King Lear I.i.107-121
A Stranger
LEAR So young and so untender? CORDELIA So young, my lord, and true. LEAR Let it be so. Thy truth, then, be thy dower, For by the sacred radiance of the sun, The mysteries of Hecate and the night, By all the operation of the orbs From whom we do exist and cease to be, Here I disclaim all my paternal care, Propinquity and property of blood, And as a stranger to my heart and me Hold thee from this forever. The barbarous Scythian, Or he that makes his generation messes To gorge his appetite, shall to my bosom Be as well neighbored, pitied and relieved As thou my sometime daughter.
It’s worth spending a paragraph on the first two lines of this extract, lines I didn’t treat in my last entry. Cordelia’s answer to Lear’s question is a kind of metrical echo of it, but without the unstressed final syllable. There’s a mini-anaphora here: “So young….”, “So young.” But Cordelia replaces Lear’s “and so” with “my lord,” reflecting back metrically the insistence that Lear puts into the repetition of and so. Her direct address here gives her an edge over that repetition, break its self-iterating quality; and we can sense this as well in the stressed ending of her line, and its monosyllabic concision. The five syllables of his complaint — and so untender — are transformed into her much more direct assertion: and true. Because the lines are metrically very close to being parallel, their differences stand out.
Lear picks up on her firmness, changing his tone rapidly and entirely, but now he too pivots as his quondam favorite daughter has done, on the word so —“Let it be so” — to return to the notion of truth. This enables him to echo his previous complaint but in an imperious mode: “So young and so untender” becomes “Thy truth, then, by thy dower.” Not that anyone hears what in my post might sound like a sing-songy parallel. Lear’s change of tone completely overrides any formal, metrical similarity in the two seven-syllable sentences. He asserts himself here in much grander language than he’s used thus far, as he utters her exile, pronouncing his oath by swearing on the greatest of imaginative things. The idea of human life and death he evinces here, in this powerful curse, is far different from his previous benevolent and somewhat fogeyish assertion that he will, “unburdened, crawl toward death.” No: we — all of us, not just the royal we — exist because of the operation of the orbs, and it is their operation that will determine when — will determine that — we will cease to be.1
Lear’s grandeur here, and his language, is greater than anything that has come before. The unexpected and stunning first person singular in this curse is far more powerful than the royal plurals that he’s used before when trying to sound majestic. This is the true authority of absolute self-assertion, self-coincidence.
The ancient idea of the stranger here enters the play — everything that is other than the domesticity that Lear had sought to extend over his whole domain in dividing his kingdom among his daughters. Now the possible world has become vast and grim. It includes the barbarous Scythian and those greedy, cannibalistic primitives who have no sense of kinship with their generation, i.e. their children. (He doesn’t see the irony of the applicability of this image to the way he is treating Cordelia. ) The realm of the underdefined — the nameless and therefore more general types of humanity that appear in his speech — enters the play here. Lear’s language anticipates Edgar’s when he has to enter the world of poor Tom.
We’ve had a hint of this outer world before, when Gloucester says that Edmund has been “out” — somewhere — for nine years, and will away again. Here we learn more about what things may be like out and away from the triple kingdom Lear had imagined for his offspring. The alliterative list of what he disclaims — paternal care, propinquity, and property of blood — becomes an expression of anathema, a series of abstractions that he names only in disclaiming them and that therefore give us a sense of the all-too-abstract, all-too-inhuman exteriority to which he is banishing Cordelia.
I think this is an amazing effect, and I don’t know that there’s a name for it. But as I say, it shows Lear at his grandest, so far, and that negative grandeur (hence he disclaims all those things) is a measure of what it is that Cordelia is being exiled to. “Sometime daughter” works the same way: the negation is so much more weighty than what it negates. Sometime daughter is a far grimmer, far stranger status than a mere daughter could ever be. It’s not that she’s no longer his daughter. She’s — so he pronounces — eternally his sometime daughter now, eternally the negative of the daughter she once was, and if he brings the idea of the heart in yet again, it is to say that she is a stranger to his heart. But more than that. “To my heart and me” is a reduplication for emphasis, but one that also points in the direction of the stranger: the heart is not the core of the person — it’s the bare pronoun that matters.
And then his declaration of how he will “Hold thee from this forever” echoes but grimly tightens the meter of “So young and so untender,” which has given us a template for the rhythmic finality of this exorbitant curse.
Again, you shouldn’t ordinarily be hearing the rhythmic parallels between So young and so untender; Thy truth then be thy dower; Hold thee from this forever. But they have something of the effect of the off-rhymes these phrases end with: untender, thy dower, forever make us sense a grim and more and more inflexible undertone in the language. The greatest stress in these paralleled rhythmical units is on “from this”, and the forever then extends it onwards into the comparative-inflected endlessness of the world of the stranger, extending forever.
Keats wrote a sonnet “On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again”, but Lear’s words are echoed much more powerfully in his sonnet “When I have fears that I may cease to be”.