Brian Boyd, a Nabokovian professor at the University of Auckland, has published a most accessible book that blends the local with the vast, particularly in Elizabethan sonnets, which have the human disposition towards natty verbal patterns. Before writing Why Lyrics Last, he published On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (2009), a far longer book that explores the ubiquitous narrative hunger that we enjoy. Now he has turned to verse, above all to lyric: that is, the kind of verse that fails to tell a story, unlike the what-next poetry of our ballad and epic traditions.

Boyd’s relatively few opening pages of cognitive anthropology take us from the oral tradition to modern poets’ craft in which, held within a print culture, ‘They need to compensate to be sure of engaging their absent audiences by multiplying the appeals to attention, especially should they wish to forgo the emotional engagement that narrative almost automatically supplies.’ This attention is held by verbal echoes, rhythmical orchestration, suggestions of the visual, and the curiously fastidious governance of line-length. Centuries of cultural inheritance have sharpened our awareness of these things, if we read poetry at all: in the end, either nothing or everything is old-fashioned.

Such questions have driven the book to lyric poetry, distilled most remarkably in Shakespeare’s sonnets, not least because they seem to proffer an invisible narrative. Not for Boyd, though, the identity of the beautiful boy, nor yet dark Emilia Lanier as sawney seductress. When the main game begins, he invites us into a close reading of the proto-Proustian sonnet 30, ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought’. Such practice will recur a number of times, tweezering particular poems from their local habitation.

Funny about sonnets, though. Despite being dubbed ‘little songs’, they were seldom set to music, which calls to mind Dennis O’Driscoll’s definition of poetry as ‘music set to words’. In my own experience, that is how one writes short poems, editing by sound. And Boyd traces these sound patterns across neurological expectation and realistic input, well knowing that ‘Art needs to attract attention fast, but great art attracts it again and again’: even first up, poems need to be read at least thrice, or that’s what I say.

At the core of Why Lyrics Last, if one can discern a core in so elastic an intellectual performance, sits this passage:

I have suggested that play lies at the origins of art. It allows animals to experiment with degrees of risk in situations of security and control. Art, in its play specifically with pattern, allows us a double measure of control: the activity of the work of art is decoupled or shielded from the ordinary activities of life, as pure play is; and the focus on the pattern helps us to learn to navigate through the vast flux of information around us.

Now I cite this at length because it could also be seen as characterising the balances of Boyd’s teasing book. Art is an intensely serious category of playfulness. A work of art, whether verbal or not, stands musically at an angle to life, yet emblematises it. Craft and deliberate selection place the artefact on its cognitive plinth.

Boyd leads us in diverting directions, not least when he embarks on an account of love poetry by remarking that ‘The logic of reproductive specialization into female and male leads to one sex’s producing resource-rich eggs and the other producing massive numbers of cheap but highly mobile sperm.’ This biology can lead to all that male competition, to all those velvety courtiers competing for a proud mistress, and also to the sonnet tradition descending from the laurelled Aretine, Petrarch, fourteen lines after fourteen lines. Could we then call the sonnet a little sperm bank?

Across the middle of this book there spreads what we might call a triptych, for all that it contains four chapters. Here Boyd considers Shakespeare’s sonnets under three important heads: ‘Love’, ‘Status’, and ‘Death’. Within each, we re-encounter art’s relation to a person and, at the same time, its ascent into impersonality. One closing couplet exemplifies all this for us: ‘And almost thence my nature is subdued / To what it works in, like the dyer’s hand.’

Gerald Brenan once observed that ‘One of the marks of a great poet is that he creates his own family of words and teaches them to live together in harmony and to help one another.’ And Shakespeare was such a canny harmonist. Boyd has an excellent ear for the sounds and steps of this lineal family, reading the most relevant sonnets persuasively, coaxing out their innuendoes, even their resistances. But the lyrics in question add up to that particular, distinctive congeries, a sonnet sequence, for some reason much favoured in Elizabethan times. Such a sequence, and particularly Shakespeare’s, can hold the inquisitive reader at bay, refusing all traction of storytelling. What is more, he can himself be seen as competing with Sidney, Spenser, and company in adaptations of the Petrarchan model, while remaining inaccessible as a chap. And the sonnet sequence holds us back, distances its proferred selves. If we go to it seeking an objective correlative, we find that this is spread wide and thinly, like Vegemite on many pieces of toast. Will the Wordmaster is there, but we can’t catch him, even though Boyd observes that he ‘sets up the sonnets to exploit our strong default tendency to make things in narrative terms, if we can’.

At the end of Borges’s fable about the great creative artist, God answers the Bard out of a whirlwind, saying, ‘I, too, am not I; I dreamed the world as you, Shakespeare, dreamed your own work, and among the forms of my dream are you, who like me are many, but not one.’

If hammered art is finally the product of the Not Me, one can align it very much with dream: or else, as Boyd has persuasively argued, with play. It takes us, along with the ambitious sonneteer, out of our selves. And, being readers, we try to unlock that best-selling product, Shakespeare’s sonnets.