O how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
When it comes to the article in “Shakespeare’s Sonnets” about piece 65, there are things a New Critic would agree with and things that the same critic would not. For example, the critic would applaud the post’s straightforward – line by line, at some points even word by word – breakdown of the text. Yet because these critics believe in excluding historical context from their analysis, they would not be a fan of the way the post explains the word “o’serways” in line two, especially when they tell the reader that the word is not used often in the present time. A new critic would look at the word, see what it means, and just take it as that.
Another example of an explicitly non-new criticism is the breakdown of line 5, which reads “O! how shall summer’s honey breath hold out”. In the analysis the writers of the post focus heavily on the connotation of the individual words, and in this, imply a sense of interoperation from the reader, which new criticism prohibits.
The post is inconsistent though in the way that it shifts from purely connotative analysis to denotative anaylsis and back. For example, a new critic would enjoy reading the first few sentences of the post’s analysis of line 6, which describes the line “Against the wrackful siege of battering days,” by defining the word “wrackful”. The next few lines though, give historical context, which new critics loathe.
Overall, there are an equal number of aspects, I believe, of this analysis that new critics would applaud and despise. The tedious breakdown of individual lines and words would put a grin on any new critic’s face. Yet at the same time, some of the techniques used in this breakdown and analysis would leave those same critics scratching their heads.
A Semiotician would not advocate such an intensely close reading as a New Critic would. instead of meticulously breaking down each word, a semiotician will go for more of an overview of the poem, and in this overview, identify the important signs in the text.
After coming across the necessary sign, an image will then surface in the mind of the Semiotician, giving the reader a picture on which to base his interpretation of the word off of. For example, the phrase “summer’s sweet honey breath” in the annotated line above. Based on this sentence, we can picture the scene; sun shining, a warm breeze blowing through the clear skies, just over the fresh green grass.
This is what we think of, next we need to determine why. We can identify “summer” as “warm and pleasant” because we know winter is not these things. We also know that fall and spring are seasons that can have aspects of both warm and cold weather. Because we know that the season in question is not winter, fall or spring, we can assume it is summer, the time of warm air and beach days and pleasantries.
This view of summer allows us to successfully comphrend the rest of the line. Because the “sweet, honey breath” flows through summer, we know that it must be a warm, happy wind. It is not the brutal gusts of winter or the chilly winds of early spring and late fall. By a process of elimination and the image the sentence painted, we are able to successfully comprehend the line.