“The blazon of sweet beauty's best”: Shakespeare's Lucrece

When, in Sonnet 106, Shakespeare's speaker alludes to “the blazon of sweet beauty's best” (5) he identifies “blazon” with “despanriptions of the fairest wights” (2), with poetic portraits “in praise of ladies dead and lovely knights” (4). ¹ He then goes on to qualify “blazon,” to suggest that it is an outdated poetic mode standing in contrast to a present, paradoxically silent, one: “For we which now behold these present days/Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise” (13–14). The term “blazon” derives both from the French blasonner and from the English “to blaze” (“to proclaim as with a trumpet, to publish, and, by extension, to defame or celebrate”). ² Its usage was firmly rooted in two specific despanriptive traditions, the one heraldic and the other poetic. A blazon was, first, a conventional heraldic despanription of a shield, and, second, a conventional poetic despanription of an object praised or blamed by a rhetorician-poet. The most celebrated examples of French poetic blazon were the Blasons anatomiques ducorps femenin (1543), a collective work in which each poem praised a separate part of the female body, each poet literally spoke either “of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye,” or “of brow” (6). Within the English tradition, poetic blazon typically consisted of a catalogue listing each of these particular beauties, their sum constituting an exquisite, if none the less troubling, totality; their rhetoric inspanribing them in a Petrarchan world of “ideal types, beautiful monsters composed of every individual perfection.” ³ Shakespeare's speaker implies that blazon's inventory of fragmented and reified parts—a strategy in some senses inherent to any despanriptive project but, in its exaggerated form, characteristic of Petrarch and the Petrarchans—falls short of re-presenting present beauty: “I see their antique pen would have express'd/Even such a beauty as you master now” (7–8, my italics): “They had not skill enough your worth to sing” (12). ⁴ Before a new manifestation of “sweet beauty's best,” either a new language of despanriptive praise must be invented or a new awareness of the celebratory power of silence acknowledged.