.
Smooth pillows. Sweetest bed. A chamber.
Death to noise. And blind to light. A rosy garland.
And a weary head. And if these things as being time by right.
Move not thy heavy grace. Thou shalt in me.
Livelier than elsewhere. Stella's image.
She. This sleep poem, which I do love, but I think it's constructed differently from Shakespeare.
The Sleep poem written about a decade before Shakespeare's, has no dealt away in its metre.
The dream at the end happens inside Sydney's head and inside the grace of the lion.
Unlike Shakespeare's, which stops the whole poem and takes over the whole body.
Shakespeare's Miss Britain might be close in date to sequence, but it is closer in kind to this infrared image of a fox.
This shot was set up by Stephen GUILFOYLE and is one of a series called Night Procession,
for which he positioned motion sensitive cameras in a forest, having first noticed the tracks and stopping places of night creatures.
I wish I had such an instrument for detecting the movements of poles.
His cameras could be triggered by insects moving over grass by rain or webs or slats or gusts,
so that often the image is pure misimpression, out of reach of all meaning.
Three legs, a deer, a mouse, ghost running on a branch foxgloves.
Or is it nestlings mouths? Hieroglyphs by bark beetles and eggshell opening fungus spores function as leaves water not looking at itself.
All poems are straining to see like that, moving as close as they can to what they can't see.
I have heard of negative capability, which is the phrase Keats used to describe Shakespeare's withholding of himself from his work.
But this infrared capability is a refinement we should learn from.
A fox doubled in dark water by the low wave like his movement has triggered, dipping down to the edge of the on animal.
The expression on this fox his face is just as I imagined the king's expression court seeking indiscretion.
Mr. President, it was originally a legal word,
meaning concealment of a crime and a proclamation made in 1582 suggests what kinds of concealment were in the air.
When Shakespeare and Sidney did their dream of any person wittingly concealing any such Jesuit seminary man or priest or the practice aforesaid,
shall be deemed and taken to be in case of miss presumed of treason.
That was Sir Edward Coke responding to the pressures around the monarchy.
No wonder it's unsettling to lift the curtain of a sonnet and find a king sleeping in its cavity.
It's impossible to know when Sonnet 87 was written.
There is speculation that Shakespeare started writing sonnets in the early 1590s alongside his first plays,
but dates belong to the day that you can say when a poem was published and the sonnets were first published as a sequence in 1609.
But publication is just the gravestone that commemorates a poem flat out for you cannot measure its gestation.
Philip Larkin said he wrote poems in the evening after work and left them after 2 hours because after that you're going round in circles
and it's much better to leave it for 24 hours by which time your subconscious or whatever has solved the block and you're ready to go on.
Elizabeth Bishop wrote 17 drafts of her poem The Art of Losing and Who Knows How Many Others in her head.
S.K. Williams said that his poem The Hearth, took 25 years to finish.
Before publication poems are at their most active,
suspended in the memory and movingly interacting with the poet's waking life, sometimes to devastating effect.
Ted Hughes spoke frequently about the damage inflicted on him by the crones while he was writing.
Like dreams. Poems modify our assumed knowledge of the world and are in turn modified by the world they modify.
So we have to imagine at least two decades during which sonnets and plays were exchanging images.
A whole line of things moving in and out of sonnet 87 as if it were changing the.
We thought I heard a voice cry. Sleep no more. Macbeth doth murder.
Sleep. Oh, stop there a little.
This is the rarest dream that a dull sleep democ sat through years.
All ha waking or sleeping.
Sure it is not so. Who is it that can tell me who I am?
The sonnet inhales all those voices and is animated by Imagine Shakespeare falling asleep after
writing King Lear Dreaming He's a king waking not knowing whether he is himself waking or his dream.
So half waking or sleeping?
Sure it is not so. Who is it that can tell me who I am?
Between 1594 and 1606, Lear was changing from the orderly king of the source play into the exhausted human of Shakespeare's play.
Exactly the same transformation as happens in Sonnet 87.
The language moving from executive command to wounded explanation lear of the source play
is a strong magician who frightens his murderers by apparently controlling the thunder.
Shakespeare's Lear complains that the Thunder would not peace at my bidding.
I no doubt the point would have been well illustrated in performance at the Globe, where the storm was made material by cannonballs,
rolling down copper sheets, drums and squids, disks of starch shaken in a wooden box and whistling fabrics brushed by a churning wheel.
Those are the voices of matter which alter the meta in King Lear through the sharp Hawthorne blows the cold wind that is the food on the heath.
Speaking in the same tune as Sonnet 87.
Thus have I had the stone through the crucible.
Thus have I had the blows, the cold wind. It is the same weathered sand, the same bareheaded king.
See, talking in the same changing. Thus have I had the as I dreamed a flatter in sleep.
A king. But waking. No such matter. I often say those lines to myself to wake up, or at least to bring to mind what waking up demands.
Absolute change of rhythm. Absolute change of status.
I recently fell asleep while listening to someone speaking and found myself staring at the regular white spots on his suit.
Each spot backlit as if his body was riddled with small holes.
And I was looking straight through them to the daylight. But there were no spots on his suit for a moment.
Two almost identical speakers passed through each other, each with the same voice.
And each day begins in similar misimpressions, like an ancient vessel saying everything twice over.
A woman shouts in the street and is instantly translated into dream narrative, where she becomes an owl on a fencepost.
Some light passes over the islands. It becomes a red blindfold, becomes a knife pressed into the eyeball.
The pressure increases until suddenly the symmetry is broken and the two worlds assert their difference.
The sleep world is ancient, feudal, abusive, immersive, wishful, luminous, faceless, limitless upside down.
The awake world is constrained by matter.
It is very small. You have to get into it through the half inch opening of an eye.
To practice that crossing. Salvador Dali recommended afternoon not in a high vat Spanish chair with a key
clasped between finger and some of the left hand and a plate positioned underneath.
The moment you nod off, the key falls and wakes you and dreams can be harvested as subject matter for paintings.
There are plenty of similar examples among writers. Misha, the French 20th century poet, was a talented sleeper, helped by.
He published a series of short prose dreams, including My King, which reads like a footnote to the sleeper in Sonnet 87.
In my night, I besiege my king. I get up little by little.
And I wring his neck. He regains his strength.
I come back at him and wring his neck again. I shake him again and again like an old plum tree.
And his crown wobbles on his head. And yet he is my king.
I know it and he knows it. And of course, I'm at his service.
Michelle. Sleep goes on and on, increasingly violent and hilarious.
But it seems to me that his account is no more than a paraphrase of dream.
It is the movement from one state to another. But his dreaming poem.
What on earth do I mean by that? I mean that the deep structure of poetry is transitional.
Unlike music or painting, poetry is a between form which demands that you occupy two planes of perception at once.
It is theatre and it is art. It is fluid.
And it is fixed. It is matter and inspiration, thought and sound.
It is one rhyme laid next to another so that two words seek together.
It is metres built up in layers so that each phrase remembers or predicts another.
It is expression fused with impression, observation soaked with intention, imagination made actual by a tea falling on a plate.
And at the centre of all this there is simile which demands the same insidious discipline as waking up.
To think in simile is to dwell in two visions at once, as if you were still suffering from sleep.
Thus have I had the as a dreamed of theatre in sneak a king but waiting no settlements.
It is good. It is formally correct that Shakespeare negotiates his waking.
By means of that twilight word as adverb conjunction preposition as always expresses a long sidedness.
It cannot exist except in transition. And no representation can exist without a sense of.
Impossible to catch sight of the substance of us.
And yet each one of us passes through it every morning.
If you know how to wake up, then you know how to punch.
Elliot book ten a king has fallen asleep on a battlefield with his weapons laid out a side.
It is night, ancient Homeric night, which is more like a substance than a time.
A fragrant cloud like sickness. People creep along underneath night or push their way through it.
Night is also a destructive, claustrophobic.
It is powerful even over God's even use of night.
It is death. A compass night darkens a man's eyes when he stops breathing.
It is a measure of swiftness, they say. Apollo came swiftly down like the night.
Night is the oldest of the gods, and it is ambrosia, which means not mortal.
It means you might look outside and catch a whiff of damp earth and honeysuckle.
But the matter of light extends beyond that and is essentially unknowable.
And this particular night is especially strange because the Trojans have lit fires
on the battlefield and they are sitting around them playing flutes in the darkness.
And because it has been a good day fighting, I imagine their music is pretty wild.
I am actually long threads of chromatic scales and screens are tangled in the night substance.
Rhesus the king of the three oceans has just turned up, hoping to help defend the city.
He has been managing his horses on difficult tracks through the mountains and he is relieved to have arrived at last.
He has no idea what a merciless place this is.
He has fallen asleep among his companions at the far edge of things,
with his horses standing close by eating the grass and his weapons laid down like cutlery and the sound of flutes tying up the air all around him.
The entire threshing army is sleep. And sleep, by the way, is not just a state of rest.
It is a creature, a character. It lives on an island.
Sleep has enough weight that when it moves, you notice the treetops shaking.
And sometimes sleep settles among the leaves in bird shape, watching its prey.
It is that kind of world, that kind of night, that kind of seep.
Then HarperCollins sat up out of sleep and saw the empty space where those horses have been standing and men gasping and bleeding.
And he cried out, calling his friends name so that the Trojans panicked and shouted back and came rushing up
to stare at the horrible deeds done by those two men before they went back to their ships.
The two men in question, Diomedes and Odysseus,
have been prowling through the night substance and have found and murdered 12 threshers, including their king.
When Diomedes found that king, he snatched away his life as he lay there gasping.
Thinking about treatment stood at his head. But in fact, it was the son of only.
I recognise these punishments. I've seen them already in Sonnet 87.
There is the king, the dream, the man waking up, the empty space, the devastation.
But I am seeing everything now the other way round. I have caught the king just before he vanishes.
Peering out through the night. Substance like a fox.
Seeing something. Deonte He mistakes it for a dream because he doesn't yet know that he is the dream.
He is already changing status from a sleeping to a dead king.
And in the Iliad, dreams always appear like that.
Standing above the sleeper in human form. Some dreams are true.
Some dreams are false. But in Homer, no dream is subjective.
They descend from elsewhere, search for a sleeper, stand next to his head, transmit some message, and then move away.
They always appear like that, which is why recess fails to recognise diamonds and is annihilated by similarity like gods or ghosts.
Dreams in India are not ideas but existences.
Homer. Unlike Larkin or even C.K., Williams spent at least 500 years on his talents before publishing and that prolonged dream time during which the
stories went on living me interacting with the world must have blurred the edge between waking and sleeping.
You can see how one state blends into another when Diomedes moves into the space
where a dream should stand and takes on the intoxicated lightness of dream.
Nothing resisting as he murders seeking them.
It's not certain whether the story of Jesus is part of a much older rhapsodic cycle about nitrates,
or is part of the later and more literary odyssey which dropped off and fell into the Iliad.
Such deliberations only make sense because the poems are so hybrid and hard to define, like a backwards reflection of Sonnet 87.
The Iliad is an oral poem being passed through by a literary come at a certain moment.
Probably in the eighth century B.C. scribes made written copies of the text,
and although versions went on changing from one performance to another, there was an evolving sense that something ought to stay fixed.
The Iliad is a poem that is waking up feeling about trying to make contact with the matter of papyrus.
But it is also a poem that is swooning backwards into deeper sleep.
The dream of recess has happened already in the Epic of Gilgamesh, where A.D. dreams of death standing next to his head.
Here he is in a translation by Maureen Gallery Kovacs.
And crew's innards were churning. Lying there so alone, he spoke everything he felt saying to his friend.
Listen, my friend. To the dream that I had last night.
The heavens cried out and the earth replied. And I was standing between them.
And there appeared a man of dark visage, and turned me into a dove so that my arms were feathered like a bird.
Teasingly, he led me down to the house of darkness. On entering the house of dust.
Everywhere I looked, there were royal crowns gathered in heaps.
Everywhere I listened. It was the bearers of crowns who in the past had ruled the land, but who now served.
And. And. And. Dreams Always come in threes And I have dreamed my way now backwards through deepening sleep to a moment of waking up.
I have called this lecture a sleep talk, and my purpose in doing so is not to confuse you, but to honour the manner of the summit,
which in Shakespeare's hands is not a confessional but factual proceeding like sleep talk from one similarity to another in a never ending pattern.
Between the similarities between the poem's rational beginning and irrational end.
There is a passing place, a breathing space.
A line and a change of sound. A dawn and dusk nightscape.
A slow down sleep wave. A zone of half beans.
A heap of crowns. A line of kings. Mist.
Moisture, almost. And messiness.
A theatrical wind machine. Copper balls on metal sheets.
Squids. Voices to foxes.
Gusts of darkness. And a forest.
None of these things exists or materially causes any other, but they all past exist and affect each other by means of adjacency and resemblance.
And that is as close as I can get to the theatre maker who made this sonnet.
It is quite problematic. Every writer needs to make terms with Shakespeare, needs to get past him or underneath him, or even square up to him.
But I can't help thinking there is some enchantment or theatrical trick which keeps him invisible.
There are at least seven portraits of Shakespeare, and not one of them is a true likeness.
My favourite full slate is this portrait of an unknown man clasping hands from a cloud.
It was painted by Nicholas Hilliard during Shakespeare's lifetime, but apparently it depicts someone else,
which is a pity, since it beautifully illustrates the atmosphere of Sonnet 87,
the unknowable cloud like and superior other, the sky blue emptiness pressing up against the subject,
the misprint of eyes facing forwards and hand seething upwards.
But as far as I'm concerned, the truest likeness,
perhaps the only likeness I can make terms with is the blank space, which is the subject of this lecture.
Pure disappearance is Shakespeare's signature.
He delights in making a world and then whisking it away.
Leading his audience blindfolded to a cliff, which is not a cliff or a statue, which is not a statue.
He keeps confessing disappearance even as he seems to be professing something else.
Love or envy or pride or murder or kingship.
England His characters speak emphatically of such things,
but then suddenly stop speaking and are melted into a thin air such that his dreams are made of faceless fabric.
Not a. No such matter. Nothing. That seems to me to be the real subject of Sonnet 87, which is why Ezra Pound I am reducing it to an empty space.
I want the sonnet to confess to the disappearance of its maker.
And if you ask me for a title, well, I shall double the disappearance by calling it Mr. Pretty.
It's a huge thank you to Alice for that extraordinarily dense and broad lecture.
I deliberately didn't write her any notes because I was trying to approach it in
that dreaming rather than thinking space that you mentioned at the beginning.
But lots of the things that you said, the phrases that you used are resonating in my in my mind.
I think in particular, as so many of us spend so much of our time thinking about interpretation and interpretative crusades in poetry.
I particularly want to hold on to what you said, which was something like, If you know how to wake up, then you know how to read poetry.
And that's, I think, particularly what I want you to take away with me,
that that parallel between that the transference in our psychic states and the movements of the earth.
So thank you very much, Alice. Can we thank her one more time?