I am responsible for grouping these three sonnets under this heading. The second one beginning “What is’t to live” appears in Butler’s Note-Book with the remark, “This wants much tinkering, but I cannot tinker it”—meaning that he was too much occupied with other things. He left the second line of the third of these sonnets thus:
“Them palpable to touch and view.”
I have “tinkered” it by adding the two syllables “and clear” to make the line complete.
In writing this sonnet Butler was no doubt thinking of a note he made in 1891:
“It is often said that there is no bore like a clever bore. Clever people are always bores and always must be. That is, perhaps, why Shakespeare had to leave London—people could not stand him any longer.”
xiv. The Life after Death
Butler began to write sonnets in 1898 when he was studying those of Shakespeare on which he published a book in the following year. (Shakespeare’s Sonnets Reconsidered, &c.) He had gone to Flushing by himself and on his return wrote to me:
24 Aug. 1898. “Also at Flushing I wrote one myself, a poor innocent thing, but I was surprised to find how easily it came; if you like it I may write a few more.”
The “poor innocent thing” was the sonnet beginning “Not on sad Stygian shore,” the first of those I have grouped under the heading “The Life after Death.” It appears in his notebooks with this introductory sentence:
“Having now learned Shakespeare’s Sonnets by heart—and there are very few which I do not find I understand the better for having done this—on Saturday night last at the Hotel Zeeland at Flushing, finding myself in a meditative mood, I wrote the following with a good deal less trouble than I anticipated when I took pen and paper in hand. I hope I may improve it.”