H o w t o R e a d L i t e r a t u r e1 3 2summer’s day?’ is flexible enough to be voiced in a whole variety
of ways. An actor can choose within reason where to lay the
stresses, just as he or she can choose what pace, pitch, volume
and intonation to go for. The five stresses of the metre (Shall I
compare thee to a summer’s day?) provide a stable background
against which the improvisations of the speaking voice can be
played off. An actor who delivered the line with the stresses as I
have just marked them would be unlikely to receive a standing
ovation.
The metrical scheme of ‘Baa baa black sheep’, by contrast, deter-
mines the way the line is voiced rather more rigorously. It leaves
less room for ‘personality’ in the speaker. It is a bit like the contrast
between set dancing and the way you gyrate in a night club.
Because the stresses of the verse are so regular and emphatic, it
sounds more like a chant or ritual than a piece of conversation.
Even so, you could use tone to convey the kind of interpretation I
have just sketched. You could begin with a sardonic cackle (‘Baa
baa’), follow it up with a curt, imperious ‘Have you any wool?’, and
then have the sheep speak its lines in an elaborately mock- courteous
way, with mutedly aggressive undertones.
Part of the poem’s effect lies in the contrast between its form and
its content. The form is simple and artless – a childlike chant which
slims language down to a set of brief notations. Its lucidity suggests
a world in which things are unambiguous and out in the open. Yet
this is hardly confirmed by the poem’s content, as we have just
seen. Its transparent surface conceals a whole set of conflicts,
tensions, manipulations and misunderstandings. These characters
may not quite be out of the late Henry James, but their discourse is
awash with ambiguities and insinuations. Beneath the text itself
lies a complex subtext of power, malice, domination and false