When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state
(Like to the lark at break of day arising)
From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven's gate.
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
When, submerged in sympathy for the self during a period when Fortune is not looking kindly on him, the poet's mood sickens almost to self-loathing, his thoughts turn to the lover. Then, from wailing at the deafness of the heavenly host, he becomes a celestial carol-singer, at which point the absence of elusive Fortune matters not. Not even kings are as richly endowed.
What speaks out of the 29th sonnet (and its companion piece, the 30th) is an acute sense of material impoverishment. Fortune, that notoriously inattentive floozy, has overlooked him while she has been busy bestowing favours and fancies elsewhere, to the extent that her understudy, Envy, has inveigled herself into the poet's home and set up camp. Others are 'more rich in hope' in the twin senses that they are more hopeful, but also that they have been blessed with the wherewithal to live more successful lives. Everywhere he looks there are people enjoying themselves, 'like him, like him', as the pivot of the sixth line has it, while he falls ruining at a heaven that has failed in its primary duty, to hear the unhappiness going on outside its walls.
And then something makes him think of the boy, and it all flows back into perspective. Or rather, the conventional perspective is itself thrown into lustrous disproportion. Vaughan Williams's lark ascending makes an unscheduled parenthetical appearance (recalling the contemporaneous adage that 'If the sky fall, we may hap to catch larks'), and suddenly the ululations of grief at heaven's entrance turn into melodious praise, doubtless to the relief of the door-staff, who aren't so deaf after all. The metaphor of love as wealth is as old as Gilgamesh, but serves here to remind the lover that being a king wouldn't now add an iota to the contentment he denied as recently as the eighth line.
In 'True Love', Joan Armatrading sings, 'Poverty can be romantic/ In black-and-white it looks like art/ Just as long as we're together/ I couldn't care less'. While commonly feeling that this is how it ought to be, we repeatedly fail in the duty of hope. When two together fail, the game is usually up. But if the face of one 'like him', rising absently in the dreaming mind, can burn the evidence of material failure to a cinder, then love, such as it is, is indeed true.
Hear Fingersnap's David McAlmont give a beautifully considered reading of Sonnet 29 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE2FfNEp6jI&feature=youtu.be&noredirect=1
