Great article by Paul Edmondson over at Blogging Shakespeare with a simple premise : get a group of people together to talk about just one sonnet, in this case sonnet 29, for an hour. What happens? Can you still learn something new every time? To steal from the closing sentiment of the article, can you exhaust it? Or will it merely exhaust you (temporarily)? We talk about sonnet 29 frequently here. Once Rufus Wainwright put it to music I found it easier to memorize, which in turn caused me to pay more attention to the emotional power behind the words. I’ve since added it to my wedding book for its potential in that arena as well. I started to do my own analysis here, but that’s not really fair to the original post. Go check it out.
An occasional sonnet is extremely simple in diction and could possibly get exhausted in a relatively short session (e.g., Sonnet 38). But not Sonnet 29. As an example, in the blog, the punctuation has been altered from the original, changing the meaning, to the detriment of the poem. The discussion he had used only one edition, yet there are many differences among the different editions of this sonnet. So much to talk about!
–Carl