"All days are nights . . . and nights bright days . . ."

[Annabel Lee]

"All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me." (Shakespeare, Sonnet #43, lines 13-14)

Question:

Regarding the second line of the above quotation, it's clear that are is elided between nights and bright days, but is all also elided and/or understood? That is, is the line short for "And [all] nights [are] bright days when dreams do show thee me"? My sense is that the answer is YES, but I'm sufficiently hesitant to need an external confirmation.

My thoughts:

Part of the problem in answering the question is that a bare plural can, or often can, be read as either indicating some or all (e.g. "Ducks eat bread"). However, it seems to me that we can tease out the elided or understood all by looking at a variation with no:

No days are nights, or nights days. (meaning: "No days are nights, and no nights are days.")​

That sentence seems grammatically acceptable to me, and it is obviously not short for "No days are nights, or nights [are] days." The verb of the second independent clause seems to need to be elided. Further, no seems to carry forward to the subject of the second independent clause, which no somehow seems to dominate, making or necessary rather than and.

Thank you.

 

[BobK]

I agree about 'are' but not necessarily about 'all'; some nights he might not sleep, or sleep dreamlessly, or dream about going to school in his pyjamas, or.... (He probably hopes his beloved will assume that he dreams only of her (him?), but he doesn't say so or imply it.)

 

[jutfrank]

... is the line short for "And [all] nights [are] bright days when dreams do show thee me"?

Absolutely. I think this is obviously what Shakespeare means—the romantic sentiment is that every night that brings me dreams of thee is a bright day. So yes, I think it's definitely understood, in that that's what the line actually means. Whether it's actually 'elided' in a grammatical sense I think is a different question that I don't know how to answer. Being elided grammatically and being understood pragmatically are different things to me.

My thoughts:

Part of the problem in answering the question is that a bare plural can, or often can, be read as either indicating some or all (e.g. "Ducks eat bread"). However, it seems to me that we can tease out the elided or understood all by looking at a variation with no:

No days are nights, or nights days. (meaning: "No days are nights, and no nights are days.")​

That sentence seems grammatically acceptable to me, and it is obviously not short for "No days are nights, or nights [are] days." The verb of the second independent clause seems to need to be elided. Further, no seems to carry forward to the subject of the second independent clause, which no somehow seems to dominate, making or necessary rather than and.

If I understand this correctly, you were wondering whether there are legitimate cases where the scope of quantification can 'carry forward' across co-ordinated clauses. I think you've shown that well with a good example, and I think the same thing is happening with the couplet.

I tend to believe that semantic scope comes from speaker meaning before syntax, but here I do think you can argue that the phrase when dreams do show me thee is acting to reduce the scope to a conditional—nights become days if and only if they feature dreams of thee. For that reason, you could argue that the NP nights is therefore not universal in scope because we're not talking about all nights but only about certain ones that satisfy a condition. Still, I don't think that's a good enough argument, personally. To express my romantic feelings about you, I'm going to tell you that I dream about you every night.

Reading the poem as a whole, I can notice that there is considerable use of the word 'when' throughout, not just in this last phrase, along with its logical friend 'then'. The whole poem seems to me to have a kind of 'logical form', where the main idea is that the voice is so smitten with love that the world makes no sense in the beloved's absence—under those conditions, day is night and night is day. This is what I get, logically speaking:

all days [in your absence] are nights
all nights [in your presence] are days

 

[BobK]

... Being elided grammatically and being understood pragmatically are different things to me.
...

Good point; I hadn't thought of that. I just assumed this use of 'elided' was simply an unusual (and possibly inappropriate?) use of a big word.

 

[jutfrank]

I just assumed this use of 'elided' was simply an unusual (and possibly inappropriate?) use of a big word.

Ah, well we didn't get it precisely right because in linguistics 'elision' is really to do with phonology and sounds. In syntax it's more correctly called 'ellipsis'. Oddly, and inconveniently for some, there's no such verb as 'ellipt'.