Sonnets As Retelling of Ovid's Fable of Narcissus

Sidney Lubow's interpretation of the Sonnets:

The poet decided to create a set of Sonnets telling the story of Ovid's fable of Narcissus, as if the poet were Narcissus, himself, talking to his own mirror.

In order to create the person in the mirror, he creates his clone--he calls it a son to be born, to love--just as Nemesis, the goddess of revenge created the clone for Narcissus to see and love. (In Sonnets 1 to 17 he creates this clone, and born in the 18th sonnet's couplet.)

In order to create the equivalent of Echo in Ovid's tale, the bard wrote the poem "A Lover's Complaint", which introduced the woman you call the dark lady, the Muse of tragedy, Melpomene. Why her? Well Echo could not speak normally, because she was punished by Jove's wife, Juno, for helping Jove in his amorous affairs with other women. ALC is therefore narrated by that 'fickle Maid', the Muse, that she fell in love with the teenage boy who did not yet start to shave. She was seduced by him and she loved him till he died. But spitefully out for revenge.

In the last stanza she goes off into the Sonnets and enters at Sonnet 21 as 'that Muse.' She disappears in Sonnet 26 through an 'embassage' and tells the poet that she is leaving (to do her spiteful work).

She woos away the son/clone/boy/man he loved in the mirror after several travel sonnets and this destroys the poet, who cannot see him any longer. this destroys the poet through many following sonnets wherein he actually wishes he were dead, a fate he already knows is his, being true to Ovid. He keeps thinking of the Muse as the cause of his rejection by the man he gave his heart to, and vice-versa, in many sonnets. Until about Sonnet 126, a strange thing happens, the Muse returns indicated by a set of parentheses, immediately followed by Sonnet 127, a 'black' dark beauty' with a false borrowed face, the Muse haunting him. In sonnet 131.11 he finally realizes what she has done, she put his face on her own neck. This is done to make him realize that self-love is not so loveable to him any longer. She has given him 'eyes to blindness' in Sonnet 152 which he realizes too late.

The last two Sonnets are unfortunately ones that say that his self-love was fatal and the very last one is a repeat that is the voice of the son/clone/man/love who was speechless throughout the Sonnets, saying " water cools not love, as a matter of fact, "loves fire heats water."

Both go off into "The Phoenix and Turtle", the funeral of the two lovebirds to which all the birds are invited, including the Crow of S.70.4, the dark lady, the treble-dated Muse of tragedy.

He wrote all the Sonnets in his teen years, through college and lots of other stuff, as "A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres", with poetry naming the Flowre, Narcissus.