Chapter two

The Immortal Word Made Flesh to Dwell Among Us

Boethius, Dante, and Petrarch all declare the limits of poetry’s immortalizing powers and even the transience of literary fame itself, but we need not look back to them to question the credibility of Shake-speare’s claim that he can make his beloved live substantially while entombed in verse “which hides your life, and shewes not halfe your parts” (17:4). Contemporary passages from Nashe and Daniel, as well as the effect of the speaker’s own personal confession of despair before time’s tyranny in 64 effectively serve to “demolish all [his] previous [and subsequent] claims about eternal poetry” (Weiser 68). Ultimately, they prove no more logically persuasive, despite their brave front and rhetorical allure, than did the persona’s initial argument for immortalization through progeny.

In the initial eighteen sonnets, the “eternizing mirror” (Fineman 205) Shake-speare holds up to the narcissistic young man is the paternity the speaker enjoins. That soon gives way, however, to the private gratification poet and subject can each take in the poetically idealized image of the beloved that the poet-persona will fashion as a richer reflection of the beloved’s beauty and grace than progeny could be. Daniel’s Rosamond, however, sensibly disagrees, reminding us that all such mirrors eventually shatter. Unlike Shake-speare brandishing his quill at the grim reaper in foolish bravado, the “Rose of the world” (The Complaint of Rosamond l693) is wise enough to realize that the memorialization she requests from the poet-speaker of Delia will only be comparatively more enduring than the tomb of “Marble and Brasse” (707), now destroyed, that Henry II set up at Godstow to honor his passion for her. Poetry’s memorials, if aere perennius, are not, for all that, ever enduring. Even if Dan-yell were to grant her request to tell her story in “favorable lines” (715) in order to awaken sympathy for her now humiliated case in the fashionable public’s eye, it would merely “give me longer daies” (718) and redeem “some time, / Till other ages shall neglect thy rime” (720–21) because, should nothing else fail, “confusion in her course shall bring, / Sad desolation on the times to come” (722–23). Thomas Nashe makes a related charge when he mocks “puny poets and old ill poets” who commend themselves in their vainglory as they “bless whatsoever they invent” (II, 109). He compares such puffery to the vanity of those who “will rather reare themselves monument of Marble then monuments of good deedes in men’s mouthes” (II, 109). But neither of these caveats, suggestive as they may be, are as damning or intriguing as the words that come from Shake-speare’s own mouth in a weak moment in 64. There his usual saber-rattling posturing before the enemy unaccountably gives way to a confession of despair and incapacitation, his only comfort the elegance and wit of the words communicating his dread of contingency.

What’s more, Shake-speare’s puppet-master takes pains to insure that readers will not miss this turnabout his persona suddenly manifests. The anticlimactic force the couplet delivers, noted by Weiser (68), develops only because the two sonnets bracketing 64 and 64’s near neighbor, 60 (with which it shares imagery), utilize their couplets to work to reverse the dark meditations on time’s ravages presented in their quatrains, in the end making extraordinary claims for the power of poetry to transcend mortality. When 64’s couplet fails to develop a comparable consolation, the bleakness of the effect is that much more pronounced, a shock to expectations of solace readers enjoyed in 64’s near neighbors. The effect is that 64 undermines the persuasiveness of those claims for poetry’s power the speaker made without risk of challenge elsewhere.

Sonnet 64 expands the desolate zero-sum arithmetic of appetite’s fluctuations from the psychological account tallied in 56 to historical and metaphysical ledgers. Here the speaker “ruminates” (11) sadly upon Ruin’s seemingly invincible reign of terror over all of human and natural history. Everywhere here one sees the marks of weakness and marks of woe human beings endure, not only in the past and future that have obliterated and will obliterate all human enterprise, but also and more immediately in the hapless and hopeless present we continue to endure as long as we care to live. Though the couplet sustains other complementary readings, perhaps its most self-evident import initially is that whatever or whoever we may love will sooner or later be wrenched from our embrace and then, adding insult to injury, subsequently lost to our common yearning for commemoration. These are the grim facts we know only too well, subliminally. To the extent that we do not live in the “perpetual dulnesse” of brute desires, our visionary reflections upon the devastating effects of the past and future in natural history (Q2) and the human history (Q1) of our relationships to one another mean that every moment of our present is shadowed by half-suppressed apprehension quaking before the mindless executioner’s ax. Not only must we suffer loss, but we must live in the distressing apprehension that in our self-awareness about the inevitability of losing what we do not wish to we must also “weepe to have, that which [we] feare to loose” (the final word of the quotation suggesting both the deprivation implied in the word “lose” and the apprehensive fear of leaving beloved things unprotected in a threatening world that the verb “loose” conveys). In the aggregate, these mutually reinforcing torments often lead us to feel that life itself has become nothing more than what our souls “weepe to have” and “fear to loose.” In short, the sad weight of our cumulative experiences leaves us in a kind of half-life, tired of living but afeared of dying, like Antony and Cleopatra in their final days.

Ruin’s reign of terror is absolute. No human resistance can cut our losses.

Like as the waves make towards the pibled shore,

So do our minuites hasten to their end,

Each changing place with that which goes before,

In sequent toile all forwards do contend. (60: 1–4)

We and our time here on earth are like waves endlessly displacing one another without progress until each expires, spent pointlessly upon earth’s human shore. Human beings can only “contend” (4) with the elements, with themselves and with one another. Treading in place on a tidal millwheel of “sequent toile” (4), we simply displace those waves of human beings who have gone before us, to be displaced by those who will come to take our places in turn: all of humankind identically hapless links in the tragic chain of eternal recurrence, our energies and seed wasted on the hem of the earth we would more intimately embrace and know. All that water and not a single human being’s thirst definitively quenched.

Q2 argues that all any one of us can hope for is to “gaine / Advantage” (5–6) in this contention; but our ascendancy in battle, like the sea’s, is but momentary and inconsequential. We may at times seem to win an advantage, but we cannot emerge victorious. The “gains” we make are no more real than the apparent progress the waves make as they “change place with that which goes before” (60:3), regardless of whether we think of those who “go before” us as those who precede or those who succeed us. This quatrain is closely modeled on Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1567), Book XV, 200–203 and 287–79:

But looke

As every wave dryves other foorth, and that that commes behynd

Bothe thrusteth and is thrust itself: Even so the tymes by kynd

Doo fly and follow bothe at once, and evermore renew. . . .

Even so have places oftentymes exchaunged theyr estate.

For I have seene it sea which was substanciall ground alate.

The ever “hungry Ocean” may “gaine / Advantage on the Kingdom of the shoare” (5–6) but not to overtake her in triumph or congress—only, instead, to aid the continuing object of contention itself. The lines

And the firme soile win of the watry maine

Increasing store with losse, and losse with store (7–8)

echoing Ovid’s ironies, give with one hand only to take away with the other. The sea action devours land; the sea action deposits land: ever hungering ingestion and evacuation, but nothing nourished, nothing changed for the better. What at first appears the expected triumph of the ocean over the shore circles upon itself to bite its own tail in the completion of the ambiguous syntax of l.7 and the zero-sum gains and losses in l.8. If the natural world is an adequate metaphor for human being (and nothing here suggests otherwise), the contingent flux of mutability and the ultimate pointlessness of all energy expended—poetical commemoration included—proves the unchallenged and metaphysically absurd “order” in our universe.

Nor is the melody any less jangling to the nerves when the poet considers the grim lessons of human history in Q1. The first two lines summon before us an image of human history as the disfigured corpse of man dressed out in the trappings of his own self-fashioned magnificence, a magnificence undercut and, indeed, hacked away by man’s “fell” adversary, Time. Even the symbolic trappings of our self-important sense of ourselves, with which we deck our fallen kings and heroes, have themselves become “outworne” (2) by the time they are unearthed from being buried for an age; but even when the gold helmet shines with eternal radiance, the worm crawling from the “defaced” (1) skull it houses is a shocking reminder of how vain such tributes to ourselves are as adequately protective armor for our heads and hearts. If additionally, Shake-speare should be speaking here in more generic terms of the “rich proud cost” (2) of the monumental architecture of former ages, wasted and left in ruins by Time’s relentless onslaught, the second half of Q1 operates not simply as a complement to but also as a continuation of the logic of the first two lines. The “defacement” depicted only shifts ground from the personal horror of a meditation upon a death’s head to the panoramic sweep of civilizations and cities put to the sword: “loftie towers . . . down rased” (3) and even commemorative “brasse eternall” (4) melted down in wholesale disfigurement, sacrificed to the “mortall rage” (4) the victors feel toward everything their enemies ever honored.

In keeping with the zero sum to-and-fro logic of the maddeningly metronomic motions that tick and tock through 64’s miniature theater of the absurd, Q1conjures up yet another horror, this one adding greater reason for despair than Time’s ruinous tyranny over human history can do in and of itself. The syntax of “the rich proud cost of outworne buried age,” for example, develops the same kind of self-reversing ambiguity that “and the firme soile win of the watry maine” does within the brief compass of the balanced hemistitches constituting ll.2 and 7. In each line, what initially invites itself to be read as a relatively unqualified triumph from a forward looking movement and point of view gives way, upon backward looking reconsideration, to a double take that records unanticipated defeat. Should we view what Time defaces in l.2 primarily as a splendid and enduring (if maimed) relic of a yet glorious human past? Or should we read the line as recognition of the wasted labor of a culture already in decline trying unsuccessfully to defy Time and defend itself against the terror of death’s unqualified triumph by means of lavish burial tributes and memorials designed to live beyond that culture’s collapse? An “outworne buried age” and the “rich proud cost” of its memorials, each ruinously “defaced” by “Time’s fell hand,” suffer a double defeat—once, in the death of the era itself and, then, in the evident futility of that age’s labors to transcend its mortality in some way.

The aural pun in “rased” (3) and the amphiboly generated by the ambiguous modifier, “eternal,” in l.4 extend this same vein of thought. With time, towers go and towers come, often raised from the very rubble that seemingly marked them as definitively razed. Is the “Ruin” (11) in the poem urging the speaker to “ruminate” so darkly the ruin he contemplates when he sees “loftie towers” razed to the ground or the ruinous repetition of the same cycle of folly begun all over again when he sees towers that are down then raised from the ground again to start the same cycle all over again? Or both? Is “brasse eternall” (4) unfortunate slave to the killing fury (the “mortall rage”) of enemies or is “brasse” a metonymic figure for humankind’s eternal slavery to its own impotent but costly “rage” against its own mortality?

The couplet levels yet one more painful blow. We do not “weepe to have” solely what we already possess and will one day lose. To the fearful sorrow that makes us, like 64’s speaker, cling miserably to loved ones and life itself in desperation, we might add our obsessive and vain yearning to possess (our “weeping to have”) what we do not—some form of freedom from death that makes us compulsively attempt to immortalize ourselves by commemorating our presence here. But these immortal yearnings—no less than the fears for the loss of what we do possess—can likewise prove nothing more than a “monumental” waste of time. Whether we are hoarding living treasure from theft or expending it prodigally on narcissistic monuments to ourselves in our creations—poetic or otherwise—all of us who have grown sadder but wiser in the way that the speaker of 64 has know that everything we do is a lost cause. Even our most prized memorializations are eventually reduced to the “rich proud cost of outworne buried age” disfigured by “time’s fell hand.”

Oddly enough, in such a world the only thing that is not a monumental waste of time is a defenseless yet “brave” (in Elizabethan usage, at once “courageous” and “splendid”) engagement in it and to it. When seen in the unique perspective from which alone sonnets like 56, 73, and 64 can make satisfying sense, their hidden confidences, when disclosed, repeatedly argue that we should not pointlessly huddle in cowering fear of time’s destructive fluctuations nor in the overreaching quest to make valuable use of time in order to perpetuate a foolish human race against it. Instead, we should “re-deem” the time, living solely to engage and enjoy our time being together, taking full and satisfying advantage of the time that has been given to us. Appearances notwithstanding, for true good Will/will time is not most notably—except to the fools we often prove to be—an invincible enemy; it is a seedbed of creation to be cultivated and propagated in order to yield an increase that sustains us in satisfaction. In Time’s garden, the Rose may either be severed from its vine in vain tributes to ourselves or “cultivated” to beget yet greater and more refined bounty. In our “engagements” with time, our battle swords should be beaten into ploughshares. We are not here on earth merely to endure diminishment and die, to flee from our time being in fear of its passage or simply run out of it in futile pursuit of self-deifying myths with which to memorialize ourselves. We are meant instead to multiply our joys in grateful and abundant confidence that we have all the time there is in the world in which to nourish and enjoy ourselves and those we love. For the Bard, the true vision of Time is not the fearful and demoralizing specter of outworn buried age defaced before which, consciously and subconsciously, we all cower. It is not the grim reaper, but, as in Blake, an eternal youth. It is the fecundating allure of l’ora beatrice (the true Laura/Beatrice), the May-time “of yee[-]are” (73:1). It does not see as “Winter” sees, the “being full of care” we heard in the first speaker of 56 and see again here in 64 read in this fashion and from this “perspective.” Instead, it sees and speaks with “Somers welcome,” the voice of sweet love we have heard gently welling up from the pure and generous depths of all the sonnets we have thus far examined, the same sweet voice we are about to hear inspire us as we witness it soaring confidently and free above our dark oceanic flux.

As both 56 and 64 rightly indicate, the world is indeed a “hungry” place (64:5; 56:6). In our private lives, that hunger often makes the heart a lonely hunter. In our public lives, that hunger makes human history a slaughter bench. In the natural world’s order, that hunger makes hunting and being hunted the inhalation and exhalation of nature’s panting maw. “Sweet love” (56:1; 76:9) alone transcends this world of unrelenting appetites to feed rejuvenatingly on innocent and convivial satisfactions. Our appetites, by contrast, urge us to circle in some inane metaphysical holding pattern until, our fuel spent, we plunge precipitously to decline and death. Even as we continue to feed on each other and the world, we manage only to generate a famine where abundance lies.

As the ambiguous syntax of Q3 intimates, the fearful and demoralized speaker of 64—to whom we have fatalistically been nodding in agreement in the foregoing analysis—may himself be as much “selfe confounded, to decay” (10) as are the natural elements he has been commenting upon in dismay. What “Ruine hath taught [him] thus to ruminate” (11) is not simply that time will one day come to take away his beloved as it has done and will do to others, world without end. Even more significantly, ruin has taught him to think upon such matters ruinously. The word “thus” in l.11 may as readily mean “in this manner” as “what is to follow.” Indeed, under the ruinous influence of his fearful fantasies of tempus edax the speaker has already converted the death and loss of the beloved from a single event that is to take place in one bleak moment sometime in the future into a death and loss that have already and definitively taken place within the soul of the speaker long ago and for as long again as he shall live (a reading more readily distinguished when we keep in mind that “my love” [12] simultaneously refers to a person and to the speaker’s devotion to that person). So long as the speaker allows himself to be overrun by his perceptions of ruin, he has no spirit and time (nor generous good Will/will) with which to enjoy his relationship to his beloved. His own belittled worth and satisfactions may well, and most truly, be the “rich proud” sacrificial “cost” ruinously laid on the altar of “outworne buried age” without his knowing he has done so any more than the dead do. To see “thus” is to see in a gratuitously defeatist way, overcome by the determinism and slavery of a death to which only our bodies need be thrall.

The hinge that opens the poem in two diametrically opposed directions is the noun phrase “This thought” (13). If “This thought” refers to the ruminations upon ruin preoccupying the first speaker, then the couplet seals the casket on unrelieved despair. If, however, it refers to the startling recognition that to think in that fashion is to make winter ere summer half be done, then the couplet has awakened the Bard to a gratitude so revitalizing that it makes him “weepe” with joy that he still has what he might have wasted entirely and lost prematurely. Likewise, that thought urges him to live in the one fear that until now has not troubled him—the fear that he might allow this liberating insight into the proper “appreciation” of one’s time being in love to slip again from mindfulness. When we realize just how precious the time we can share with each other actually can be, we may both “weepe to have” and “feare to loose” the awareness of our joy in it. Once more made aware of the absolute and sacred terms of marital engagement in it and to it, we would renew our vows of fidelity to loving life, seeking to have and to hold each day from this day forward until death do us part. A spirit that has suffered the “death” of love “cannot choose / But weepe to have, that which it feares to loose” in clinging terror. But the living spirit of sweet love, generous good Will/will, is not—like Antony and Cleopatra—slave to this unholy and perpetual mingling of appetite and fear. It sees what is good for itself and others and freely chooses marital engagement to it. For Shake-speare, there was finally no joy to be found in 64; for sweet good Will/will, joy abounds. Even in death, Time cannot come to take our love away from us. In the most miraculous sea change of this fluid poem’s self-reversing movements, everything that time sweeps away, has swept away, and will sweep away again has been returned to us as a rich alluvial deposit upon which our desert may bloom. “Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain” quick now, here now, always, so long as we recollect that for our own good we need to remain steadfastly among those we have not forgotten, without self-regarding fears for ourselves. Should we forget or neglect that wisdom—no matter how often—the encouraging Word of true good will/Will awaits here (its silent love “writ”) to urge the prodigals, happily, back to life and those we love.

True good Will/will’s re-deeming voice, now heard in 64, transforms the defaced and defacing countenance of the grim reaper into a more deeply thought-provoking and welcoming vision of Time, a figure enacting and inspiring desire and delight rather than fear and despair. The speaking voice’s quickening change from utter demoralization to boundless joy in the sonnet is not a clever magician’s cheap trick. It is a genuine miracle of rare device we have ourselves experienced directly, having seen and heard it with our own eyes and ears, an enriching renewal enacted convincingly in the shift from hearing one speaking voice in the poem to one that is far more bountifully self-transcending and wisely reflective about a condition both we and the speakers share. In true good Will/will’s desire for engagement with the precious moments of Time’s being as they come, hoping in this blissful congress to have and to hold Time’s eternal youth from this day forward, “Father-ing” Time can begin to breed further life rather than merely threaten to snuff it out. “Love is a babe” (115:13) that grows within us from every moment of decision to enter into joyful congress with that time being.

In 73 true good Will proved eager to share with his readers the joy of the May-time of his spirit endlessly renewed in preference to settling lamely for autumnal apprehensions about life’s relentless diminishments. In 56, his “sweet love” urged upon us Summer’s ever-present “welcome” (14) rather than wintry “care’s” increasingly “sad Intrim[s]” (9) of wasting hunger, subject to mere appetite’s law of diminishing resources. Here in 64 the re-deeming Bard transfigures metaphysical desolation before the grim reaper into the generative and joyous engagement to gratifying congress with the time being’s eternal youth. In each case the poet’s rejuvenatingly inspirational wit turns on the reader’s ability to re-cognize the poet’s own critique of the persona’s misprizing his and our time being, the l’ora beatrice. This is the epiphanic illumination awaiting its dawn everywhere in the young man sonnets, reminding readers (as we ceaselessly need to be reminded) that the only thing truly worth knowing in our lives is the “sweet love [the Bard] alwaies write[s] of” (76:9), a love that, like the sun’s self-renewing illumination and germinating warmth, remains a boundless fountainhead of nurture, “daily new and old” (13) in lives utterly dependent on it for continued health and well-being.

In the endless fidelity to its repeated daily trajectory across the firmament, the sun’s most substantial task and accomplishment is not the nearly pointless function it has come to serve in our small minds as a primitive chronometer marking lost and wasted time. We tend to forget too readily that its profounder worth is its miraculous capacity to help germinate and nurture all life into the fullness of its being. And so it is with the Bard’s self-same song in his verse—“still all one, ever the same” (76:5) in its declarations of love. In his singing a single refrain in these 126 poems, an art “so far from variation or quicke change” (76:2), the poet’s commanding obsession may easily be mistaken as the declaration of a troubled passion that gets nowhere and merely marks time, singing of love ever threatened by the loss of its continuance before, in its final lyric, its fears are indeed realized. But if we “learn to read what silent love hath writ” (23:13) in these verses, we can come to appreciate that the “sweet love” true good Will “alwaies writes of” in them is not one of threatened diminution but promising “increase” (1:1)—108’s “eternal love in love’s fresh case” (9). It is a tale ever and at once both old and new, a tale in every fresh hearing among its readers “still telling what” was once “told” (76:14)—and thus not yet definitively “tolled”—as long as each discerning reader’s viva voce re-cognition and re-incarnation of it reanimates the May-time of the poet’s spirit in the reader’s “time of yee[-]are” (73:1). The Bard’s two sub-sequences are no more about the persona’s failing quest to preserve the love he has for the fair young man and dark lady than Petrarch’s is about the failed attempt to preserve his love for Laura or Dante, Beatrice; like theirs, the esoteric enlightenment is access to productive congress with l’ora beatrice, the vera beatrice, a life wholly consumed with a true Socratic eros, true good will’s re-vivifying realization of ever new births in beauty.

This re-deeming vision of Time manifests itself again in two of the best poems of the “procreation group,” 2 and 12. These poems, too, would also seem to expend all their energies in a “defensive” war waged in vain with tempus edax. They do not seem to make any effort to beat their self-protective swords into ploughshares. However, the self-defeating contradictions disclosed in the advice these poems seem to offer must not be mistaken for the voice of true good Will/will. Take 12, for example. This celebrated piece reiterates from 64 the speaker’s relentless meditation on time’s passage, its diminishments, and its power to “waste” (10) things away—whether the ruin takes days (l.2), weeks (ll.3 and 5), seasons (l.7) or human years (ll.9–12).1 Here again the zero-sum absurdity of temporal “order” (things “die as fast as they see others grow” [12]) further intensifies the sadness of the spectacle. Urged on by his reflections on the natural order in ll.1–8, the speaker momentarily hesitates in his discourse to “question” (with a touching incredulity growing out of the seeming perfection of the beloved’s present beauty) whether the same mutable fate “must” (10) similarly await the beloved as well. Having thereafter concluded that Ruin’s reign of terror is indeed universal (“nothing gainst Time’s sieth can make defence” [13]), the speaker urges the auditor to outsmart the enemy in the only way that he knows to “save” (14) him—a decision to sire children.

If logic like this were to be the criterion by which genius is measured, the Bard would have had difficulty being admitted to the temple grounds, let alone enshrined at the pinnacle of the literary pantheon. His persona’s argument is patently sophistical. Though breeding children is a way to defend oneself temporarily from the horrors of time’s depredations, doing so could hardly be said to provide a long-term solution or even a morally justified defense in the war the poem dramatizes. The only people who could be convinced by this argument would be egotists foolish enough to dream they can “immortalize” themselves through their offspring or craven enough to breed children in a wantonly selfish effort to distract themselves from their own aging. Anyone who cares about children at all would be horrified by it. Breeding children in such a world for such a reason is merely a waste of time that thoughtlessly commits yet another generation of dying animals to the “wastes of time” (10), in the process doing nothing more than repressing the extent of its dismal devastation. If it is in some manner a “defense” against “Times sieth” (13), it could be so only in that those who would do such a thing to distract themselves from confronting their own deaths think it legitimate to use their children as human shields to be thrown on the enemy’s bayonets in a vain effort to protect themselves from being put to the sword themselves.

The same must be said even if the speaker means the word “breed” in a grander figurative sense, suggesting that the only defense against Time’s rapacity is the civilized “good breeding” to face the marauder down bravely and die with grace and dignity, salvaging moral victory from physical defeat. Though clearly an advance on the thoughtless self-regard involved in the former reading, even this suggestion would not truly “save” or redeem us from Time’s barbarism. It could only provide cold consolation in the face of the tyranny of death. Though the gladiatorial slogan, morituri te salutant thrills the soul with its valor and dignity, it also grimly resonates with an awareness that its defiance of a cruel fate is tortured and empty, leaving those of us who hear it—like those of us listening to the speaker’s advice in the couplet of 12—less than completely sanguine about it. It may be that in some bleak circumstances it is all that can be salvaged from a terrible situation, but it remains a horrific tragedy, not a salvific cause for celebration. How much can one applaud the martyr’s spiritual triumph when the cruel emperors to whom our saints’ “civil” defiances are offered cannot be brought to justice for the barbarity of their crimes?

Lonely defiance of cruel tyrants can be no less a waste of time than breeding children to defend oneself against death. True good Will/will realizes that the only way one may assuredly avoid the “waste of time” (10) is not to defy the tyrant vainly but to “disarm” him completely. The only fully satisfying resolution of the poem’s conflicts is one that, building upon the sexual undercurrent in “beauties” who “forsake” themselves (11) and “die as fast as they see others grow” (12), reads the final line as a salvific invitation to congress with a fathering Time joyously embraced. We are best served by an eager embrace of our time being so that in commingling union with him we may “brave him” splendidly and satisfyingly “when he takes [us] hence” (14). The final word of the sonnet, in this reading, does not mean that “Time will come and take [our love] away” (64:12) but that we might happily allow Time to take us “hence,” that is, “now and henceforth,” enjoying him at our pleasure and in hopes of yet greater future yield. Only in reading the poem thus can we free ll.7–8 (“Sommers greene all girded up in sheaves / Borne on the beare with white and bristly beard”) from their grisly funereal associations sufficiently to realize that the image’s terrifying surface import obscures a sustaining figure of bountiful harvest.

Sonnet 2 covers much the same ground in a more complex idiom. Addressing a “youthe” (2) of unusual beauty “so gaz’d on now” (3) in his prime, the speaker melodramatically discusses the young man’s growing older in terms of an extended metaphor of a fortress, its “treasure” (6) safely buried within, manned by those who are making every effort to “hold the fort” against the besieging enemy, Time itself, a force that is prepared to wait as long as it takes to starve the youth into defeat. A number of intended ironies permeate this extended figure. The “beauties field” of the beloved’s face, its brow smooth and its clear eyes “deepe sunken” (7), will be a very different thing once “fortie Winters” have carved out “deepe trenches” (2) in it and clouded the clear gleam of its youthful glance in eyes by then “deepe sunken” (7) by starvation and shamed by submission to defeat. These graphic images of aging’s toll on us are depressing enough in themselves, but when one considers them in terms of the siege metaphor, one must add to them the supplemental irony of the youth’s subsequent recognition of the futility of his efforts to withstand the siege in the first place. What possible point can there have been in having wasted twenty years or more to “hold the fort,” staving off the painful effects of aging, if thereafter one is forced to give what’s left of the “store” away anyway? (Indeed, that question that makes 2 both the entire sequence and its ending in 126 writ small.) What remains of beauty in late middle age is “of small worth held” (4) both by those living within the body’s fortress and even by its newly victorious besiegers. Such is the painful life span of human desire, besieged first by fear and then by despair. The speaker openly probes this wounding irony in Q2 if we interpret “Then” (5) as a temporal marker rather than a logical one and assume for the moment that the person asking for the location of the buried treasure is not the poet but the victor demanding the spoils once the fortress has been relinquished. The “all-eating shame” (8) the speaker refers to here communicates doubly, suggesting both a terminally destructive eventuality to be regretted, on the one hand, and on the other a “consumption” of spirit even more complete and devastating than the starvation of the body precipitating the surrender to despair. If one has “fought the good fight” for decades, the utter surrender to Time the destroyer at the eleventh hour can only be seen as a doubly crushing woe. The starvation of the body is shameful enough; but for the spirit to waste away and lose heart is an “all-eating shame.”

What’s more, the figurative situation does not seem to allow for any redeeming alternative. Either one can abjectly concede the treasure “keep” to the enemy now that the battle has been lost or one can, in one final act of defiance, refuse to “say” (7) where the “treasure of (our) lusty daies” (6) has been buried all these years. But even if one takes the latter course, one’s own “deepe sunken eyes” (7), wasted by Time’s ravages, give the game away. Neither abject capitulation in despair nor stoical, silent refusal to look the enemy in the eye directly and give in completely can save anyone from Time’s all-eating fury. Whether one curries favor through total surrender (in youth or even at the eleventh hour) or continues to defy Time into old age, the result proves equally “thriftlesse praise” (8)—in the one case, the thriftless praise involved in deference to an enemy power that will only kill after it has plundered; in the other, thriftless praise of oneself for a proud but equally catastrophic resistance.

Hence the relief that initially greets the speaker’s offer to bring in reinforcements in the sestet, urging “praise deserv’d” earned through “beauties use” (9) as a meaningful alternative to the despair of such “thriftlesse praise.” But to our chagrin, these reinforcements manning the parapets are our own children. Near the end of World War II in Europe the allies overrunning German positions discovered (and no doubt frequently had already killed) twelve- and thirteen-year-old boys pressed into combat. Despite the optimistic claim for the benefits of paternity the persona intends to forward in the couplet, any parent who would do such a thing must have blood that runs very cold to “warme” (14) to the task or the subsequent sight of his own children’s “blood” pressed into such desperate service. The modern editorial insertion of quotation marks in ll.10 and 11 begs the question regarding where the indirect discourse should end. The unmarked Q text forces the reader to ask that very question. Grappling with it liberates an interpretive quandary as to whether the twelfth line of the poem (“Prooving his beautie by succession thine”) refers to a beneficial and restorative legacy children pass down to their parents as an antidote to fearful depression over Time’s lethal assault or whether bringing a child into the world is not finally an agony to be added to one’s own death in the “succession” of one’s thoughts upon the murderous succession of things. In the latter reading, the child will indeed prove “his beautie by succession thine”; but, unfortunately, in this case the antecedent of “thine” might be the all-eating adversary. Except for the completely self-absorbed narcissists among us, the hope the sestet offers us for some meaningful defense against Time’s scythe turns to ashes in our mouths. Thus, the initial assumption that the construction forming Q3 is an exhortational one transforms itself into an ironic interrogative. How much more praise does our beauty’s use in reproduction deserve if all that it produces finally is another death? L.9’s question, then, can only be lamentably rhetorical, one would have to conclude.

Not necessarily. True good Will/will’s more affirmative answer to the question speaks out here in his allusion to the parable of the talents in Matthew (25:14–30). The addressee of 2 is in a position directly comparable to the unprofitable steward of the parable who, having buried the “treasure” he had been given for fear of losing it, was subsequently condemned to a lonely despair when what was given was simply taken away from his care and he, cast out into a darkness where there was nothing but weeping and gnashing of teeth. In the parable, the steward suffered his bleak fate because, like the speaker here asked to “sum [his] count” (11), he had returned only one for the one with which he had been entrusted. In his fear of his master he had buried his talent, not multiplied his store. The same fate overtakes both the speaker and any auditor who follows the advice thus far forwarded in 2. Anyone foolish enough to listen to him would “sum my count” merely by replacing one breathing body with another and nothing greater in a zero-sum cycle of generation, himself beset initially by fear of loss and then, when that fear proves prophetic, by despair. In the parable, the punishment the steward receives seems cruel and unfair until one realizes that the master’s wounded anger (contrast his generous bounty to any and all productive servants) is not for the fact that the condemned servant scrupulously returned what he had been given, but that his attitude toward his benefactor was a gratuitous insult to him: the assumption that the benefactor was an enemy, not a friend.

Lord, I know thee that thou art a hard man, reaping where thou hast not sown, and gathering where thou hast not strawed. And I was afraid, and went and hid thy talent in the earth: lo, there thou hast that is thine. (25:24–25)

It is, of course, a comparable folly for us to look upon the time being given to us in fear of our losing it until we view it in despair once it is, then, surely lost, thinking of Time as a grim reaper (or besieging enemy) seeking to punish us and profit from our labors rather than as an eternally youthful benefactor who can help us to “enter . . . into the joy of thy lord” (25:21, 23), the joy of creation itself.

Young or old, our “beauties field” can be “of small worth” only when it is merely “held”—that is kept out of cultivation. If for every “deep trench” forty Winters had dug in our brows our spirits had planted seeds in them and then tended them, that field would have grown into harvest upon harvest, not merely the “totter’d weed” (4) the first speaker sees in his mind’s eye as beauty’s eventual fate without cultivation. Our youth’s “proud livery” need not be reduced to tattered and useless rags; it can be repaired and worn again even more lovingly as a “new made” (13) cloak for “could” (14) blood. Like the profitable servants in the parable, our common salvation lies in beauty’s only proper “use,” the cultivation and multiplication of our bounty and joy generously shared with others in our common need.

The “praise deserv’d” that best and truly crowns “beauties use” (9) is not the praise idly assumed owed us for merely perpetuating ourselves in some way through children or any less lively monuments to ourselves. “Praise deserv’d” is no such narcissistic reward; it is praise for that which deserves to be praised: increase through beauty’s only proper use, our unending “appreciation” of the value and desirability of life’s bounty. Loving fatherhood, after all, involves more than breeding new stock to feed ourselves and a false sense of security. After putting “beauties field” to good “use” through forty winters, we could look upon a son now matured into a gentle and generous soul and say: “This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” What’s more, we might generously wish to share his accomplishments with the world in order that such a son (or some other “progeny” of our own creation and cultivation) might re-deem it in some beneficial way. To give such a gift would be to “prove his beautie by succession”—among those to whom it had been transmitted—“thine.” If such praise is deserved, the child’s graces and gifts, while benefiting the world, will also glorify the father, “prooving his beautie by succession thine,” as well, joy abounding. “This were to be new made when thou art ould, / And see thy blood warme” like the sun’s rising, the poet’s love, or our time’s being in the hours as they come and go, ever “new and old, / . . . still telling what is told” (76: 12–14).

In 104 the speaker’s anxieties over time’s depredations intensify from 64, 12, and 2’s fears about the beloved’s eventual obliteration from memory to more immediate concerns over imperceptible changes for the worse in the young man that may well be occurring at this very moment, changes that, appearances notwithstanding, are in every likelihood eating away at his beauty from within even as the poet speaks.

In Q1 and Q2’s vocative, the speaker declares that for the three years he has known the beloved he has not been able to notice any appreciable deterioration in his beauty, but in the volta he confesses his surreal fears that, like the movements of the sundial’s shadow, his beloved’s decline, ever “stealing from his figure” (10), has been ceaselessly continuing by degrees too infinitesimal to be noticed even by an observer as obsessively on the lookout for signs of deterioration in him as the speaker has ghoulishly been. In “this most time-centred of all the young man sonnets” (Hammond 198), the speaker confesses a fixation with temporal disintegration bordering on psychological perversity, an impression reinforced by the connotations of eerie watchfulness (and even predatory possessiveness) conveyed in the implications of the phrase “your eye I eyed” (2). The beauty the speaker continues, even at present, to “eye” in this manner represents a detached and yet invasive inspection that should be unnerving to us all for reasons well beyond the mortality we share with him and his beloved. In any event, given the assurance of decline that has abruptly come to dominate his thinking, in the couplet the speaker shifts from the confident reassurance he offered the beloved in the poem’s opening vocative to a public proclamation of a panic-stricken boast, addressed somewhat incongruously to ears that cannot hear it (“thou age unbred”), ages yet to be born, in an effort to prevent the loss of a beauty never again to be rivaled by commemorating it in verse while yet he can. Seemingly committing himself to the folly 115 will soon dismiss as misguided, the speaker idly presumes here to be “certaine ore in-certainty, / Crowning the present, doubting of the rest” (11–12) when he seizes this opportunity to enthrone the beloved’s present perfection as a beauty beyond compare. A poetic credo that began by asserting that the beloved “never can be old” concludes thirteen lines later by incongruously celebrating (seemingly within earshot of the beloved) the despairing comfort of the boy’s “beauties summer dead” (14).2 Thus, the price of enthroning his beloved above all others is to envision him prematurely dead and buried.

Perhaps the most overt cue, that the sonnet we have understood in this manner until now masks a heartier “perspective,” comes from the ambiguity in the wording of the “processe of the seasons” (6) described in Q1 and 2. Nothing beyond our own thoughtless presuppositions demands that the natural description in the three quasi-parallel constructions of ll.3–8 must be read exclusively as an account of temporal process as destructive juggernaut. “Three Winters colde” dormancy may have as much to do with generating and sustaining “summers pride” in its ornamental finery, “shooke” out in leafy “forrests” self-display as it does with its more somber role in denuding those same forests of all decoration. Likewise, the “yellow Autumne” in the “three beautious springs to yellow Autumne turned, / In processe of the seasons” cannot help but take some positive “coloration,” as Booth has noted (334–35), from the ostentatious ornament implied in the earlier phrase “summers pride.” In fact, it may more readily suggest one proud display transfigured into yet another in Autumn’s own glory than it requires readers to see in it only a darkening omen of death. “Three Aprill perfumes in three hot Junes burn’d” (7) may, of course, be read as a destructive holocaust; but the gentle reality of the English summer climate, the proximity of the reference to Aprill’s “perfumes” so near June’s burnings and the undiminished “greene” (8) of the beauty the poet celebrates here (as well as the positive implications operating in the two previous images of seasonal growth) combine to suggest that what may burn in hot June is not just April’s blossoms but its own lovely flowering and scent in its turn perfuming the June air. To paraphrase Keats, where are the scents of spring, ay where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy loveliness too.

Add to this the ambiguity the Bard can manipulate in the first line of the sonnet because Elizabethan punctuation did not utilize commas to set off vocatives or appositives, and the entire freight of meaning in the octave can be seen and heard to shift dramatically out of the minor key. Q’s unpunctuated “faire friend” need not be a vocative at all, but may instead be a portion of an elliptical introductory clause whose suspended referent is only made clear in l.9’s “beauty”: Beauty’s fresh and ever greening manifestations in the natural world, the speaker may well be declaring, have always been and continue to be a fair friend to the poet, delight in which “never can be [nor grow] old.”

“Yet” in l.9 need not mean “nonetheless,” expressing the persona’s apprehensive fear about to be announced; it may mean “even at this present moment,” introducing a repetition of the Bard’s expression of appreciation for the gift of beauty’s infinite being in his life, a thankfulness he is about to explain still further. “So” in l.11 need not mean “thus,” announcing a parallel between time’s flight from itself and the disintegration from within itself the beloved’s “sweete hew” (11) may enact. “So” may mean “so that” or “in order that,” connecting the first half of Q3 to the second in a single construction that admires “beauty” yet again, this time for stealing from its own previous figure to bring forth new beauties, new, lively being, a “sweete hew” that has “motion” (12) to live anew and radiantly, like the statue of the lost queen that happily comes to life again at the conclusion of The Winter’s Tale. The “motion” of beauty’s being in time in this reading is a miracle to be endlessly appreciated—not the first speaker’s fear of a single diminishment to come. For the persona, any change in the beloved, however negligible, is a thing to be dreaded; for the Bard, as we shall see even more clearly in 16, temporal process brings the static beauty of the beloved to life as a wondrous new being constantly outpacing the dead image of perfection that we as lovers might misguidedly hope to lock away in an unwittingly narcissistic embrace.

Troubled by the absence of the presumed subject of the modifier “for feare of which” in the grammatical development of the poem’s final two-line sentence, editors have historically altered the period at the end of Q3 into a colon or semicolon in order to reassure readers in their initial confusion that it is “me” (11) or “mine eye” (12) that lives in the fear that inspires the poem’s final proclamation. This seemingly helpful change fails to appreciate the Bard’s final bit of wit. Only if we acknowledge Q’s period and the initial confusion that the couplet thus presents in its own right, only then are we free to realize that for the Bard and the “onlie begetter” with whom he yearns to be united in re-cognition here, the understood subject in the couplet is not the “deceaved” (12) eye (and “I”) of Shake-speare but the generative, self-transcending spirit of “beauties summer” (14) in its endless blossoming. Were “beauties summer” fearful of stealing from its own figure to give some new “sweete hew” lively “motion,” then beauty’s summer would have died without progeny before this present “age unbred” had ever been carried to term (“borne”) or delivered into the life it now manifests (“born”). The couplet does not finally represent an idle and vain boast, an “insult ore dull and speachlesse tribes” (107:12), hurled without fear of contradiction at those yet to be born; rather, it is a humorous corrective delivered to us all, the legions of those too poorly “bred” to do anything more significant with the time being bequeathed to us than to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Sonnet 1153 offers a yet fuller exploration of the vain impulse, bred by a cowardly concession to “times tiranie” (9), to yield to fears about contingency and attempt to preserve securely some privileged incarnation of love by burying it alive in a poetic proclamation like the one that ends 104. Sonnet 115’s perceived failure to harmonize its internal logic with the open-endedly hopeful assertion it forwards in the couplet (see Booth and Vendler’s commentaries) begins to explain why it has not garnered more inquisitive attention than it has as a direct challenge to the tempus edax view of time prevailing elsewhere in the persona’s consciousness throughout the sequence. One can only assume that prior readers intuitively reached the same conclusion Vendler did in assessing the seemingly incoherent logic that gives the nod to “time the creator” over “time the destroyer” in the couplet: a conclusion that sounds more like a “forced compliment” than a “satisfactory [logical] ending” (485). Feeling that love might still come to flourish and grow within one’s own life is no metaphysical defense against its eventual demise. Certainly the odds do seem hopelessly stacked in the long run against the continued well-being of this seemingly helpless “Babe” (13) in a world of millions of threatening “accidents” (5) lurking. They “creepe” (6) stealthily between the most sacred “vowes” (6) to adulterate them, “change” (6) or “forswear” seemingly stable and secure “decrees of Kings” (6), and “divert strong mindes to th’ course of altring things” (7) like the shifting channels of rivers rushing things on to some ruinous end “as though the altering things flowed in torrents towards decay” (Kerrigan 332). Indeed, one cannot help but wonder “how” this babe’s

hunny breath [can ever] hold out,

Against the wrackfull siedge of battring dayes,

When rocks impregnable are not so stoute,

Nor gates of steele so strong but time decayes. (65:5–8)

But then again, if all love’s babes were to die before coming to a maturity in which to perpetuate themselves and even multiply, then the “times should cease, / And threescore yeare would make the world away” (11:7–8). Love’s being in time cannot be seen simply as a death sentence to be endured in perpetual apprehension, a fearful premonition that ultimately proves prescient. Like babes whose changes and alterations can yield maturing development, love’s being in time can and does live in relative freedom from fear of approaching death, growing ever beyond itself in its boundless possibilities of development. Vendler’s depiction of the poem’s apparent illogic is not, then, a sufficiently balanced account of love’s Janus-faced contingencies.

Nor, when the sonnet concludes, are we left solely with the uneasiness inspired by Shake-speare’s incoherent reflections upon himself and his condition. True faith in love, as 116 will show, is not slave to the fickle vagaries of happy or unhappy accidents in the way this troubled poet-speaker attempting to reassure himself clearly is. Straightforwardly gazed upon, Shake-speare’s remarks here may show nothing but confusion, but “eyed awry” in “perspective” fashion they may yet “distinguish form” (R II, 2.1.18–20). The persona’s poem both begins and ends with the burgeoning sense of a windfall whose extent has yet to be determined. But his confident faith in love lies ever eroded from within by apprehension about far less happy “accidents” threatening love’s well-being at seemingly every turn—Q2’s “savage inventory” (Vendler 485) reflective of ruinous Time’s coming day of reckoning. Faith in love’s grander possibilities of being cannot be persuasively argued, as Vendler rightly sees, simply on the basis of mere happenstance, the vagaries of good or bad fortune that seemingly hold the speaker’s moods and continued sense of well-being hostage. If love is not some kind of “ever fixed marke” (116:5) by which human beings can sail toward some worthy destination beyond themselves, whether the seas upon which they ride are sunny or threatening, then, like the speaker of 115, we can only drift helplessly, “at sea” regarding our emotional lives, pitched hither and yon by altering circumstances, “vagabond flags” shifting endlessly and to no end except to “rot [themselves] with motion” (A&C 1.4.45, 47). When, however, we heed the voice of true good will speaking here, 115 voices a blessed creed. The “most full flame” (3) of love by which the Bard’s persona hopes to light his way at poem’s end “afterwards burne[s] cleerer” (4) in the more restrained yet more clarifying illumination true good Will discloses.

In the ebb and flow of Shake-speare’s musings in 115, Q1 sets the stage for the poem’s subsequent drama by recording the speaker’s delight with a perceived increase in his love. His remarking upon this surprising windfall has important consequences for our address of his subsequent reflections. The speaker’s having been “surprized by joy” prior to Q2’s litany of time’s depredations keeps readers mindful, as they navigate Q2’s terrors, that all may not be lost since Q1 showed time to be as capable of increase as of Q2’s desecration and decay. Moreover, Q1’s hyperbolic reference to former declarations of love the poet made to the beloved as “lie[s]” (1) forewarns readers subliminally of the need to be wary of the speaker’s current temptation to make the very same overreaction all over again, when, now having found himself hounded anew by fears “of times tyranie” (9) in Q2, he feels tempted to enshrine and embalm the present glory of his feelings of love’s fullness in verse before it should perhaps find itself ebbing, altered by negative circumstances that will surely come to “take my love away” (64:12)—whether the lost love under scrutiny may be the beloved himself or the speaker’s height of feeling for him. Our double vision allows us simultaneously to see the reasons both why the speaker is understandably tempted to proclaim “now I love you best” (10) and why doing so may very likely prove itself in error yet again. When the speaker declares in Q3 a confident moment when he was “certaine ore in-certainty” (11), the reader realizes that if he speaks the truth there, in another sense he lies in doing so. Having experienced the new height of his admiration for the beloved at the present moment, the speaker is clearly now “certaine ore [the] in-certainties” about his love’s future well-being; but, in terms of his own inner incertainties urging him to yield to the temptation to “say so” (13), he just as certainly lies—whether in saying that he knows definitively that he loves his beloved best now or that he is, indeed, “certaine ore in-certainty” in saying so. Readers know what he does not: that which leads the speaker to such proclamations is not inner certainty but inner quaking, an apprehensive fear before life itself—not secure feeling but inner insecurity.

Whenever the poet-speaker is tempted to declare himself in this manner, as 107 ironically characterizes it: “Incertenties now crowne them-selves assur’de” (7). What ultimately results from our double awareness regarding the speaker’s outer strength of feeling and his inner weakness—his simultaneous confidence and inner fear—places even his final pronouncement in the couplet in jeopardy as well. We do not, of course, doubt his conviction regarding what he is feeling and expressing there; but we do have to doubt its power of continuance and endurance in his inner being. Even this final pronouncement is an “assurance” of such potential uncertainty that readers cannot feel guaranteed that its speaker will not forsake his words of faith in love’s growth, touted here, whenever the first sign troubling it fails to keep him surprised with joy. To “give full growth” (14) to an infant love without so much as a word about its care and nurture is no auspicious promise of its meaningful sustenance; it seemingly exposes the helpless “child” nakedly to the killing elements with only one’s doubtful best wishes for its continued flourishing its only shelter from life’s storms.

In order to hear the voice of true good Will/will expressing itself audibly in 115, we must pay much more careful attention to Q’s original punctuation than editors have been willing to do. The phalanx of those who have felt it necessary to replace the final line’s period and/or the twelfth line’s colon with question marks and to set off l.9’s unpunctuated “why” with commas did not do justice to the poem’s complex point. Shake-speare’s was the sensibility they heard speaking in the poem (and perhaps in their own hearts as well) when they first read it and, based on that presumption of the poem’s import they punctuated accordingly. Without the commas in l.9 dictating the inflection in which the line should be read, the line’s antithetical ambiguities immediately assert themselves. Either the line is confessing the speaker’s fear of time’s tyranny or, with seeming illogic, it expresses the conviction that there is in fact no reason to fear time’s tyranny. If the question marks give way to the original punctuation at the conclusion of ll.12 and 14, readers must jettison the Shake-spearean readings they initially formulated regarding the poem’s resolve, ones that corroborate the continuing uncertainty in the sestet. In their place they then must fashion readings that square with the requirement that the material from l.4 14 must somehow be understood as a single declaration explaining why the poet-speaker may “not” (10, 13 italics mine), even now, proclaim the fullness of his love.

Once Q’s original punctuation has been reestablished, one is no longer bound to concede the oft-remarked ungrammaticality of Q2 (see, for example, Booth 380 and Vendler 484). Though no less difficult to construe, Q2’s syntax may not be a construction that interrupts itself, incomplete, in l.9’s exclamation that “makes a fresh syntactical beginning” (Booth 380). The understood subject of the participle “reckening” in l.5 may well be the speaker who, having in the remainder of Q2 reflected upon a variety of time’s accidents, goes on to explain in l.10 that, based on that reckoning—one that yields no good reason to fear time’s tyranny—he can now say why he may not give in to anxiety about his love’s continuance and give it mummified memorial in a verse “tombe / Which hides [the babe’s] life, and shewes not halfe your parts” (17:3–4). Instead, he is obliged to give it the “full growth” (14) that its living reality in his life requires of him.

To have parsed the adequacy of the statement’s grammar does not, of course, establish that the reasoning in it is sensible. How is it, for example, that the speaker can pass through Q2’s gauntlet and come away from the experience declaring that there is no good reason to fear time’s tyranny? But if we mull Q2 long enough, it may dawn on us that the contextual indefiniteness of its diction allows for both negative and positive constructions of its sense. Silent love hath writ here a second voice. Perhaps time’s tyranny should not be feared because, as 64 puts it, time gives as much as it takes and vice versa, demonstrating an “interchange of state” (64:9) that, “cheared and checkt even by the self-same skie” (15:6), increases “losse with store” just as steadily as it increases “store with losse” (64:8). Over time the land gains as much from the sea as it loses to it. For every “accident” of time that vilely “creepe[s] in twixt vowes” (6), as when adulterers violate marriage vows, there may be somewhere else a crawling child born to lovers from warring clans who creeps in twixt vows of hatred to accomplish what nothing else has been able to do in burying the hatchet. For every wanton act of aggression or arbitrary monarchical whim that “change[s] decrees of Kings” (6) there may well be a child born to a responsible monarch just in time to prevent a bloody succession battle. For every physical loveliness in its prime darkened and furrowed by time’s tanning action, there may well be spiritual beauty fashioned in time by which physical beauty may be toughened sufficiently to expand beauty’s utility and durability in serving important human needs beyond one’s own youth’s glow. For every self-serving act of bribery or terror that may “blunt the sharp’st intents” (7) to remedy injustice or properly punish some crime, there may well be the disarming power of a child to defuse a dangerous rage. For every act of moral cowardice that “diverts” otherwise “strong mindes to th’ course of altring things” (8)—circumstances having now been thoroughly compromised morally by that fact—there may well be, in some happier circumstances, a parent delightedly accommodating himself to his growing child, endlessly and innocently “diverted” by the new directions his beloved child’s interests and growth may take. On balance, then, one may well wonder why human beings should fear time’s tyranny. Indeed, true good Will subsequently implies that the only tyranny by which time can come to dominate human will occurs, not by time’s own assertion of unbridled control over us, but by our own surrender to terror when, fearful of change, we “crown” the arbitrary ascendancy of any present happenstance—good or bad—“doubting of the rest” (12).

Nor does the persona realize the unconscious egoism implicated in his seemingly innocent temptation to declare “Now I love you best” (10). True good Will knows that one can never say “Now I love you best” when tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow one may improve upon one’s former efforts and love yet better. We cannot finally speak about some of the most important beliefs in our lives, among them belief in the love relation. Human love is not something that can in fact simply be proclaimed; it is something whose “worth unknowne” (116:8) can only be measured by its enaction. “We cannot speak about it; only the outcome can tell” (Frost “Education by Poetry” 46). To speak of love alone is love’s labor lost. It cannot be communicated on anyone’s “say so” (115:13); nor is faith in it merely an inert and largely self-satisfied feeling of well-being acutely susceptible to the slightest changes in mood or circumstance. It has little to do with the ephemeral cupidinous bliss a mythical Roman “Babe” engenders, a “god” in whom belief can never be anything but half-serious and half-hearted. Rather it is true good Will/will’s commitment to a living reality engaging his energies day after day, a “babe” of the greatest promise cultivated in the lively dimensions of his ongoing relationship to others. Though of our own making, this living progeny is neither of the parties from whom it is born; it is a vital living tie between them orienting their lives toward Socratic good, daily new births in beauty. With attentive care this babe can be endlessly nourished, cultivated, and sustained and thus given its “full growth” as “beauties Rose” (1:2) into ever resurrected life; without care, this sempiternal “Rose” only withers on the vine, making a famine where life could abound, a “babe” starved by senseless neglect, however benign.

Shake-speare’s pronouncements in Q2 and the couplet of 115 cannot readily be reconciled with one another. The voice of true good Will/will, however, remains wholly consistent with itself in unfailingly enthusiastic appreciation of time’s being and becoming as eternal youth, the “eternall Sommer” (9) of ceaselessly generative potency affirmed without reservation in 18. To hear what silent love hath writ in these poems is to be wary and skeptical of all the sentiments in which the persona claims that poetry’s ultimate value is nothing more substantial than its power to preserve the beloved from time’s taint, merely “intombed in mens eyes” (81:8), confining what he purports to love to an empty Petr-arcan crypt’s mummified repose—the “monument” of his “gentle verse” (81:9). “Heaven knowes” that is “but . . . a tombe / Which hides [love’s] life, and shewes not halfe [its] parts” (17:3–4).

Take Sonnet 19, for example. In its typical modernized format, with “time” in ll.1 and 6 capitalized and with a comma after “time” (1) as well as commas bracketing “swift-footed time” (6), Q1–3 make a confusing set of commands. Verging on hysterical rant, the poem repeatedly threatens the kind of incoherence that is most likely to manifest itself in those under crushingly unrelieved stress. The ebb and flow of the speaker’s defiant orders and dismissive concessions to Time, uttered in a wavering attempt to save one precious mortal from death’s clutches by granting “ould Time” (13) a redundant license to kill any other living thing the hungry monster might wish to devour cannot mask completely “the pathos of the speaker’s hopeless request” (Weiser 30). Hapless vulnerability keeps bleeding through his overwrought and reckless bravado. Having spent the poem trying to conduct tough negotiations with a monster, in the end the persona meekly hands over the one thing he had held out for until then, conceding that “ould Time” can “doe thy worst” even to his beloved’s loveliness, because he has known all along subliminally that the sops he has verbally hurled at Time could keep the voracious beast off only so long. Though l.14 declares the speaker’s verse as his last triumphant trump card slammed on the table, tonally that is not enough to overcome the impression that if he’s won this last trick, he’s nevertheless lost the hand. The only thing—such as it is—that he has to console himself and his audience with is the hollow defiance of his verse itself, an enduring memorial to his beloved (and his own feeling for him) that can be no more, by his own admission here, than a “grave where [a] buried love doth live” (31:9) its death in life.

Q1’s rant may well remind us of Lear’s “Blow winds . . . all germains spill at once” (3.2.1–8) as a way to end a world that will not honor a balked imperial will. The speaker’s grief and fury here is no less strikingly self-regarding and disproportionate to the suffering we witness him endure. The speaker does not appear to sense how “unbalanced” he has become in ordering Time to execute or maim all living things great and small, natural and preternatural, gentle and rapacious (Q1’s “Lyons” [1], “Tygers” [3], “Phaenix” [4]—indeed, all Mother Earth’s “sweet brood” [2])—in sum, commanding his hatchet man to do “what ere [‘whatever’] thou wilt” (6) so long as he will refrain from “carv[ing]” with wrinkles his “loves faire browe” (9). In a world in which wholesale death and maiming are thus remorselessly countenanced to ransom an unwrinkled complexion for some one favored youth the “most hainous crime” (8) one can imagine hardly seems to be the responsibility of the years that innocently enough show their wear and tear—at least, not for any minimally objective observer, it doesn’t.

The speaker says some “very odd things” (Vendler 125) in addressing tempus edax here. If Q1 seems to urge upon Time acts of mutilation and genocide that “in the normal course of time, Time does not” perform (125), Q2 (in ll.5–7) contemplates (as if for the first time, it seems) and then surrenders to Time’s predation things to which Tempus edax has never felt its ravenous access denied. The “glad and sorry seasons” (5) have always flown in the way that time flies or “fleet’st” (5). Nor is there anything remotely hypothetical or uncertain about what time immemorial consistently has done to the “wide world and all her fading sweets” (7).

Yet despite the destruction and decay visited upon them by tempus edax, the world and all its brood still persist through time in undiminished strength. If the “pawes” of aging lions have lost their claws and fearsome tigers have succumbed to ludicrously disfiguring gum disease, the species they represent, “beauties patterne to succeding” (12) generations, still endures and remains harmoniously allied for sustenance to the devouring spirit that displaces generation upon generation it feeds. The speaker may imagine to his horror that once tempus edax had destroyed all the great predatory beasts of the world, it could then force Mother Earth to cannibalize herself once and for all. In so thinking, however, he neglects to recall that for all her maternal nurturing of her “owne sweet brood” (2), Mother Earth has proceeded in concert with tempus edax, devouring her own with the “slow, smokeless burning of decay” (Frost “The Wood Pile”). And a good thing, too, since without such grim transfusions the world would soon come to an end from earth’s nutrient depletion, if not first from the pathogenic diseases communicated by the growing mountains of corpses rotting undevoured. Indeed, Earth’s perpetual Phoenix-renewal only proceeds by this destruction of its own: “The earth don’t want to just keep things, hoard them; it wants to use them again,” flowering without stop from its own decay (Faulkner “The Old People”). Mother Earth’s gentle nurturing of its “sweet brood” remains married to “time the devourer” as she feeds her pelican brood with her own blood. The speaker contemplates solely time’s capacity to destroy all resurrection and new life when he licenses the devourer to “burn the long-liv’d Phaenix in her blood” (4), presumably meaning by that last phrase, “in the height of its vigor” and, more figuratively, “once and for all.” In so saying he fails to realize that the very fate to which he would consign the Phoenix in his despair is the same fate the Phoenix voluntarily chooses, undespairingly, not to die once and for all but to continue, knowing that only by such means may it resurrect itself into new life born into the world “for good”—its benefice enduring. Thus the self-immolating Phoenix in her vigorous blood ever burns “in her [own] blood”—not the victim the speaker imagines, but a figure willing to endure whatever may need to be endured in order to live forever as “beauties patterne to succeding men” (12).

Some assurance that the persona’s puzzling commands and concessions in the octave are meant to confront readers with these competing scenarios comes, characteristically enough, from the form of the poem in Q. Only if we record that, though capitalized in l.13, “time” in ll.1 and 6 is printed in the lower case, and that Q does not punctuate after “time” in l.1 or before or after “swift-footed time” in l.6, and that “what ere thou” (6) is not a necessary or even likely equivalent to “whate’er thou,” only then, can it dawn on us that the poem need not be an address to personified Time at all, but may well be designed to make syntactic sense as an address to an unnamed “thou” (1) whose behavior and spirit only serve to devour time, not redeem it creatively. Like the addressee in the first seventeen sonnets reluctant to commit himself to propagate the species in time’s pregnantly “due” course—who would instead, a sun “out-going in thy noon” (7:13), “lead Summer on, / To hidious winter and confound him there” (5:5–6) so that in “threescore year” he “would make the world away” (11:8)—this “thou” in Q1 would consign the “earth” to “devoure her owne sweet brood” (2) and “burne” the “long-lived Phaenix in her blood” (4) merely to “blunt” or mute his own self-regarding fears. Living in fear of his time’s being, he would “make glad and sorry seasons” (5), “like his own being” (“as thou” [5]), foreshorten and diminish themselves fleetingly, doing to the “wide world and all her fading sweets” (7) what “ere thou” (6)—that is, “before you had acted so”—only swift-footed time could do: run roughshod and unthinkingly over any “appreciation” of their liveliness and value.

In Q3, were the speaker’s rescue fantasy to be realized, it would not be the benefice to mankind he imagines. Were one privileged favorite alone among men to be allowed “untainted” (11)—that is, “untouched”—by time, his “beauties patterne” (12), inhumanly transcendent and unreachable, would not constitute a “patterne for succeeding men’s” happy imitation and emulation. It could inspire jealous envy or regret. The speaker would have become a latter day Narcissus in his yearning regard for an inert image of perfection, an image of perfection that can offer nothing substantial for humankind to embrace. True good Will/will has a very different pattern of beauty to offer to succeeding generations. His beauty’s pattern of Phoenix-renewal is not untainted because he hopes it alone will remain untouched by devouring time as time “courses” (11) or “hunts down” every other living thing. He’s sanguine that “the earth can have but earth, which is his due” (74:7). His is a beauteous pattern that hopes to retain within itself and inculcate in others he loves the “untainted” (11) purity of spirit and openness to experience that embodies an unshakeable faith in a more fruitful engagement with our time being—one that does not live like the “thou” (1) “devouring time . . . in thy course” out of fear for its own continuance. That “all-eating shame” (2:8) and utterly obsessive fear, not Time’s more objective predations, is the terror from which this new speaker wishes to preserve himself and his beloved audience of foolish “thous” here. His “loves faire brow” (9) wishes to greet time, not “in thy course” (11), that is, destructively, but gently and freely, in due course, without worry “lines” (10) carved in his brow (compare to 100, ll.9–10). In so doing, he offers “beauties patterne” in the world. Only thus can the human branch of the sempiternal Rose of beauty “never die” (1:2).

In this reading the couplet does not declare a defiant challenge to the grim reaper’s impotence, a defiance of questionable persuasiveness given devouring time’s power so universally conceded and emphasized elsewhere in the poem. Instead, it makes a gently chiding address to the antecedent of the poem’s “thou” now surprisingly identified as “My love” (14). “Yet do thy worst, my love, ould Time shall in my verse ever live young.” True good Will knows and freely admits in saying so that time’s devourer is within all those beloveds he addresses, just as it is within his own person and desires as well (“my love” [14] understood reflexively). But despite the “worst” (13) that our generic “wrong” (13) as misguided mortals can do merely to lay waste to our time being, the re-deeming voice of the Bard ever affirms in unshakeable calm its faith in time’s vigorous Phoenix-like capacities for renewal. His is a song happily “keeping time” rather than devouring it, a song proclaiming the good news of salvation, the true vision of time as forever “young” (14). The youth he praises is not ultimately a fair young man, but a spirit of youth vigorous enough to propagate happily our desires for new births in beauty.

Since we now know that Shake-speare speaks both for himself and differently for his creator when he emphasizes how “all alike my songs and praises be” (105:3), it should come as no surprise that other sonnets should echo these thematic duplicities. Take 15, for example, a poem highly reminiscent of the rhetorical structure of 12. Sonnet 15’s smug promise to “ingraft you new” (14) as the only means to overcome “wastfull time . . . [and] decay” (11) recalls 12’s concluding recommendation to “breed” as the only means to achieve the same end and 19’s declared triumph over time made possible by the persona’s versifying—a reading of “ingraft” activated as soon as we read the contiguous reference to the defeat of “this bloudie tirant time” (2) by means of the poet-speaker’s “rime” (4) in Q1 of 16.

In the octave, the speaker, like his counterpart in 12, begins with a dire meditation upon the mutability of “men” and “plants” (5), in short, of “every thing that growes” (1) only to die; but 15 shifts away from 12’s focus on physical deterioration to a more generalized, philosophically conceptual rumination that finds itself preoccupied by the instability and evanescence of things. So brief is our tenuous grasp or “hold” (2) on our pathetic “little moment[s]” (2) in the sun that the seemingly solid world the speaker sees before him in all its vivid glory strikes him as having no more substance than brief stage “showes” (3), pathetic spectacles acted out before an audience of one’s “betters,” those “Stars” (4) that alone can cheer or check the play’s run. From his vantage point near them in the upper boxes, he can clearly see that these same stars alone, not the players in their hour upon the stage, can sum up for themselves the spectacle’s ultimate import and value; but whatever meaning their critical “comment” (4) and comprehension may make remains tantalizingly out of earshot of the actors themselves, leaving the poor players to strut and fret in fear about the merit and continuance of this “performance of their lives” they are giving. Theirs is not to reason why; theirs is but to do and die as an utterly commonplace assemblage of stock characters who, in their youth, blindly “vaunt” (7), who, even if they may have risen to be principal actors of the troupe’s tragic repertory, nevertheless, “at height decrease” (7) uncomprehendingly, and who, farcical fools in old age, “were [or wear] their brave state out of memory” (8) as has-beens living in the ludicrous fantasy that they “haven’t lost a thing” or else in some “brave” show of faded glory to which no one pays anything but bemused inattention because their moment has passed.

The botanical figures mingling with the extended theatrical metaphor in the octave do nothing to soften or qualify the speaker’s mordant musing. As comparisons of the human life cycle to stages in the growth cycle of plants, ll. 7–8 only complement the “theatrical” depiction of the hapless absurdity of human being in time. These lines darken further the speaker’s summation of the dire straits in which human beings find themselves trapped by adding the inexorable propulsion toward embodiment’s decay to the blindness and incomprehension with which we live out a doomed existence. Though l.6’s “self-same skie” may attach itself to the theatrical metaphor as a reference back to the “Stars” of l.4, its phrasing may more neutrally help to contrast the unchanging stability of the distant heavens’ order to the more familiar sublunary world of change and decay humans inhabit. Yet even the understated matter-of-factness of this figure does not make human existence seem less of a mockery and riddle since the inscrutable face of the blank sky cheers or checks all organic life with bewildering randomness. However suddenly or slowly it nurtures or kills, it does so “out of the blue,” its seemingly remote and indifferent hue.

Knowing then what he thinks only the stars and he know, in the sestet, in a reprise of the misprision 115 ultimately rebukes, the speaker would “crown the present, doubting of the rest” (12), hoping to fix honorifically and preserve forever the beloved “most rich” in the “youth” (10) he presently enjoys before the stealthy dial hand should make the young man’s “height decrease” (7) and “change your day of youth” in the sun “to sullied night” (12). The remedy he boasts, however, offered, not at the young man’s eleventh hour, but more nearly at his being’s high noon, is not truly a cure that will “save the day” of his existence. Instead of freeing the beloved to live out more richly the remainder of his day in the sun’s strong light, multiplying and nurturing the good he might well yet steward, the best that the speaker can offer is a vain consolation for the fearful night to come, a flickering candle in a strong wind at dusk.

In the tedious logic of the first poems of the sequence, “the repeated argument to procreate becomes so dulled that the sonnets seem to exist more for their imagery of the horror of death than for the proposed consolation” (Hammond 23). That is no less the case here in 15 where once again “the speaker’s negative vision outweighs his subsequent affirmation” in the couplet (Weiser 19). If the couplet is taken as a curiously worded suggestion to propagate, it does not offer a compellingly persuasive transcendence of the problem of human mutability so powerfully depicted in the poem’s body. It would merely satisfy itself and its addressee with a standoff, a holding out against death’s siege, which for every five or so pounds of flesh time “takes from you” (14), the addressee should propagate in some decaying hole a new five pounds of flesh to insure his own standing in place, a grandstanding place offering no generous benefice to another but only admiration for the gallant posture one strikes in an empty defiance of time. Sonnet 2, as we saw, was an updated version of the fearful steward’s folly in thinking he could give a secure and worthy account of himself by showing that nothing in his keeping had been lost over time. Both there and here generational succession is reminiscent of the satirical portrait of Nature at her forge in The Romance of the Rose laboring incessantly merely to reproduce herself in a world-without-end reduplication. The human perpetuation of itself in this manner is no protection ultimately from enduring the unprofitable steward’s lonely damnation in his benightedness, gnashing his teeth in angry frustration and incomprehension at having been deprived of everything he once held and enjoyed. The false consolation offered in the warning that one will “unlok’d on diest unlesse thou get a sonne” (7:14) is really no consolation at all except to the terminally vain. It is, in fact, an assurance only of the inevitability of one’s own death and miserable death-watch of a child who might love the dying man before the child, too, must die alone in its turn. The only thing multiplied in such a succession is bewildered and anguished woe.

If, guided by 16’s first lines, we read 15’s couplet instead as the first indication in the sequence that the speaker’s verse should be considered one’s best hope of besting tempus edax, the speaker’s assertion of his powers falls no less short of convincing persuasiveness, not only because we all know subliminally that poetry, like plants, lives a subject in Time’s kingdom, but also because the very metaphor by which the speaker makes his claim is drawn from the botanical realm and thus “ties” his verse to its “grafted” place in the decaying “stock” of sublunary change. That verse’s fate is not alone to give the beauty it perceives a prolonged life and renewal but also, with it, eventually to die. As an organic reality born in time, like the human being he imagines he can preserve from ruin, his own boastful and overly cocksure verses do no more than “vaunt in their youthfull sap” (7), both in the couplet’s too confident boast about its power and in its adolescent overconfidence about knowing all that one needs to know about being in time because it can make a mockery of everything but its own exalted powers of intellect and insight. Once the “height” of whatever fame these verses may win has been attained, it will do nothing but decline until his lines “were their brave state” completely “out of memory,” having become—as they will—but a lost fragment of an obliterated cultural tradition. In the “height” of whatever wisdom they may convey, they can do nothing but ironize and diminish themselves as they declare their “brave state” will outlast the player strutting and fretting his hour upon a versifying stage here. It is his own vain pride, more than time and decay themselves, that makes him unknowingly “vaunt in [his] youthfull sap.” At the “height” of his admiration for the beloved (and, correlatively, at the height of his admiration for his own wisdom and power), in his war with time he simply diminishes himself and the beloved by changing the sad subject to concentrate instead on singing his own praises. The elders he makes mocking fun of in l.8 are not the only fools whose blind vanity fails to imagine that one’s own day, too, will pass.

“All in war with Time” (13), the brash spear-shaker hoists himself on his own fearsome quill before he ever actually engages the imagined enemy, producing nothing more than premature ejaculations here. His octave’s frighteningly clever summation of the meaning of being in time can only seem, on further reflection, a bit unself-reflectively sophomoric and presumptuous in its detached matter-of-factness about the absurdity of our fates as humans and the severe limits placed on our comprehension of life’s meaning. The speaker has unwittingly trapped himself in a version of the liar’s paradox. If things are as incomprehensible to us in our blindness as he declares they are, how is it that he can see that blindness so clearly and articulate that comprehension so completely in a mere eight well-turned lines? If what he is declaring is true, then just as certainly he must be lying.

True good will sings a different tune. In Q the clauses that constitute Q1 and Q2 are not parallel dependent constructions awaiting the completion of their meaning in the sestet. They are three separate yet each perfectly formed sentences whose meanings, therefore, are not suspended for the present, but fully enacted there, each manifesting itself whole in a satisfying succession of epiphanic moments. In this, their very grammar proves a metaphorical anticipation of the wondrous insight with which the Bard initiates the poem. The first two lines, concluding as they do with an end-stop, cannot finally be Shake-speare’s darkly fearful anticipation of ruinous decrease; they must represent his creator’s own revelatory illumination of an endless procession of new births in beauty, the unity of the manifold and stability in flux—in short, a world of ceaseless “increase” (5). In a world full of “thing[s] that growe” (1), every new moment (as soon as we inflect a pause after the word “consider” [1]) represents a fully realized transfiguration, a “perfection” (2) newly configured and continuing to reconfigure itself in the course of succeeding moments. “That” (3) is what “this huge stage presenteth[,] nought” else but an endless series of spectacularly “arresting” and arrested “showes” of beauty, directed, beyond our ken, by the transcendent power of the “Stars” that alone understand their full import. The “that” in l.5, like the one in 3, is a demonstrative pronoun, not a relative, implying that whatever sense to follow in Q2 will proceed from the processional perfections realized in Q1. Like plants, men, too, are at once both “cheared and chekt” (6) synchronically and diachronically in a world of “increase” (5), one in which this “self-same skie” (6) harmoniously supervises development and growth in being.

The only thing capable of short-circuiting this synergistic dynamism at once “chearing” and checking human growth into its processional perfection is the mind of man itself. Only he can disturb the fine balance: his youth’s vaunting spirit feeling cheered without check; his aging decline in vigor checking him without cheer—all while the “self same skie” never ceases to superintend an order of beauteous increase despite whatever fruitless vacillation human mood swings display. To this order, the Bard knows, human beings should ever seek to harmonize their spirits and their actions in emulation of the quasi-divine calm the ever “self-same skie” manifests as it directs creative “increase.” Men should not, like fools, think too much of themselves in youth, at the height of their powers diminish themselves wastefully, or as fatuous old men wear the brave state of their lost youth as if they still possessed it. Instead, they should always and wisely “wear” a “brave state” of beauty “out of memory”—not of themselves or of their former glory, but “out of” (“in consciousness of”) the memory of the self-same creative and present calm they should sensibly emulate, ever recalling its synchronized cheer and check, whether that may mean fruitfully moderating youth’s tendency to heedlessness or fruitfully managing vigor’s decline.

In the sonnet’s resolve, several phrases seem at odds with themselves if Shake-speare is to be construed as their speaker. “Conceit” (9) carries with it disconcerting and even predominant implications of “exaggerated or fanciful speech” for a word Shake-speare intends here to reprise merely the “thought” elaborated in the octave. For a person hoping to communicate his fearful awareness of how inexplicable change for the worse ever threatens, his choice of the oxymoronic phrase “inconstant stay” (9) seems at least in part at odds with his purposes since the phrase cannot escape suggesting a stability in flux at odds with the idea of a state of flux in apparent stability the speaker hopes to convey. Finally, one is hard pressed to comprehend clearly in what sense “wastfull time debateth with decay” (11) in Shake-speare’s personified account of the enemies who wish to “change your day of youth to sullied night” (12). How is “wastfull time” to be distinguished finally or even sensibly from “decay”? What precisely would such seemingly closely allied pillagers need to debate?

These conundrums vaporize, however, when we recognize the voice of the Bard speaking past his persona. For Shake-speare the sestet follows sensibly from the octave’s true “thought”; for his creator, his persona’s resolve in itself is an act of folly based on a thoroughly questionable poetical construct of the speaker’s own “conceite[d]”—“merely fictive”—making in the octave. For the Bard, the world is a true and stable order of steady-state change fashioned in time, a thoroughly paradoxical but beneficent stability in flux; in his persona’s myopic “conceit,” it is merely a destructive flux even in its apparent stability. The poet knows that the only truly “inconstant stay” the poem reveals of a sort that would substantiate his persona’s understanding of the phrase is not in the world at all but in the poet-speaker’s flighty response in the sestet to the world as he misprizes it. Since the world, as the persona sees it, is but an inconstant stay, he would, through his art, redeem that situation by offering what he thinks is a reliable “stay.” But this “stay,” his metaphor notwithstanding, is no plant support in a graft he “sets” (10) in decaying organic matter’s root-bed, time’s darksome house of mortal clay. It is a graft that is no graft at all nor binding “stay.” When he “sets” or fixes his gaze exclusively on a beloved he imagines, in dramatic irony, is “most rich in youth before my sight” (10), he sets his poetical graft, not in a rich loam that alone can nurture even richer life, but in the intense inane of his own admiring and self-satisfied gaze where the beloved, with equal inanity and self-satisfaction, might bask in its glow. Such a vacuous mutual admiration society, one in which blindly admiring gaze, however sincere, merely reflects back upon itself in blindly admiring gaze returned, is the only social order the poem presents in which the “wastfull time” of such activity can in fact do battle or “debate with decay” (11) as to which can more speedily transform abundance into famine. If for every moment time takes from his beloved, the persona would “ingraft you new” (14), he would not overcome the inconstant stay he fears, but simply reenact one (in his sense of the phrase). The poetic “stay” or support that he offers in an inconstant world is not one by which the beloved could ever flourish, renewed in time, because he would perpetually keep removing him from his temporal condition in decay, the very stock that could alone sustain him and help him flourish even more richly. Not the world’s decay, but his own apprehensive flight from it, means that his is the truly “inconstant stay.” Thus, ever engrafted anew, the grafted scion will have no time whatever to take. That is why Q does not capitalize “time” (11) as it does the “Time” it personifies in l.13. They are, in fact, differing entities. Knowing what he does about the rich value of the world order’s inconstant stay, the truly loving Bard, unlike his persona, would “set” the numberless throng he addresses firmly in that world of dying organic being so that however rich in youth they may well be presently they may live yet more richly. The “he” in l.14 in this reading is not “Time” (13) but “decay” (11). “With Time” (13) on his side in his war with decay and sullied night on behalf of human flourishing, he would align humankind firmly and indissolubly with a world endlessly generating new births in beauty by engrafting our “Roses” anew for more fruitful purposes in our decaying flesh “even to the edge of doome” (116:12), in this, burning the long-lived Phoenix in our blood.

In 60 we see the spear-shaker as unnerved as ever by tempus edax and still intent on asserting poetry’s power to resist its predations, though in this instance his claims for poetry’s ascendancy seem somewhat less defiant, absolute, and commanding than in other brave boasts he has made and will yet make.

The couplet’s “and yet” is not so much a promise as a gesture. It proposes immortality, but a heavily qualified one: “time in hope” is an unsure phrase where “times to come” would have carried absolute certainty, and the final promise of one thing standing out against the movement described in the rest of the sonnet suggests in its wording, the epitaph on a tombstone. (Hammond 74)4

This last seems especially so because the couplet says next to nothing about poetry’s power to preserve some semblance of the young man’s glory, instead focusing on the poet’s own “difficulties in attempting to create a work which will defy the ‘decay’ of all human things” (74). The speaker may express with pride his hope that his verse will endure or “stand” (13) forever, but readers who have taken in the terror of Q1–3 can now only hear a much less promising message in what he declares in the couplet. For them, his “stand” can only mean a brave but futile suicide mission in which the poet attempts to sing the beloved’s “worth” (14) to future generations neither he nor the beloved will live to see, generations themselves to be mowed down in their turn by time’s “sequent toile” no matter what stand against it they might take. In anything the speaker might do, he “stands but for” time’s “sieth to mow” (12): the grim reaper’s “cruell hand” (14) binding him to the pathos of human mutability compellingly described in the three quatrains.

If the couplet is sometimes seen as “weak” or unconvincing (Martin 106), readers seldom find the body of the sonnet’s development anything but deeply disturbing as each quatrain explores a new context in which to hammer home the speaker’s sense of the universal tyranny of temporality over the “inconstant stay” of human beings in time. “Toile” (4) in Q1 might refer to its root sense of “dispute” or “battle,” to its derivative sense of “laborious effort” or to the suggestion of an “imprisoning snare”—or more likely, to all of the above. Whatever the case, our human toil, far from stabilizing meaning in our lives, simply constitutes an unforgiving Ovidian contention in which “our [and ‘hour’] minuites hasten to their end” (2) in absurd futility, “each changing place with that which goes before” (3), world without end. Q2 presents itself as a difficult and bizarre interfusion and cross-referencing of astronomical and biological figures melding with references to the astrological charting of human destinies (where “nativities” are cast and the ominous import of “eclipses” are read, for example). It communicates a doomed prescience that reads the “confound[ed]” (8) course of human being from “Nativity” (5) through “maturity” (6) to maturity’s “crooked eclipse” (7) with the same debilitating sense of cosmic determinism over human life that governs every day’s birth or “nativity” of the sun from the “maine of light,” through its slow, arcing “crawle to maturity” until with “sequent toile” it suffers its “eclipse” in enveloping darkness. Like wave upon ocean’s wave, line after line in Q3 displaces one another only to disclose the grim reaper, before whom nothing can “stand but for his sieth to mow” (12) as it methodically marches human beings to serial ruin. He “transfixe[s]” (9) or “pierces through” youth in its flourishing; he “carves” or “delves” (10) the wrinkles in aging “brows.” He even “feedes” as indiscriminately and monstrously “on the rarities” (11) nature can sometimes miraculously produce as on the commonest slug. Given this state of things, when the speaker forwards no basis for the “hope” (13) he “yet” (13) affirms, readers can be forgiven for skepticism about the future of his and our collective destiny. Whether on sea (Q1), in the air (Q2), or on the earth (Q3), time’s destructive sway over living being is both irresistible and all-consuming.

This reading of the poem, however, completely overlooks its most paradoxical implications. Each of the quatrains can be linked to the others, not simply as reiterations of ruin’s sway, but as dramatizations of time’s role in generating a condition of steady-state change, the “inconstant stay” Sonnet 15 had depicted as, at bottom, a richly creative stability in flux. In Q1 the very image by which Shake-speare would communicate time’s depletions also secretly harbors an image of time’s renewals—the endless waves of being “each changing place with that which goes before.” It has long and often been noted that Q1 depends heavily on a passage from Book 15 of The Metamorphoses, but Ovid’s account of waves displacing one another is itself imbedded in a context far more benign than the persona’s gloomy account in Q1.

The tyme itself continually is fleeting like a brooke

For neyther brooke nor lyghtsome time can tarrye still. But looke

As every wave dryves other foorth, and that that commes behynd

Both thrusteth and is thrust itself: Even so the tymes by kynd

Doo fly and follow bothe at once, and evermore renew

For that that was before is left, and streyght then doth ensew

An other thing that was never erst. (199–205 in Golding’s version)

This is not a depiction of “time the destroyer,” but of “time the destroyer / creator.” Though neither brook nor lightsome time can tarry still, they can, however, tarry in movement. They do not in the ordinary course of things simply rush things on to ruin. All things depicted in the passage and a bit later in the movements of the sun and stars “succeedeth orderly” (207) and, indeed, generate and maintain the very beings they also come to destroy with—an astonishing word—time’s “lyghtsome” touch, not the hurrying push of a “cruell hand.” The terrified soul foreseeing its fate in the waves that have gone “before” (2) it in space, dissipating on the “pibled shore” (1), needs to be brought up short from contending “forwards” (4) in that manner, fixated solely on his own demise. Only if he should “stop to think” could he become mindful that the present crest of the wave he rides was itself generated “before” in time by other dying men and women exercising creative power then to sustain human being now. The only thing that can make “[h]our[s]” into “minuites,” and thus can alone “hasten” (2) us to our “end” (2) prematurely, is not time itself (its “minuites” add up to “[h]our[s],” after all); it is our own “sequent toile” (4) relentlessly contending forward toward ruin, “all in war” (15:13) with our own time being, a war that “doth now[,] his [Time’s] gift confound” (8). For the thoughtful soul intent to hear with eyes what silent love hath writ here, Q1 does not consign human life to a “sequent toile” in which we are ever contending forward against time in futile resistance. No race against time, Q1 “keeps time” as it “takes its time” to proclaim that our time being can be an inviting and fruitful stability in flux in which we willingly embrace each moment’s “changing place with that which goes before” in a stately dance of creative good’s orderly succession and growth.

In the diurnal course of things, Q2’s “eclipses” (7) do not portend anything more catastrophic or permanent than a brief occlusion of the steady state of change in the sun’s recurrently nurturing progress—whether those eclipses refer to astronomical aberrations or each night’s alternating predictably with the sun’s “daily new and old” (76:13) birth in the following morning’s “maine of light.” The “now” such eclipses “confound” is, thankfully, no cause for more than momentary disquietude. Indeed, “wherewith” in l.6 does not more self-evidently mean “whereupon” than it does “where with,” a phrase activating a reading that the “glory” (7) which the crooked eclipses would obscure is still a “being crown’d” (6) with its mature power to generate and nurture, presently, such that what the crooked eclipses “fight” (7) against is both maturity’s remaining power and the gift time has given us, confounding the “now” (8), the present minute that “holds in perfection” each “little moment” (15:2), like a budding Rose (1:2). The only darkening powers that might endure to do permanent damage to human being are those we impose on our own powers in self-diminishment, not the ones periodically occurring in the natural course of things.

Mimicking the octave, Q3 generates its own figure/ground painting of “Time the destroyer” and “Time the creator.” The grim reaper may “transfixe” (9) youth’s flourish by “piercing through” it; but Time the gardener may transfix or “hold motionless” the flower of youth it has “set” (9: compare to 16:6) by staking it to the earth that sustains it, fixing it transtemporally for its greater good. Time the destroyer may “carve” or “delve” wrinkles in a “beauties brow” (10); Time the creator carves the balanced proportionalities (or “paralels” [10]) so constitutive of our very sense of beauty’s being. The grim reaper may devour the “rarities of nature”; but Time the gardener “feeds” self-sustainingly on the “rarities of natures truth” (11) as he “stands” (12) to note the harvest of his labors, patiently waiting for further growth and bounty in the yield his “sieth” has yet to “mow” (12). Several structural considerations combine to make this unorthodox reading of l.12 not just possible but as compelling as the standard one. In the first place, Renaissance pronunciation made the sounds in “nothing” and “noting” much less distinct than they are today (compare to Booth and the aural puns more self-evidently operative at 59:1 and 12:13). Moreover, were l.12 to shift subjects away from “Time” (9)—the personified noun that “transfixes,” “delves,” and “feeds” in successive line units—it would abruptly violate the pattern of declaratives, one to a line, operating in strictly parallel constructions in ll.9–11. That pattern conditions readers to expect more of the same in l.12. Only the complete ascendancy of the specter of the grim reaper in our imaginations can block the more favorable reading from reaching consciousness and rooting us down in our “inconstant stay” on earth.

The couplet need not thereafter depict a speaker all in war with Time, a warrior defiantly standing against time’s destructive power while time mows down both the addressee and the verse that would preserve him. The couplet may instead depict a poet-speaker who “stands in hope” of a positive response to his urgent communiqué from those to whom it is addressed, beings and “times” (13) yet to come—his readers—the extent of whose “worth” (14) unknown (compare to 116:8) should not be determined exclusively by the “cruel hand” of the grim reaper or our weak-kneed temptation to betray our best selves and collude with him, suicidally hastening our minutes to their end ourselves. The “and yet” introducing the couplet need not be a conjunction expressing logical antithesis or oppositional contention; it may have the more neutral force of an adverb with substantive function alluding to his and our “time remaining” on this earth, whose “worth” (14) unknown the Bard will now and, hopefully, in future “times” (13) live on to “praise” (14) despite Time the destroyer’s “cruell hand” (14). This “yet” (13; compare to 107:3) cannot simply be “supposde as forfeit” to the “confin’d doome” (107:4) visited upon the world by the grim reaper; it is the indeterminate “lease of my true love” (107:3)—both the poet’s expression of true love and the creative powers of generous response and emulation his “onlie begetters” may in turn pass on to “yet” others regarding the vera beatrice, the l’ora beatrice. Thus the couplet realistically makes good on its hope: in the words written in its gentle hand we do indeed hear the living voice of the Bard still speaking to us for our own enrichment from beyond the grave in which his body lies moldering at the “cruell hand” of the grim reaper.

Sonnet 63 “rewrites 60 in first person form” (Vendler 296). Much of the imagery and, indeed, specific phrasings in 63 recur in nearly identical or variant forms from 60. Here it is “Ages cruell knife” (10) that threatens to “confound” (10) the “beauties whereof now” the beloved is “King” (6) whereas in 60 it had been Time’s “cruell hand” (14) that threatened to confound the beloved’s “now” (8) wherewith his kingly being had been “crown’d” (6). Sonnet 60 described in horror how time “delves the paralels in beauties brow”; 63 describes how time’s “injurious hand” (2) will one day have “fild” the beloved’s “brow with lines and wrincles” (3–4) like the speaker’s own. Here as there the beloved’s coming decline is inscribed in an image of the sun’s progress toward its “eclipse” (60:7) in “steepie night” (63:5); 63’s “travaild on” (5), a version of 60’s “sequent toile” (4). But here 60’s philosophical abstractions are converted into a more personalized account of the effort to preserve the beloved from the fate that has already, by the speaker’s account, overtaken his own body and spirit “crusht and ore-worne” (2) by time.

It is an odd, even self-contradictory salvation he proffers. The sestet does not and cannot, as promised, repel Age’s degenerative siege from which the speaker would “fortifie” (9) him. In fact, by l.12 the speaker has unwittingly conceded that “Ages cruell knife” (10) will definitively “cut from memory . . . my lovers life” (11–12), just as it will obliterate “my lovers life” (12) itself. Though the persona did not intend to have it say so, the unexpressed object of the verb “fortifie” he uses in l.9 generates an ironic ambiguity. The persona would fortify the addressee; but what follows, far from shielding him from age’s cruel knife or strengthening him, instead rather cavalierly surrenders him to the butcher without so much as a fight. Without knowing so, Shake-speare only fortifies himself, reflexively, “now” (9) against the inevitable degeneration he foresees in his beloved (“For such a time”) by metaphorically burying him alive in his own and his readers’ porous and itself decaying “memory,” the beloved’s present “beauty” (12) prematurely “dreind” of “blood” (3) by this poetic vivisectionist’s verse tribute to his own newly proclaimed power. “The closing presents a solution for the speaker, not his love” (Weiser 67). As Hammond puts it:

Where the octave presents an aged poet and a young subject, the sestet presents the poet still alive and the subject dead—or at least his beauty dead which, for him, is the same thing. . . . The body of the sonnet has graphically aged [the young man] and insidiously revived the poet. (76)

We cannot finally determine whether the “sweet loves beauty” he hopes to preserve for admiration in his verse is the beloved’s present personal beauty (especially since he never in fact describes him specifically at any point in the sequence) or whether it is himself as poet that he would—unknowingly, of course—set up for admiration in the memory of future generations of his readers. In any case, the couplet’s affirmation, though less tentative than 60’s, remains satisfying only as a stylized, relatively trivial bit of rhetorical wit (“blacke lines” [13] paradoxically remaining “still greene” [14]), no substantial resurrection of the beloved’s lost “Spring” (8) into living “greene” (14) again. (Recall that in 16 the speaker had, by contrast, argued that the more “blessed” means by which the beloved might “fortifie” [3] himself in his “decay” [3] was by means of “living flowers” [7] he might cultivate than by Shake-speare’s “barren rime” [4]).

Only by a kind of synesis, wherein apparent meaning trumps syntactic confusion, can the first line of the octave be read in the sense in which it has traditionally been taken (“In anticipation of the time when my beloved shall be as I am now”). Though an understandable extrapolation, it becomes so only after one has construed a situation in which an older man is discussing how he plans to deal with his younger beloved’s physical deterioration. Such a reading, however, can make no sense of l.8’s end stop in Q, since the entire octave in this scenario is nothing more than a string of dependent constructions. On the other hand, if we were to take “now” in l.1 as a substantive and “my love” (1) as no person, but the speaker’s feelings for his beloved, the first line, though still Cummings-esque in its convolutions, is much less contortedly construed as a complete declarative statement with seven succeeding lines of dependent suffixes. Then the period at the octave’s conclusion would make sense without need of emendation: “The feeling I harbor for the object of my affection will ever be, just as I am, against the present moment.” In other words, it will ever be at war with time.

Thus a self-reflexive satirical reading of the persona’s poem’s intent activates itself as the Bard provides his voice-over assessment. In it, the persona is seen as “crusht and ore-worne,” not so much in body as in spirit: an old man before his time. Though the speaker has allowed his spirit to feel “crusht” by time’s “injurious hand” (2), his condition is not one, however, that is “o’erworn” because of time. Rather, he has made himself “ore-worne” (2)—literally, if archaically, “worn out before” he need be so. Having himself “dreind” his own love of its “blood” or “passion for life”—the “youthfull morne” (4) he still could enjoy—he now lives alone in his pale fears and anxieties about a future that has prematurely “fild” (3), that is, “filled,” “filed” (or “carved”), or “defiled” his brow with worry “lines and wrinkles” (4). In his self-depleting imagination, the “youthfull morne” he could still enjoy has been driven from consciousness by a spirit that has already deserted its present, forsaking itself, only to have “travaild on to Ages steepie night” (5) within, his nightmarishly apprehensive vision of time hastening his minutes to their end in sequent toil. Because his own bleak vision so wraps him in its blind night, excluding all “others,” “all those beauties [potentially fruitful brides all] whereof now he’s King” (6) are presently left to lapse beyond his “distracted” ken, ever “vanishing, or vanisht out of sight, / Stealing away the treasure of his Spring” (7–8) by inanition.

From this “perspective’s” vantage, the sestet grows rife with ironies at the persona’s expense. If, for example, we take “For such a time” (9) to mean “‘in preparation for,’ a resumption of the sense of Against in l.1” (Duncan-Jones 236), then the speaker’s efforts to protect his present state against “confounding Ages cruell knife” (10) can only seem a blind and ludicrous waste of time, since the octave has shown that the enemy he fears is not outside the fortifications in a threatening world. No fortification in and of the “now”—as opposed to a loving engagement in it—will do any good whatever because the enemy, “confounding Age” (10), is already within. Indeed, it has secretly penetrated the very “defenses” by which the persona hopes to protect his illusory sense of present well-being. In similar fashion, if “For such a time” introduces a new declarative sentence (as the Bard’s punctuation in the octave in Q demands), it might well mean “for that amount or period of time,” referring back to the persona’s wasteful, prematurely debilitated time being characterized in the octave. Then, whether the speaker is assuming the power to protect his own illusory well-being reflexively (“fortifying myself”) or the illusory well-being of some beloved (“fortifying you”) “against confounding Ages cruell knife” (10), readers know better. Because of the octave we already know that the speaker is warring against the “now” even as he presumes to fortify it. For the period of time that he would fortify himself and his beloved in this way, the only thing his obsessive war can do is to kill its own time as the speaker labors forward, forsaking himself, “for such a time” (“during that extent of time”) speeding the way “for such a time” (the “dreaded eventuality”), all the while weeping to have, that “which [he] fears to loose” (64:14). Not confounding Age’s cruel knife in love’s happy reciprocities, but ever himself “selfe confounded, to decay” (64:10) in his lonely terror (so long as he lives in the octave’s fashion) the only thing that he can safely assure is that confounding Age “shall” indeed “never cut from [his] memory” (11) his obsessive focus on the importance and centrality of his “sweet loves beauty” (12)—that is, the beauty of his own feelings for the friend idly entertained even as he acknowledges that his “lovers life” (12) is simultaneously proceeding to its death unattended. But no matter. “His beautie” (the beauty of his own feeling’s unquestioned excellence) “shall in these blacke lines he seene” (13); and those “lines” (for such a time at least) will “live” and “he” (in his self-glorifying feelings again) for such a time only will live in them “still greene” (that is, “in a state of callow immaturity”), the sweet ripeness of being unrealized (compare to V&A 806 and A&C 1.5.74).

On a conscious level, no doubt the speaker believes that it is his beloved and not his feelings for him that he would celebrate in verse. The “memory” (11) he thinks he is serving is not his own repute but the memory of his beloved living on in admiring future generations. But insofar as he would bury him prematurely there rather than love him better here and now, his good will toward him undermines its own apparent virtue. For us as readers, the beloved’s beauty he replicates can be little else but an indistinguishable shadow cast by the “blacke lines” testifying to the speaker’s feelings for him, a shade prematurely “dreind” of “blood” (3) and sealed hermetically in the dim half-light of the poet’s verse monument to him to live on vacuously there for a time but ever “still greene” because never given the “full growth” gracing all living beings who “still doth grow” (115:14). Himself unable to foster or appreciate his beloved’s “youthful morne” (4) or the fertile possibilities of “all those beauties whereof now” the young man is “King” (6), our mad vivisectionist is determined to preclude his beloved’s natural decline by presently preempting time’s “cruell knife” (10) to wield it himself, draining the beloved of blood and “fil[ing]”—that is, “carving” or “defiling” his youthful hue with the “lines and wrincles” (4) of his undistinguished verbal etching: his verses but a “painted counterfeit” (16:8) of his beloved he idly insists time cannot touch.

Matters are quite otherwise for the Bard. Uninterested in futile wars with time and himself therefore “against confounding Ages cruell knife” (10), he would instead genuinely “fortifie” (9) or “strengthen” the “now” (9) in which we all may live in creative concert so that our awareness of Age’s cruel knife will “never cut from memory / . . . sweet loves beauty” (11–12), though Age will take our lives surely enough, all in good time. The fertile and indissoluble marriage between the Bard’s own “sweet love’s beauty” and the “sweet loves’ beauty” of all to whom he speaks here in loving reassurance and appreciation for their manifold creative accomplishments in love “shall in these blacke lines be seene, / And they [both] shall live” (14). As “long as men can breath or eyes can see” (18:13) “he” (14), the poet in this sweet love’s beauty, “in them” (14), (74’s “better part of me” [8]) shall “still greene” (14), ourselves and the poet ever made anew in sweet loves’ multifoliating Rose.

Like 63 and 64, 65 devotes the elegant variation of its quatrain development to reprising the “fearefull meditation” (9) on time’s depredations from 64, only to avert in the couplet a second consecutive confession of despair by revisiting the enduring claim for his art that the poet-speaker made at the conclusion of 63.5 Vendler (304) has aptly noted that in 65 the speaker’s immortalization claim has shifted from the organic plane of life to the inorganic plane of art’s commemoration of it in “black ink” (14). Chastened by the vulnerability 64 has exposed in him, the persona’s affirmation of the power of his art is “considerably weaker than that of 63” (Weiser 71). Indeed, its “poignant valedictory allusion to summer’s honey breath” abandons “any hope for an organically analogous eternal summer (Sonnet 18)” (Vendler 305). The only hope the speaker can muster is that the beloved be hidden somehow “from times chest” (10) in the closed casket or “gilded tombe” (101:11) of the poet’s verse where, though he is to “lie hid” (10), ever locked away from view (compare to 48 and 52), he may, nevertheless—with dark irony for balked readers—“still shine bright” (14). If, as we saw in 63, the beloved became little more than an indistinguishable shadow of his lover’s feelings for him, here the speaker’s fears would keep the beloved from time’s view entirely—his light extinguished under the poet’s bushel even as the poet boasts its brightness. Reduced to no more than an “inanimate, if valuable, object” (Hammond 78)—“times best Jewell” (10)—should his beloved live on, he will do so only as an inert keepsake or souvenir; and “even this degree of identity is threatened by the reader’s uncertainty as to whether ‘my love shall still shine bright’ may not be as poet centered as the rest of the sonnet, with ‘my love’ meaning ‘my feelings of love’” (Hammond 78).

Thankfully we do not have to accept the persona’s word for it that the best way to keep “times best Jewell” from being buried away forever in time’s “chest” some day is to squirrel it away from all view presently in the poet-speaker’s casket of “black inck” (14). Overcome completely by the fearfulness of his meditation on time’s irresistible powers, the speaker forwards a series of rhetorical questions to which he imagines there can be no credible reply. What chance can the delicate “hunny breath” (5) of summer’s “flower” (4) have against time’s “siedge” (6) when men’s strongest defenses—“rocks impregnable” (7) and “gates of steele” (8)—cannot long stand against the all-powerful enemy’s battering assaults (Time’s “battring days” [6])? If the strongest materials with which man can build (“brasse” and “stone” [1]) and the furthest extent of what he may see (“the earth” and “boundlesse sea” [1]) are subject to Time’s mortal tyranny, then what “plea” (3) for mercy by the far more vulnerable “flower” of beauty can hope to quell the enemy’s “rage” (3) for destruction, even when the plea is made in abject subjection to the victor? It would appear that there is nothing strong enough to hold back time’s trampling flight (l.11) or to “forbid” the absolute conqueror’s “spoile or (‘o’er’) beautie” (12). Only the writer’s god-like “miracle” (13) could conceivably protect it.

The “hunny breath” (5) of sweet Will, however, sings a sweeter song. The Bard is at least as familiar as the next man with Time’s sad mortality; but the “sad mortality” (2) that concerns him is the sad mortality that kills by inches, the “sad mortality” virtually personified in the speaker we most readily hear in the poem, a voice and spirit so nearly crushed by the woes of life in time that an incapacitating “rage” (3)—the previous sonnet’s “mortall rage” (64:4)—dominates him. Though it “carries on” self-pityingly here, the “action” (4) of that rage, in its impotent resistance to what cannot be resisted, is “no stronger than a flower” (4). Brass, stone, earth, and sea, the various materials of creation and destruction in our “inconstant stay,” have great power for “spoile or beautie” (12) in time. The sad mortality time embodies does not “o’ersway” that power, as the persona believes; it works in and through their steady state variations. Nor does the sad mortality of his mortal rage o’ersway it either; instead, in its sputtering self-incapacitation it simply “ore-swaies” (2) or “preempts” its power “before” (ore-) it can yield any good, focused as it is on its own hurtling forward, making time fly to its own dismal end. In the Bard’s “perspective” art, the question that concludes Q1 is not a rhetorical one, disclosing the persona idling in fear-full speculation over a foregone conclusion; it is a genuinely contingent question that presents a new speaker wondering instead what room “beautie” (3) can have to “hold a plea” (3)—or judiciously “argue its case” (Booth 246) in favor of proceeding generatively in concert with time and flourish in our inconstant stay—when the judge in these inner proceedings before whom the matter is to be disposed is so intemperately confounded by his own mortality that for him time’s flow seems simply but an entropic nightmare that “sadly, runs away / To fill the abyss’ void with emptiness” (Frost “West Running Brook”).

In the song the poet himself sings with honied breath, he discloses a wisdom the traumatized persona does not comprehend. Since, unlike the persona, he is not in war with time, for him “summers hunny breath” does not and should not even try to “hold out” against “the wrackfull siedge of battring dayes” (16); instead, in yielding to and proceeding in concert with them summer has historically renewed itself time and time again in nature’s stability in flux. What possible good could come from its holding its honey breath in fear of the chilling eventualities that will arrive in due time anyway, making winter ere summer half be done? When one regards this question seriously, Q2’s “O how” (5) suddenly presents itself, not as a new question, but as a place-holding reiteration of the unanswered question announced by the same “How” in l.3, a worried interjection that is followed in the remainder of Q2 by a related question as to whether summer’s honey breath should do something as foolish and counterproductive as “hold its breath” against the time when it will, indeed, no longer breathe as a means of “holding [its] plea” with “rage” against the dying of the light. The answer, of course, is that such a gesture is but the ludicrous waste involved in breathless apprehension.

Q2 then changes the possible terms of the questions in Q3 as well. They need no longer record the lamentable impotence of the first speaker’s desire to preserve from harm the object that he most esteems (“times best Jewell”). They may record, instead, in question form, a rueful concessionary recognition that neither beauty’s resistance (holding out against a siege) nor apprehensive fear (beauteous summer holding its breath) can give anyone the slightest real hope for life’s indefinite continuance: in other words, his “fearfull meditation” (9) may well be that all such “actions” (4) are for naught. They will not hold a plea for beauty, but only “spoile” or “despoil” it. Q3, then, simply acknowledges in healthy despair that such self-defensive measures do not do, nor can they preserve, any good at all. The truly fearful meditation is not the fear that what we value may be stripped from us; it is that the way we respond to that fear may do nothing but compound grief. The speaker’s fear should not be how and where “our valuables” may be kept from time’s plunder. It should be fear regarding our criminal folly when, like thieves, we would steal “from times chest” (10) Time’s jewel as if it were our “spoile” (12) and hide it safely away, false stewards all, imagining that we need never pay for the crime. “Times best Jewell” (10) cannot, in fact, be taken “from times chest”; it can only emerge “from times chest,” “in good time.” It is no “object” at all that we can possess or horde; it is the grace time itself offers us for our use and bounty yet to be reckoned. No “strong hand” can hold a thievishly “swift foote back” (11) from racing to its own ruin nor “forbid” his “spoile or [‘o’er’] beautie” (12) except the “strong hand” of the Bard writing verse that continues calmly to “hold a plea” for beauty in our judicious court of consciousness urging us to “keep time” with him, singing of and living in the “sweet love [he] alwaies writes of” (76:9) in his unhurried songs, like the nourishing sun eternally reborn, “all one, ever the same” (76:5) in affirming the beatific hour that is ours and hours in coming. This is the song that he would urge upon us in preference to one that simply wastes its time lamenting that beauty is but a lost cause unless secreted away in a hiding place where the initial singer falteringly and falsely hoped time could never recover the theft.

Nothing can make the persona or his unreflective brethren among us re-deem their condition except perhaps the “miracle” (13) of the Bard’s own “hunny breath” that, like the nurturing illumination of the sun or a guiding star in the “blacke inck” (14) of the night sky, remains an “ever fixed marke” (116:5) of love that can direct us to some good beyond ourselves rather than to simple ruin. This miraculous expression of love alone, alive in his verse, not idly preserved in the persona’s verse casket, “may still shine bright” (its “May still shin[ing] bright”) to sustain “summers hunny breath” in time “still” (“yet now,” “in each new summer’s self-perpetuating time to come,” and in “the speaker’s quiet calm”). His song, sung in the loving and living stillness, alone may be sufficient to enlighten us to see our way clearly enough to stop in our “swift footed” tracks. From him, we may learn best to love Time’s jewel for what it is, and then ourselves, in turn, shine so brightly that we “give light into all that are in the house” (Matthew 5:15) of our mortal clay rather than apprehensively watch that light die out hidden under the persona’s bushel, without sufficient fuel to maintain its illumination. There’s no point in waiting there with him in the dark, holding our collective breaths in vain fear.

The bravado of Shake-speare’s rhetorical stance in 107 makes it sound like the most “majestic superhuman pronouncement” (Booth 346) of his faith in poetry’s power made in the sequence. But read more exactingly, his boast generates a troubling paradox in that “the first eight lines both present grounds for and completely undercut the informed optimism of the last six” (347).

Despite the supreme confidence with which the persona would confer “immortality” upon his “true love” (3)—whether his beloved personally or his own feelings for him—certain features in Q1–2 force us to doubt the speaker’s reliability. The magniloquent opening strains of the poem impressively dismiss the power of the speaker’s own “feare” and the world’s (or his) ominously “prophetick” (1) sense of the future to dictate the terms of his true love’s “lease” (3) or that lease’s resultant yield. One can only assume that he speaks so confidently because he feels his “true love” is so profoundly within his own “controule” that it is no one’s place to challenge him regarding its disposition or range of use, or even that use’s final determination and duration, though his immediately subsequent claim that his love should not be “supposde as forfeit to a confin’d doom” (4) runs so contrary to the facts of life in time as we know them that most readers are likely to feel the burden of proof has shifted to the speaker by this point, no matter how confident his stance. Though he probably intends the word “yet” in l.3 to mean “nevertheless,” its common temporal usage (“up until this moment”) also exposes in it a fault line of weakness in the imperturbable façade with which the speaker continues to face down “death” (10) in the poem.

Transition and logical continuity between Q1 and Q2 initially seem absent, but further reflection links the first two lines of Q2 more notably to the “feares” (1) of the first while the confident proclamations noted in ll.7–8 appear to mock the recurring folly of presumption even the most powerful kings evidence in their “prophetick” views of their glorious futures. In any event, the vague predictions that collectively form the allusive core of Q2, whether manifestations of fear or presumption or both, are linked to one another by the recurring evidence of priests’ and kings’ prophetic acts of presumption—the “reading” of “eclipse(s)” of the moon (3), the “presage(s)” of augury (6), the confident coronation of dynastic lines to endure into perpetuity as divinely ordained (evoked by the word “crowne” [7]), and the inaugural proclamations of everlasting peace made by the victors after every newly concluded war declaring that the “peace” (8) now reigning represents a definitive termination of the most recent “war to end all wars,” though in such moments of exuberant hope it is, no doubt, a subliminally anxious “peace” that “proclaims Olives of endless age” (8).

Confident in his greater powers of vision, in Q2 the speaker cleverly mocks the prophets of doom as well as the overconfidence of the self-important kings and tyrants of this world at the height of their powers, to suggest, it would seem, that even the most visionary and powerful of his fellow human beings cannot be trusted to get anything right, let alone the fate or limits of his “true love.” If the world can be so wrong about so much, could it not also be mistaken in its assumption that his true love is subject to a “confin’d doome” (4)? Like the initial speaking voice we heard in 64, here, too, the voice we first identify seems to know that “Incertenties” (7)—contingency and flux in the ebb and flow of time—are the only universal law to be trusted, though as yet we have no idea by what exclusion he himself has been exempted from the general folly. For the moment, however, his only purpose is befuddling mockery. We do not know from the speaker’s wording, for example, whether he is suggesting that the “eclipse” of the moon that she “indur’de” (5) should signal happiness or grief since we are not certain whether he wishes us to think the eclipse signaled the death of a “mortal Moone” or, more hopefully, simply the eclipse’s end and the Moon’s divine transcendence of her “mortal” phases of fearful darkness. Nor are we meant to be certain whether the augurs are “sad” (6) because they happen to get certain ominous “presages” right on occasion or whether they are “sad” because they got them wrong the rest of the time and consequently suffered in disrepute for their miscalculations. At the height of their vanity and power, kings “crowne them-selves” assured. Can we preserve this declaration of uniquely glorious destiny from the threat of clownish folly that shadows it in the Punch and Judy show of political intrigues in which kings often successively play their “crowned” and “uncrowned”parts? Perhaps even kings do not in the end “crowne them-selves” with genuine assurance. Perhaps, instead, as figurative “incertenties” themselves, they “now crowne [‘crowning the present moment of their false sense of security’], them-selves assur’de” only in their presumption. In support of this seeming contortion of the poem’s syntax, one need only recall that the speaker of 115 had spoken of a time of false confidence when he “was certaine ore in-certainty, / Crowning the present, doubting of the rest” (11–12). And what are we to do with the paradoxically contradictory postulation of an “endlesse age” (8) of peace symbolized by the same olive branch that, as Booth notes (347), likewise decorated the heads of battle victors, symbolizing the triumph of violence?

Though the dismissive fun at the expense of the priests and kings of the world testifies clearly to his commandingly clever wit, he, too, may “yet” prove too clever for his own good. His jest at others’ expense turns directly into the last laugh on him when, in the very next line, reiterating l.7’s “now,” he introduces the supremely confident (and, thus, following the logic of the octave, seemingly overconfident) affirmation the sestet embodies, making him a rival in folly to the kings and visionaries of the world. In his overconfidence he seems no less an “incertenty” crowning the “Now” (9) and now crowning himself in as vainly assured a manner as the kings and seers he has just finished dismissing as fools.

Can he for his own part make good on his claim to superiority to the imperious rulers and authoritative augurs he contemns? Take his delight with the beauty of his beloved “so gazed on now,” for example: “Now with the drops of this most balmie time, / My love looks fresh” (9–10). If this claim refers to the speaker’s “true love” for his beloved, in no way does it address the burden of proof the poem’s broader context has come to require of him since it does not speak to what he might “yet” (3) come to feel in some moment other than and subsequent to “now,” especially when, for example, forty winters might have dug deep trenches in the beloved’s brow. How “fresh” (10) will the friend look then, how free from death’s sure grip? If the claim refers to the beloved himself or herself, how are we to extricate the speaker’s expression of wonder at the “balmie” (“seasonably pleasant” or “healing and revitalizing”) freshness of the beloved’s present being from the comically inappropriate suggestions of embalmment of a well-prepared corpse the same words might well claim—in an impish dramatic irony—are the only means by which such freshness might be preserved indefinitely? Death does not “subscribe” (1) to the speaker only in the speaker’s intended sense that death is powerlessly subordinated to him or forced to “sign under” his immediately previous assertion, figuratively, as witness to its truth. Instead, ironically, Death might well “subscribe” to him in the sense that death has a hand in and idly—but automatically—profits from everything the poet-speaker accomplishes, not the least of which may be the speaker’s empty gesture of commemoration of the beloved by “burying” him unrecognizably and anonymously in the sarcophagal “monument” (14) of this “poore rime” (11). The speaker clearly thinks such commemoration in his verse an honor greater and more lasting than the vain and smugly self-important tributes made by the tyrants, kings, and seers. But even were that true, would the beloved’s nameless imprisonment “preserved” only as a beautifully embalmed corpse in the “monument” of the speaker’s “poore rime” not represent as “confin’d [a] doome” (4) as anything Cleopatra, “confined in all she has, her monument,” (A&C 5.1.53) might fearfully suffer?

In a very witty jest, the speaker seemingly puts Death in his place by favorably comparing his own life as a poet living on in his “poore rime” to the constraints under which Death must live as a ranting tyrant whose only power (and eternal damnation) is ever to “insult ore dull and speachlesse tribes” (12). Death has never looked sillier: a ponticating fool beating a dead horse. Obviously, the dead do not talk back to the destructive tyrant who has crushed them; but then, neither can, nor do, the kings and seers the speaker holds up to such mockery in 107 talk back to him. Perhaps the poet’s rime is “poor,” not so much because, as he believes, it is a modest but superior domicile to the grand temples of priests, the castles of kings, or “tyrants crests and tombs of brasse” (14), but rather because in his “poore rime” he lives in as impoverishing a condition as they do. Even the very vehicle of the metaphor on which he wastes his precious time while he “insults ore” Death undermines his moral authority. He may well prefer the company of aristocratic wits who are ever ready to turn a clever phrase and trade insulting witticisms with one another in a literate war for supremacy, but to describe all others who do not, and either cannot or would not, act so as “dull and speachlesse tribes” is a smugly foolish insult to our common human dignity, a naked bigotry of an objectionable sort. Among the living, there are no “dull and speachlesse tribes”—only those, like the speaker, who, in their egoism, so enjoy hearing themselves talk that they neither pay attention to, nor care to learn to, appreciate what anyone else may have to say.

The speaker may shout from the rooftops his belief in himself and his powers of preservation in brash bombast, but a silence speaks more meaningfully from within this whirlwind. The soul of sweet delight whispers to us its truer confidence and more generous confidences in a quiet voice of true good Will/will that converts this sonorous rant from idle contempt into sacred faith offering. For this hallowed voice, l.3 is not an egoistic assertion of its own power made in defiance of time’s passage but a sweet accommodation to time in which “yet’s” temporal import functions as a noun of substance to be treasured and “yet’s” dateless span of time, the “lease of my true love” (3), operates as a noun phrase in apposition to it. Such a view of present and future benefice bears no resemblance to the dying Antony’s vain dream of an eternity of preeminence with his Elysian queen. True good Will/will expresses no interest here in embalming himself or his most beloved friends and familiars in empty monuments to his fame among as yet unborn name-droppers, insuring, at most, a “defaced” existence aridly preserved even longer than tyrants’ crests and tombs of brass. He chooses, rather, to “live in this poor rime,” resurrected, like Christ from the empty tomb, to share his joy over and over again in the current moment, “Now” (9), and in the happy anticipation of “yet” more intercourse with generation after generation of his readers, a poet exulting in a more genuine and shared confidence than the first speaker knows in his overcompensational rant. To drink deep and bathe in the ever-renewing flow of “the drops of this most balmie time” (9) is to know how and where “Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain.” This is the only means by which “Incertenties” like ourselves can crown the now, “them-selves assur’de,”—not with false assurance repressing anxious mental strain, but in the blessedly confident strains of the lark. This, in short, is the only endless bliss we know we can share. The only preservation of a rich life is a happy surrender to it and even our own deaths, since death “subscribes”—but only subscribes—to the richness of the life we may multiply and cultivate. That is the only “monument” to human being that is not a “confin’d doome.”

We are not free to take a marmoreal view of the enduring value of poetry as a superior form of monumental commemoration than tombs of brass or tyrants’ crests any more than we can or should credit Cleopatra’s dream of becoming “marble constant” in her death as a complete transcendence of vain self-regard. For the moment, however, it might well be enough to close by suggesting that the Bard discovered a symbolic paradigm for his aesthetic in Ovid’s tale of Pygmalion and Galatea. So long as the painterly Pygmalion merely embraced a beautiful but inert artifact of his own creation and called his lifeless Galatea’s beauty “love,” he remained but an oddly comical narcissist worshipping an idol of his own making. But when, frustrated in his expressions of desire for his beloved, Pygmalion asks Venus to give his beautiful but lifeless creation warmth and breathing life, subsequently he finds himself richly rewarded. The import of the tale should be clear enough. However beautifully (or enduringly, for that matter) it may be fashioned, if art is to become satisfying and meaningful rather than merely a silly narcissistic dream of self-fulfillment tantalizing us, it must be appreciated as more than some reflected image of our own obsession with ourselves. Art worthy of the name does not simply create a facsimile of life, a Galatean “painted counterfeit” (16:8); it seeks to bring the things it loves to life itself, with divine aid. That is, it seeks a life in the real world shared with others and marked by satisfying reciprocal relationships with them. The persona of 107 needs no living and breathing companionship to be thoroughly and vainly pleased with himself; in the same poem true good Will wishes to share the secrets of resurrected life he has discovered with the readers he loves, so both he and they, too, can come back to life laughingly over and over again in the reciprocal love his “poore rime” allows and fosters. Pointlessly inert poetical monuments, if not as yet buried by the sands of time, will only continue to gather dust.

Venus and Adonis identifies the wretched estate of human being in a world where unloving desire alone rules. Then “want of love tormenteth” (202) in Venus’ hungrily appetitive desire for Adonis and Adonis’ unloving contempt for her and her obsession, his “want [or lack] of love” only tormenting her further. A comparably succinct aphorism about desire initiates and informs every poem in the sonnet sequence; but happily its doubleness is not a tragic paradox but one reflective of a choice we are free to make to re-deem our vision of the world. The very first lines of Sonnet 1—“From fairest creatures we desire increase”—can communicate either a healthy desire to make a good thing better through intercourse with it (producing “increase”) or a famished, tantalizing longing (“the increase of desire”) for what we do not and conceivably may not ever possess. One option leads to the hell that, for the most part, we put ourselves through most of our days; the other leads to a life so damn good that we cannot, and, indeed, no longer wish to, “contain ourselves.” As for the choice between them, however, a word, even to the wise, has rarely been sufficient. “All this the world well knows yet none knowes well, / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell” in lust’s unloving desire (129:13–14). For our own good, we must wonder in chagrin why it remains so difficult for us as the sole progeny of Narcissus to learn to avoid being seduced into an alluring but hopeless quest for some beauty we cannot presently enjoy, a beauty that for much of the time of our lives remains tantalizingly beyond our reach, a beauty that, even when seemingly possessed, leaves us almost immediately hungering to initiate the painful cycle of deprivation and momentary convulsive release all over again. What is it but our own folly that prevents us from learning to engage fully the beauty of the time being we presently enjoy here and now and, through joyous intercourse with it, likewise come with regularity to feed on the satisfying fruits of our labor and share its bounty with others in love? “Love’s gentle spring doth always fresh remain” quick now, here now always. We need only learn to “drink and be whole again beyond confusion” (Frost “Directive”).

Though it orates in a manner nearly as self-assured as 107’s, 55 conveys a number of ironic qualifications to the “immortality” it promises. This “powrefull rime” does indeed argue that the addressee will “out-live” the ostentatious memorials princes set up to glorify themselves even in death. Yet, ominously, in this greater promise of enduring memorial the beloved will do nothing more than lie in state “in these contents” (3) that the poet’s verse monument to him houses, his glorious luster that of a sarcophagus placard more gleaming than the burial vaults of others whose dusty memorials remain “unswept.” As such, the poet’s verse tribute serves only as a symbolic epitaph (compare to Hammond 72) on a figurative gravestone read over by the “eyes of all posterity” (11). If the overwhelming likelihood is that it will be “lovers eies” (14) that alone linger to mine this memorial’s significance, hoping to see in it some romantic mirror of their own plight, even they will find themselves frustrated by this inscription on which everything meaningfully personal about the beloved and his life has been kept “hidden from . . . view” (Hammond 71–72). One has to suspect, then, that sooner or later, no matter how brightly the beloved may be said to shine in his memorial, the “eyes of all posterity” will in frustration give it up for lost, leaving it as “unswept” as the tombs of princes from lost cultures long since buried in oblivion’s sands. The only thing that can keep memorials to the dead alive in any way is the living devotion of those who care enough to sweep those gravestones clean from time to time. Grave markers like this one, dedicated to anonymous souls, are bound to be the first to suffer neglect.

As we have long known, both the thematic focus of 55 and the poet-lover’s language here draw heavily on Ovid and Horace’s self-divinizing boasts about the immortal power of their own art (see, for example, Kerrigan 240–41); but the concluding allusion to Christian eschatology in the couplet ironically hints that Rome’s worldly vanities have decisively been supplanted by a higher spiritual standard that reserves the promise of eternity only to those whose entire lives have been deemed worthy—not by interested parties’ boasts of extraordinary merit, but by a divinely impartial “judgement” (13). The poet-speaker may here promise a worldly, quasi-Roman “triumph” in which the beloved “paces forth” (10) in his magnificence and glory to vanquish “death, and all oblivious enmity” (9) in a way no other earthly potentate can rival; but in the “ending doome’s” (12) last trumpet even he must answer and humbly defer to a yet more substantial spiritual assessment. In alluding to the Last Judgment, the speaker lengthens out his beloved’s fame to a distant future perhaps; yet, given the dramatically ironic qualifications buried in the last words of his vaunt, in doing so he also seemingly deserts him there to face a more contingent judgment on his own and without his intercession.

Sweet good Will/will is no less confident in his powers than is his persona, but the “conténts” (3)—the “contentments”—praised in his verse are not subject to any such self-undercutting ironies. Sweet good Will/will does not wish that we, his truly beloved addressees, merely “out-live” (2) others, merely “enduring indefinitely through time,” in a poetical suspended animation; his hope is that we “out-live” his rhyme in a more animated and fruitful fashion than the vainglorious do whose only accomplishment is to “weare this world out to the ending doome” (12), exhausting resources that could be multiplied. When he urges us to “pace forth” (10) “gainst death, and all oblivious enmity” (9), he is not setting up a vain competition with the world’s more conventional conquerors, they and we “all oblivious enmity” toward one another in some armageddon-like battle for priority of rank and regard. He would have us “pace forth” (to the sweet time of his verse’s music) in no such march to ruinous hegemony, but rather to displace enmity altogether with love, transcending blind hate and blind rage’s obliviousness to everything but themselves with a healthier concentration on the “living record of your [loving] memory’s” (8) manifold devotions. When he speaks ambiguously of “your praise” (10), referring simultaneously to the poetical praise of love in this song he presently sings as well as to the praise of love that his addressees may live out even to the ending doom in the living record of their collective memory’s mindfulness of one another (and his song), he clearly communicates by his innocent duplicity in saying so that the “praise” he is speaking of “in these conténts” he celebrates does not signify a praise offered to us so much as it urges or passes on “praise” or “faith offering” from all of us, poet and reader alike, to loving memory. Thus, the Bard and we, both and together, may indeed become Jonson’s “living monument,” a loving memorial ever alive to our power to sweep away and thus prevent “sluttish time” (4) from besmearing anything with oblivion that we would keep shining in our loving memory of our own welfare and that of others.

Most modern editors delete the colon at the conclusion of l.8 in Q. Such emendation is neither necessary nor appropriate because the unmarked “warres” in l.7 is not the possessive it has always been assumed to be. In the Bard’s veiled declamation here, it is a plural noun. In the end, Q2 need not be read as the first speaker’s nonsensically counterfactual rant to the effect that his verse memorial, “in-graved” on perishable paper,6 “shall” (7) not “burne” (7) nor be subject (by his impotent decree) to the destructive forces that “wastefull warre” (4) and “broiles” (6) have triumphantly unleashed from time immemorial on seemingly far more durable cultural artifacts, those executed in stone (“masonry” [6]) or brass and marble (“Statues” [5]). “The living record of your memory [cannot be] a physical book” (Engle PMLA 838), but if it is a more spiritual “record,” it is not one that can logically dispense with the survival of some of the books a culture physically preserves to aid memory. Should war’s quick fire burn all the written artifacts of a given culture, there seems no realistic way the speaker might make good on his boast.

For the Bard, Q2 is a much more credible pronouncement. Though his confidence is just as unshakeable, his is a wholly realistic and convincing assurance forwarded to readers. The Bard knows that the only thing that “wastefull warre . . . and broiles” perpetuate is recurrent ruin. He also knows that despite the painfully acquired knowledge of war’s inexorable legacy of loss depicted in the first two lines in Q2, l.7 subsequently testifies to the fact that even “when” (5) we have learned this brutal lesson we nonetheless have never learned it well enough to halt business as usual in a world ruinously given over only to wearing this world out even to the ending doom by putting others to the “sword” (7). Men have not learned to make use of “quick fire” (7)—the “living record of [their] memory” of hate and rage’s devastations—to burn or melt down Mars’ sword into a ploughshare once and for all or to learn to study war no more. The agonized Bard knows this to the marrow of his bones, but he also knows that no degree of hateful devotion to devastation to which we may surrender ourselves can utterly put out the “quick fire” of consciousness that can at any and every moment re-deem us from the destructiveness of our ways whenever the “living record of [our] memory” of something other than ruin reawakens in us and newly records or “takes to heart” a hope to realize fully the possibility of something living among us other than ruinous rage and hate, some new birth in beauty that we might yet incarnate in our congress with one another by acting on love’s desire for it. That, and not some vain and ephemeral memorial to a personal favorite at least in part designed to curry favor from him in turn, that is what the Bard praises here in grateful appreciation of our human past and hopeful “appreciation” of our future well-being. What the Bard praises in the “living record of [our] memory” is at once the “living you” in each of us and the collective destiny of humanity itself, human history’s persistent power to transcend the slaughter bench it simultaneously records. His faith is in our power to harness the “quick fire” of our consciousness and conscience, inventively, for good. It is a true faith in the substance of these good things hoped for, the evidence of those things often unseen, a hope in the prophetic soul of the Bard joined to the “eyes [and ‘ayes’/‘I’s’] of all posterity” (11) focused on internalizing these words and the art of good faith in them he would share with us, all lovingly “dreaming on things to come” (107:2) because none of our hideous acts of violence can diminish the “quick fire” of living memory’s power to shame and redirect us.

In this reading, the couplet does not ironically measure poetry’s possible endurance against the eschatological implications of the Last Judgment’s supervening power; instead, with the “judgement” (13) in Q not capitalized and idiomatic sense activated by the phrase a “judgement that” (13), the couplet is free to shift its sense to a straightforward, if gentle, warning to us all. Short of the cataclysmic event that will end the world and time, the only thing that can dampen the quick fire of a mindful memory of love in us is a “judgement [within any and every one of us] that” declines love, preferring instead that “selfe” (13) interest “arise” (13) yet again. At such times, the self no longer lives in love’s memory nor truly dwells in “lovers eies”/ayes/I’s—except perhaps in the satirical sense that in their vanity lovers have been known to peer into each other’s eyes on the lookout (figuratively and, at times, even literally) for their own diminished image reflected there, all the while living in a pretense of genuine devotion.

In that it too speaks of “contents” (see l.13), “contented”-ness (1) and “memorial” artifacts (4), 74 discloses its affiliations to 55, though here the memorial is more literally tome than figurative tomb, and his purpose as much a request for remembrance from the addressee made by the speaker than, as in 55, a memorial monument fashioned by the speaker primarily to honor the addressee.

The poem’s premise would appear to be that the beloved should not upset himself in any way should he “survive when I in earth am rotten” (81:2), my “body being dead” (10), because the poet-speaker’s “spirit is thine” (8): in other words, that it survives and “remaines” (14) with the beloved every time he should “revew” (5) these lines. Their “interest” (3)—the deceased’s “worth” (13) or capital conveyed to the inheritor—still exists between them (inter/esse) through the poem’s expression of love. At the poet-speaker’s death, it will have become the beloved’s inheritance, his “interest” or “legal share” in the poetic estate the speaker generously wishes to pass on to him (Ingram and Redpath 170).

The impression left, however, is anything but the pacifying reassurance and spiritual easing it seemingly propounds. The undersong in the speaker’s vividly depicted suffering, conveyed by startlingly violent and seemingly “criminal” tropes, remains unresolved at the poem’s end and thus persists to vex the purported consolation offered (compare to Hammond 83–84). Here, in fact, we get the first of many glimpses in the sequence of declarations of love so seemingly extreme in their self-abnegation that one cannot completely rule out the possibility of a dry mock in them. As Hammond has wryly noted, “‘But be contented’ [1] may only be glossed with charity as ‘do not be upset’” (83). When the speaker first designates his disturbing separation from the beloved in Q1, he describes his death in a figure that does not necessarily communicate death at all: “when that fell [‘cruel,’ ‘painful,’ ‘ruthless,’ as readily as ‘deadly’] arest / With out all bayle shall carry me away” (1–2). What feeling soul, let alone the apprehended one’s beloved, could stand by “contented” when another human being had just been seized and arbitrarily carried off—perhaps by the threatening “conquest of a wretches knife” (11)—to molder in a most questionable confinement without bail? Would not angry protest, deeply troubled questioning, and personal disturbance be a more natural and humane reaction to such a harrowing event? Could anyone be made anything but queasy and uncomfortable upon hearing a jest from a potential benefactor nearing his death to the effect that he, the legatee, should not trouble himself in any way about his lover’s approaching demise because when it occurs he will profit handsomely from it in the “interest” in his benefactor’s estate he will then inherit? Can the legatee’s “memorial” gratitude in such a scenario in any way be compared—except invidiously—to the largesse of the benefactor’s “memorial” gift? Having heard the sacralization of the speaker’s gift of verse “consecrated” (6) to the beloved in Q2 (a gift articulated in language echoing the solemnity of the Christian burial service in l.7 and the nearly marital intimacy of “my spirit is thine the better part of me” [compare to Booth 198]), can we or any beloved hear “so then thou hast but lost the dregs of life” [9] as an appropriate assessment of the repulsiveness of his beloved’s body in death, the body that has housed this magnificent spirit? Can the being who makes Q2’s grand gesture seem repellant to those who love? Only a callous legatee could witness such a generous death and determine that all he has “lost” in his benefactor’s departure is but the “dregs of life.”

Because of the indefiniteness of reference in “The coward conquest of a wretches knife,” some editors have concluded that the wretch alluded to must be Time or Death personified, but in keeping with the phrase “my body being dead” (10) in the previous line, l.11 may be a reference to the work of grave robbers stealing valuables from the dead by cutting them away from the corpse. Such a reading makes more sense, I believe, than the former in calling the conquest alluded to that of a “coward” (11), though cowardice might also reasonably apply to the action of a summoner carrying someone away at knifepoint without cause, should that be how we care to imagine l.2. In any case, the sudden confusion l.11’s vagueness of reference creates does, as Hammond suggests, surely “jog the reader’s memory of the prisoner of the beginning of the sonnet (183)” because of its return to the language of criminal violation of the speaker’s person. If l.12 refers back to the wretch who robs corpses or to strong-arming culprits with knifes, then, indeed, that wretch may be “to base of thee to be remembred” (12). But what if, in keeping with the logic of ll.9–10 in deprecating the value of the dead speaker’s body, the referent of the twelfth line is the knife’s “conquest,” the dead or living body of the speaker being manhandled in some cowardly fashion. Both on the basis of his displayed generosity in the rest of the poem and the disgraceful humiliation of his person and body in such a scenario, would anyone willingly accede to the speaker’s claim that his body’s fate is “to base of thee to be remembred”? Can he be taken at his word in this suggestion, especially when one considers that the “contains . . . remains” rhyme in the couplet makes for a “peculiarly cold ending to the sonnet” (Hammond 83), carrying with it into the couplet “the sense of a knife at work, cutting the body of the poem and taking out or keeping the valuable contents” (84).

If the poem were addressed to a beloved contemporary of the speaker, no auditor could honorably take advantage of the speaker’s tender solicitude on his behalf without being implicated in some way in the callous indifference of those who would indefensibly “arest” and confine the speaker’s loving being without cause or basely rob his corpse of its valuables without the slightest regard or respect for his person. These vexing tensions resolve themselves, however, if the true addressee in the poem is seen as the poet’s “onlie begetter,” that “better part of me” with whom the speaker is conjugally united for creative good, a spirit to whom he is so wed that, even after the death of his body, his spirit lives on, not arrested and confined irrevocably but undiminished and ever free to do more good in “thine.” Indeed, “this line” (3) retains and in fact continues to accrue “interest” just as it likewise perpetuates his own human “interest” in others’ lives, the lives of his “onlie begetters.” It is “interest” of those sorts that shall “still with thee . . . stay” (4) for “memorial” (4). But that memorial is not one constructed from marble, brass, or even the parchment on which poems and entailed estates are inertly passed down from one generation to another. This memorial involves the “living record of your memory” surviving in the sacred mutual regard between the Bard and the readers who ever “revew” (5) and further “appreciate” the Bard’s loving identity endlessly in these lines. The means by which this only true immortality can be achieved is, the Bard jests, no restrictive esoteric discipline; it merely requests that the “onlie” begetter “but be” (1), like the Bard, “contented” (1) with his days as they pass, working to legitimize the poet’s faith in the reader as his “better part,” living, as does he still, in a memorial interest in others, one in which living “worth . . . [ever] remaines” (13–14).

In the final analysis, it is not physical death but only readerly inattention or idle curiosity that can short-circuit this immortal “line” of only begetter and only begotten. These things alone can produce the “fearful arest / With out all bayle” that “shall carry [the poet] away” (1–2) forever from those he loves, the only fate he fears. After his physical death, the Bard knows that his literary “remaines” (14)—especially those that appear to tell a tale as salacious and titillating as the one these sonnets almost tell—may suffer the undignified fate of being picked over for trifles of very inconsiderable value while the living spirit of the poet remains imprisoned without a human “interest” sufficient to appreciate its loving “worth unknown.” The defining choice upon which the poet depends is our own: in “revew[ing]” the poet’s verse memorial, the “worth of that is that which it containes / And that is this and this with thee remaines” (13–14). In reading him, we either murder the spirit we ourselves have arbitrarily confined in order merely to pick over the corpse’s inert remains or we can care enough to appreciate and liberate the poet’s lively and loving spirit of renewal, which, as he reassures us in the couplet’s declaration of his love for us, “remaines” ever available to us.

In 81 the Bard returns to the subject of the ambiguous “monument” (9) to “memory” (3) his verse tribute represents. Here, as in 55 and 74, it would appear to any reader who merely “ore-reads” (10) or “skims over” the piece that the speaker is once again affirming to his beloved how his verses will confer “immortall” (5) honor on the undisclosed “name” (5) of his beloved. The poet-speaker declares (how resentfully it is difficult to say) that he will inhabit but a “common grave” (7); but whether the speaker survives the beloved, or the beloved survives him (ll.1–2), the poet’s verse will ensure that “death cannot take” (3) or “remove” the memory of his beloved from the earth (“from hence” [3]) because the beloved’s name will live immortally in the honoring “monument” of the poet’s verse, ambiguously “intombed in mens eyes” (8) and “rehearse[d]” in their “toungs” (11), his fame ever “re-housed” anew (or is it “re-buried”?) in the reading experience of future generations well after all those presently alive “are” [long since] “dead” (12).

The speaker’s failure to name the being whose “name” (5) he promises to immortalize in order to keep him from an anonymous grave undermines his vow by making the boast even more self-evidently counterfactual than it is self-assured. The diction and figures throughout are so redolent of the charnel house that it is difficult for even the casual reader to get the smell of death out of one’s nostrils here. That irony activates a very surprising possibility of sense in l.3: “Your memory,” that which my verses celebrate, “cannot take or remove death from hence.” In other words, should men in fact “rehearse” these verses honoring the beloved’s deathless image, “all the breathers” of that brave new “world” (12) will merely waste their breath: in such rehearsals “re-hearse”-ing the beloved in death’s anonymous cortege. The poet’s final boast then is “less truth then tongue” (17:10), expressing more his own “mortal rage” (64:4) against mortality itself than any substantial reason why the beloved should be honored with enduring fame.

Another element undermining the reliability of the speaker’s claims throughout the sonnet is the unexplained shift in his self-definition from the octave to sestet, a shift from self-deprecating declarations of worthlessness in Q1–2 to bold claims of enduring merit thereafter. Both Booth and Vendler note how the octave’s carefully maintained contrast between the radically opposed destinies of speaker and addressee, expressed in the persistent pattern of contrasts between them (line by alternating line in Q1–Q2) suddenly gives way in l.9 to a declaration of complete identity between “your monument” and “my gentle verse” (9), wherein through “memorial utterance” and “memorial reading” the speaker and his beloved can live on forever (Vendler 363). “Such vertue hath [his] Pen” (13). Absent any dramatic logic to this shift provided in the poem, one can only explain the early, melodramatically extreme dismissals of his own worth as barely sublimated ressentiment: his body rotting (2) “forgotten” (4), dead to “all the world” (6) in the humiliation of a “common grave” (7), while his beloved is urged to bask in immortal adulation the poet himself “lives” (1) for no other reason but to generate. Should his auditor protest such self-deprecation, the speaker would be gratified to hear it. Should he not, he will secretly enjoy a more complex satisfaction in figuratively shaking his head at the addressee’s blindness he sees with perfect clarity from his morally superior perch. The praise offered in the sestet only seems less strained because in it the poet-speaker now fixates exclusively on the passport to his own glorification his monument to the beloved will incidentally produce, a celebrated destiny he has always believed he richly deserves, one in which he can now freely indulge because his own piqued sense of underappreciated power has cover in his praise of the beloved. This egoistic undersong may be barely audible in the persona’s floridly deictic praise of the beloved, but it never allows us to trust completely in the other-directedness of his extravagant compliments.

No such second-guessing of the generosity of the Bard’s purposes, however, undermines a reader’s sense of the “vertue” (13) in his prophetic voice here. He knows only too well that if his readers “ore-read” (10) his “gentle verse” monument (9) too inattentively, their recitation of these verses will only “rehearse” (11) them unreflectively and thus “re-hearse” them repeatedly until such time as they are no longer read at all. Should that happen, the effect of his works will not reward his devoted efforts in Love’s service but instead “yeeld . . . [him] but a common grave” (7) in artistic anonymity generated by idly inattentive readers while the true object of his devotion, Love itself, whose “memory” he would preserve in l.3, will merely “lye” (8) “intombed in mens eyes” (8). Thus, his efforts to instill the sweetly animating spirit of love’s renewal in his auditors might well come to nothing, his “part[s] . . . forgotten” (4), his beneficent import dead to “all the world” (6) and the only result of his unstinting labor on Love’s behalf to “live your [that is, ‘Love’s’] Epitaph to make” (1). In this reading, “such vertue hath my Pen” (13) does not represent a boast no one can verify; rather it wryly declares in self-mocking humility how little his efforts might conceivably accomplish.

One can imagine how crushing a blow to his ego such a prospect of poetic failure would mean to the previous speaker. But for the Bard, the possible failure to realize his poetical goals in trying to exalt love properly is, however fearfully disappointing, still no reason to believe that he would have been simply wasting his breath in his song. He would not lose heart and faith because, in the first place, the “vertue” of such praise, however ineffectively conveyed to others, remains its own reward and because he is so confident that the love he bows before and would celebrate properly in verse in no way depends for its survival on his poetry’s success or failure to keep it alive, so great is its self-sustaining power and glory. Love’s “name from hence immortal life shall have” (5) whether his verse lives or dies. Its immortality is not the result of the poet’s art at all; it is rather his art’s very source and inspiration, as we are about to see in 100 and 101. Q1 can be paraphrased: whether my art exists or results only in conveying a verse monument falsely importing the death of love or whether “you,” my loving poem, “survive” (2) when I have died, neither my verses’ devoted failure nor my own personal demise can “take” (3) the living record of love’s “memory” (3) “from hence” (3), “from the here and now’s dynamic present, the eternal now’s being in time.” Indeed, “when all the breathers of this” word “are dead” (both the “wor[l]dly breathers” and the “breathers of this word”) / “You [love] still shall live . . . where breath most breaths, even in the mouths of men” (12–14)—not, that is, in the recitation of verse, but in the very “breath” of life itself, generated in love and appreciated in love’s vitality and spirit. As to his art’s subsidiary role in that “appreciation,” if readers “ore-read” his words often and carefully enough and “rehearse,” or “take them to heart and practice them for later performance” (that action beginning to incarnate the living “beeing” [11] of love), then the poet’s “final assertion” in the couplet need not be seen merely as the initial speaker’s “genteel hyperbole” (Booth 279). The Bard’s verse and readers will then have fruitfully liberated him from the absence of “yeeld” in a “common grave” to the burgeoning “yield” (7) his living monument to love would incarnate in others who might join him presently in his truly dignifying appreciation of love’s vital blessings and, like him, pass them on in their turn to others “from hence” (3).

Sonnet 17’s only connection to the “monument/memorial” tropes so central to 55, 74, and 81 is the speaker’s reference to his verse as a “tombe / Which hides your life” (3–4), but it might well be considered with these other poems because it reprises the Bard’s argument in them in a relatively straightforward and, thus, more readily comprehensible fashion.

Troubled in the octave by the humorous predicament that the more accurately he can depict his beloved’s high desserts and beauty truly, the less likely his praise of him will be believed, the poet-speaker spends Q3 imagining a future in which his art will face a mockery he knows to be unjust. Exaggerating these woes to come for comic effect, he imagines his poetry dismissed as fantastic garrulity of an old man of “lesse truth then tongue” (10), his true praises called “a Poets rage, / And stretched miter of an Antique [both ‘quaintly out of fashion’ and ‘antic’] song” (12). To rescue him from his mock crisis (and, let it be said, to substantiate his beloved’s “high deserts” [12]), in the couplet he begs the beloved to breed a child so that the doubting Thomases so skeptical of a beauty they have not seen with their own eyes will have a visible proof of it by which to corroborate the hearsay the poet has been circulating. Though the couplet seemingly shifts the subject away from the speaker’s impending humiliation to the benefits he would like to provide for the beloved’s future well-being (“you should live twise” [14]—in his own child and in the poet’s verse), his very last words coyly shift the subject, in doubly comical fashion, back to the speaker’s mock predicament. Despite the couplet’s obvious connection to the other procreation sonnets, this poem has not focused on the beloved’s situation, but as much or more on the poet-speaker’s, so that when and if the addressee does as he is told here, the poet will have escaped the mockery he fears because then the public would see his verse’s claims of the young man’s beauty substantiated by his child. The comic effect is twofold in that the speaker’s wit subtly extricates him from his purported problem, but also because, in doing so, the speaker demonstrates as much hidden self-regard in doing something for another as would the beloved in breeding a child for such a nakedly self-serving purpose.

The couplet does not, however, provide as neat a resolution to his quandary as the speaker seems to imagine. It is understandable why 17 has often been grouped with other sonnets about poetic immortality; but the claim does not stand up under scrutiny. The beloved’s having a child only defers the problem; it does not solve it. When the child or the addressee’s extended biological line sooner or later dies out, the poet-speaker’s problem will inevitably resurface. For his part, the Bard is not caught on the horns of any such dilemma. For him the first two lines of Q1 are not an expression of worry for himself at all, but a promise of greater yield possible in the addressee’s life. The “it” in l.2 does not refer to the poem we have been reading for its revelation of selfish anxieties about somehow perpetuating a future that does not decline from the present; “it” refers to the “time to come” (1) which might be “fild” (2) by a limitless multitude of enactments of the addressees’ “worth unknowne” (116:8), such that lively acts of good will will have rendered poetic praise nugatory. By the fruits they have shared with the world, they shall be known, as well as by their realization of the limitless dimensions of further fruitfulness they can appreciatively envision, described in 16 as “many maiden gardens yet unset,” which with “good will” (“vertuous wish” [16:7]), can “beare your living flowers” (6–7). In a future filled with men and women of such demonstrated power and vision, poetic lip service will not be required. For the Bard, ll.3–4 do not represent a sycophantic gambit by which he might disingenuously flatter the addressee, attempting to win his approval by downplaying the comparative merits of his art’s praise to the young man’s beauty. Here “heaven knowes” is not an idiomatic interjection dramatizing his throwing up his hands in frustrated consternation at his art’s limits; it is, instead, a truly earnest admission that only the divine itself knows how extensively the future may be “fild” with the fruits of our creative labors. The future’s “yet” (3)—l.1’s “time to come”—is, as of now, “but as a tombe” (3) from which readers’ re-deemed lives may “yet” resurrect themselves just as the Bard’s art is presently “but as a tome” which will “hide your life and shewe not halfe your parts” (4) until such time as it, too, is re-deemed by generation upon generation’s reading it in a more spirited and personal fashion, taking it to heart and properly seeing within its encouraging confidences what we might yet accomplish. Then, as Q2 goes on to testify, the outcome will tell its truth more profoundly than the Bard’s verse can.

For the Bard, Q2 announces no fear of a mockingly dismissive and unjust criticism; it means to forward a wonder-full explanation why the future will find the poet’s testimonials to its beauty and “graces” (6), however true their mimesis, inadequate to the reality itself. L.8 in this reading acts as an after-the-fact explanation why the reality his beloved addressees will eventually encounter in amazement will actually exceed the extravagant praise in the poet’s verse that led those who heard it to declare him a liar in anticipatory disbelief, even before they had seen what he was raving about. Nothing could be that good, they will presume, wrongly assuming full growth in that which still doth grow. But then they did not know that reality could exceed their fondest fantasies. They did not know then how “nere” (that is, “near”) heaven can indeed come to touching “earthly faces” (8) with its bliss. When love is not merely flattering lip service, but an incarnate “babe” (115:13) born and cultivated through hard labor—l.13’s “childe” seen metaphorically— then in a manner no poet’s “fresh numbers” (6) nor praise of the “beauty of your eyes”/ayes/I’s can record, that “babe’s” progenitors and recipients can know without skepticism or impulse to mockery just how nearly and often heaven can touch earthly faces with its beatific hue—not only in the blissful face of the “childe” itself but also in those unto whom the child has been given in blessing. No art celebrating human touch could rival the heavenly reality of human touch itself communicated in love’s gentle way—except when we realize art itself as just such a wonder, itself born of the hard labor of poet and reader alike, Pygmalion’s inert artifact come alive to the joy of fully human reciprocation.

Q3’s “should” (9) is not a fearful hypothetical, but a gentle imperative backed by the antithetical virtue and greater human benefice the couplet will offer to conquer anxiety. The poet’s inert “papers (yellowed with their age)” (9), like Pygmalion’s lifeless statuette, should be scorned as nothing more than 16’s “barren rime” (4). The living voice of the poet is another matter entirely, ever alive reciprocally in reader after reader “toucht” (8) sufficiently to come alive themselves by taking it to heart.

The couplet’s “should” (14) is likewise meant as no fearfully tentative hypothetical, but as a gentle and loving imperative. Why live in the dim reflection of oneself that a mere copy of an original might provide, whether in the person of a son generated merely to represent a chip off the old blockhead or in the yellowed copy of verses that, by the poet’s own admission, “shewe not halfe your parts” (14)? Instead, the Bard urges that we live “twise” (14)—not in simplistic succession in time but ever simultaneously and thoroughly involved both in our own lives and in those of our progeny, those children, love’s babes, to which we should give full growth because they still can grow as long as we care enough to nurture their increased life. In so doing we may live eternally—not in “barren rime’s” antic duration through the vast and empty dimensions of deserted time, but in time’s bounty itself (“it” [14] may refer to “time” [13] as readily as to “childe” [13]), the re-deemed and fruitful state that the Bard so faithfully sings and in which he invites us to share over and over again “in my rime” (14).

To any first-time reader trying to cobble together some consistent sense in the poet-speaker’s stance toward the beloved in 15 through 18, the persona’s reiterated constancy to an ideal object can only seem to ring bewildering changes. At first, especially given the repeated argument for procreation in the previous fourteen poems, the claim to “ingraft” (15:14) the beloved anew in order to triumph over our mortally “inconstant stay” (15:9) in the flesh seemingly dramatizes the speaker’s effort to lobby again for reproduction. But no sooner does one settle into such a thought than the nearly transparent illogic of this new embodiment’s solution to the problem of embodiment’s lack of permanence (not to mention the speaker’s central and determining involvement in the engrafting process) unsettles that reading and leads momentarily to the notion that the more genuine solution to the problem of mortality offered here involves instead the immortality of art considered as figurative “graft.” Having then provisionally settled upon this seemingly reassuring thought, 16’s opening immediately disparages the speaker’s poetic powers in this regard as “barren rime” (4) and then, in the remainder of the poem, seemingly circles back to repeat the argument for procreation. But then 17 directly reverses the poet-speaker’s immediately previous self-disparagement (no longer is his art a “barren rime”) to express instead his fear that his art will soon come to be wrongfully disparaged by others unless the beloved (not this bromide again?) should reproduce his beauty in his progeny. Apparently the only testimonial adequate to the wondrous glory of the beloved now involves both progeny and poetry—the former substantiating the latter—or poetic praise will be dismissed as laughable exaggeration. In his very next breath, however, 18 dispenses completely with the previous poem’s anxious uncertainties about the enduring power of the speaker’s art without the aid of the beloved’s progeny. Though l.12 makes glancing reference back to the grafting metaphor of 15, it does so only to transmute the gardening figure into an emblem of immortal art’s golden world affirmed in the most serenely confident of terms, a world no longer (nor ever again in the sequence) dependent upon the beloved’s perpetuation of his own image through his breeding of children. In 18, unlike 17 (without a word of explanation for the change), the poet-speaker no longer depends in any way on the beloved’s visible progeny to assure that his depiction of the beloved will be taken as credible. Now, he seems to believe he can take care of that quite adequately with the help of his poetry’s future readers alone, presumably the same readers who in 17 posed such a risk to the proper appreciation of the beloved he had hoped to transmit.

The unhurried grace of 18’s first line sets the stage for a lover’s meditation whose relaxed confidence throughout the poem never trembles when faced with the obstacles his love must overcome, though it must also be noted that the “eternall Sommer” (9) the speaker professes so securely is not “transcendent eternity” but simply “human perpetuity” (Vendler 121). The fundamental contrast the poem develops between the best that is available to us in the natural realm and the yet greater supernatural glory and grace his love for the beloved incarnates in his poetic lines is reflected structurally by the way each one of the tropes announced in the octave is then “transfigured” in the sestet. A “Summers day” (1) will become “eternall Sommer” (9); a “lease [with] all too short a date” (4), a permanent “possession” owned (10); a bright sun’s “complexion dimm’d” (6) by clouds or by its “decline” (7) into 12’s “hidious night” (2) yielding to a spirit that never need wander in or into death’s “shade” (11); and a beauty that in the organic world must “some-time decline / By chance or natures changing course untrim’d” (7–8)—stripped of beauty’s ornamentation—now growing in the speaker’s poetic testimonial, his “eternall lines” (12), ever “ingrafted” anew in the re-cognition of his beloved’s beauty registering in the eyes and voices of the poet’s readers.

There are, however, several reasons why the readers upon whom the speaker builds his trust in his art’s perpetuation may not applaud his claim with the same sense of accomplishment the speaker exhibits. There is, first of all, the characteristic hollowness of yet another memorial tribute to a nonpareil readers can neither see nor hear manifested in his person any better than anywhere else in the sequence. The re-cognition of the beloved’s beauty the speaker claims “gives life to thee” (14) in his poetry, is, for his readers, little more than a suspiciously pinched and paltry existence in a poetic “tombe / Which hides your life and shewes not halfe your parts” (17:3–4). Though the speaker may boast that the “lines” of communication between his readers and himself will be “eternall” in the unbroken succession he imagines, his readers may immediately conclude that the actual poetic life-“line” giving life to the poet’s beloved here hangs by a thread as fragile and subject to obliteration as every other. If the lack of anything particularly memorable about the life the speaker would perpetuate does not ironically assure that it will one day soon slip our minds, then reflection on the contingencies of cataclysmic “chance, or natures changing course” assure that the communication signal upon which the poet depends for his beloved’s ghostly perpetuation will sooner or later fade out. Anything that “grow’st” (12) engrafted to “time” (12) must also die in time. Death may not “brag thou wandr’st in his shade” just yet—but give him time. The ever-renewed graft that the poet-speaker predicts in his readership may well not “take.”7

Another fly in the ointment is the persona’s outlandish exaggeration in claiming that his beloved’s temperament is so even and gentle that in him “rough windes” never do “shake the darling buds” of his “Maie” (3), and that, unlike the summer sun, his warmth is never “too hot” nor “his complexion” ever “dimm’d” (5–6), presumably by anger, doubt, or depression. No one of us is capable of living in this perpetual state of grace. In the speaker’s saying so, he has passed beyond genteel epideictic hyperbole into the realm of pure fantasy. As 116 more honestly characterizes the matter, the only thing that “lookes on tempests and is never shaken” (6) by them can only be the “star” (7) of an ideal light shining above and beyond the destructive reach of such tempests, not the human beings caught up and at sea under and in them, our “wandring barkes” (7) ever tempest-tossed. A proper and saving sense of direction depends exclusively upon reckoning a course by the light of Love’s ideal, though at times that directing light’s exact location may well be uncertain in the tempests tossing us beyond our powers to set a steady course, no matter how carefully cultivated and virtuous our effort may be to maintain the straight and narrow.

The simple truth of the matter, then, is that 18’s assured confidence can make incontrovertibly persuasive sense only if the poem is not addressed to a person at all but instead to Love itself. It is ideal love alone whose “eternall Sommer” remains ever-bountiful in its temperate maximalization of yield. Human summers may be variously subject to fits of immoderation, decline, and decay; but the supernal light of the love of which Corinthians famously speaks never “fades.” It knows not anger, doubt, or depression’s eclipse nor burns with destructive intensity. In the organic manner of life in which humans too often participate unthinkingly “every faire from faire some-time declines / By chance, or natures changing course untrim’d” (7–8) entropically; but in love’s reflective attentiveness no “faire” moment in time (note “some-time’s” odd orthography in Q) is ever refused or “declined.” Rather, each fair or beautiful moment, itself seen as a gift “from faire” (9) time’s being itself, is instead graciously accepted and lovingly trimmed or “cultivated” for maximum benefice so that life need not simply decline by chance or nature’s changing course, like 2’s “totter’d weed” (4) in an untended field. Thus, when Love, the wise gardener, ever grafts itself anew in our decaying flesh, binding itself in the “lines of life that life repaire” (16:9), it necessarily binds itself “to time” (12) the destroyer/preserver as the “stock” in which the scion may flourish to renew or enrich the plant’s fruitfulness. Only in this way can the gardener, “all in war with Time [as its ally in battle] for [‘on behalf of’] love” (15:13) successfully transcend “decay” (15:11). This loving spirit cultivates a rich harvest, but it never hoards. The reason that in love one never “looses possession of that faire thou ow’st” (that is, both properly “acknowledges” and “owe” in return on its debt to the divine nature from which it sprung) is that we don’t ever “own” it outright but we, the babe’s stewards, only cultivate “loose possession” of it in order to allow it further room to grow. Eternal Summer’s yield knows no limit because this “lease” or “allowance” has no date of termination whatever: it “beares [its babes] out” into the world to be shared fruitfully “to the edge of doome” (116:12).

Modern editorial consensus replaces Q’s comma at the conclusion of l.12 with a terminal mark of punctuation, most often a period. Doing so mistakenly affords the speaking voice in the poem an even greater sense of certainty than, in the last analysis, it truly incarnates; moreover, it privileges readings of the poem that focus primarily on the power of the poet-speaker’s art. In Q, the couplet can be rightly seen and assessed as the truly contingent basis upon which love and art in support of that love may endure. It does not boast the poet’s artistic accomplishment personally. Love’s eternal summer and its loose possession or “freeing embrace” of the “faire” it acknowledges and nourishes may survive unfaded—death unable to boast its triumph over her—as long as love lives growing to time in eternal lines of its lineal descent in men (as well as in the poet’s lines of verse dedicated to love that readers can keep alive); but love can do so only “so long” as men “can see” (13) love’s extraordinary merits and then “breath” (13)—a metonym for “live out”—their reverence for it. Only “so long” (14) can “this” (14)—the poet’s verse, of course, but more important, love’s eternal lineage growing “in time” through men’s comprehension of its worth and devotion to it in action—only “so long” can “this give life to thee” (14), to love’s powers of increase realized through its cultivation. Whatever the final eschatological disposition of souls, while men remain alive on earth in love, their lives always have a clear and satisfying sense of direction. In such devotions they do not wander, lost in the shade of impending death, their “complexions dimm’d,” nor do they, depressed and depleted by meaningless activity come to yearn for or “want rest” (l.11’s “wandr’st” redemptively construed) in death’s shade, their spirits exhausted by the sense of pointlessness and frustration of lives lived without love. They can do so because they continue to grow in time happily bound and grafted to the “eternall lines” of love’s shared blessings.

At issue once again in 54 is the true extent of the power of the poet-speaker’s art and the degree to which that power depends upon the poet’s readers. The sonnet sets up a distinction to be made between beauty of substance and beauty that, in the end, is but dissatisfying and demoralizing “show” (9): between beauty generatively married to truth and those lovely things that “die to themselves” (11), alone and barren. It develops this contrast by distinguishing between “Canker bloomes” (5), or “dog roses,” and those roses prized not simply because of their comparable loveliness to the eye but also because, unlike the scentless canker blooms, when their fragrant petals have been distilled into rose water, such “Sweet Roses” (11) add the medicinal “virtue” (9) of their “perfumed tincture” (6) as a most lovely and useful “ornament” (2) to their more superficial visual appeal. The couplet then shifts ground to identify the speaker’s beloved with the richer worth of the prized rose by arguing that the speaker’s “verse” will “distil” the beloved’s “truth” (14) for the benefit and delight of others, even when his “beautious and lovely youth” (13), so vivid now in its coloration, shall “vade” (14) or “fade.”

This seemingly innocent compliment is neither as winning nor as convincing as it may sound. The shift from a distinction between the blossoms to the identification of the beloved with the more favored of the two is a fast shuffle. The quatrain development inconclusively explores in seemingly decorous abstraction an ominous contrast between a superficial, quasi-meretricious and ultimately demoralized beauty left to its own devices (Vendler describes the erotic subtext of the imagery in Q2–3 as a “harlot’s progress” [263]) and an alternative way of life it counterfeits that richly complements its beauty with the spiritually transfiguring “virtue” (9) of its “truth” (2). The couplet then links the beloved to the ideal union of beauty and truth, but without any basis for the flattering accolade, a matter of no small consequence given that the body of the poem had implicitly revealed how easily the lesser glory might mimic the greater.

Moreover, if the beloved is to be identified with beauty and truth rather than with the “unrespected” (10) canker blooms whose beauty hides no greater depths of worth, why should the addressee’s worth only be celebrated fully after his death, and, then, primarily through the agency of the poet distiller? Nor is the matter any less troubling if we read “vade” (14) as a reference, not to the beloved’s death, but to any measurable decline in the youth’s beauty. Why would the speaker now celebrate his later calling attention in verse to the perfected union of beauty and truth in the beloved when to do so will halve the totality being affirmed since truth would at that point be shackled to a beauty in decline? At the very least the oddity of these disconcerting gestures on the poet-speaker’s part leaves unsettled readers without adequate resolution at poem’s end. As Vendler puts the case, the poem’s ending “maintains the perplexity with which it [the poem] began” (266).

What’s more, doesn’t the poet-speaker’s assumption that the beloved’s beauty/truth identity depends on his art’s power virtually transform the purported object of his veneration into a sly cover for his own self-promotion? What has happened to the healthy fear expressed in 17 that without substantial corroboration from the beloved himself, the poet’s praise of him would surely raise suspicions of gross exaggeration, his laud communicating “less truth than tongue”? Those questions aside, how heartened could a reflective addressee be by “immortal” praise declaring that the “sweet odor” (4) giving off evidence of the truth and virtue in his beauty will only manifest itself when “manufactured” by his poet-lover at the price of his beauty’s disfigurement or after his death, almost as if it might be nothing more than a cosmetic or embalming perfume designed to cover the stench of corruption itself?8 Certainly the speaker himself had invited such questions by developing the free-floating, ambiguously directed contrast between meretricious appearance and true ideality earlier in the poem. Can even more careful reading establish definitively the degree of irony or its absence with which it speaks? I, for one, do not see how.

The sonnet does come to satisfying resolution, however, when the couplet’s relationship to the rest of the poem is seen in radically different light; but that new “perspective” can never activate itself as long as Capell’s emendation of “by” (14) to “my”—more often than not accepted—is considered a needed improvement to Q. When the couplet is read as it first appeared, its syntax is most naturally understood as no address to the fair young man at all. “Beautious and lovely youth” (13) need not be direct address; in the new reading, it is a noun phrase that functions as the subject of a sentence in which that same collective noun understood distributively can “distill . . . truth” (14) “by means of” or “by” this very poet’s “verse,” verse “by verse” (14). “You” in l.13 and “your” in l.14 need not refer to a person at all but to “sweet love” personified or, alternatively, to each of the Bard’s sonnets, including this one, written in the service of that love, whose potential fertility and riches are to be contrasted to the kind of beauty that only dies to itself aborning. Loves of the sort he analogizes to “Sweet Roses” (11) do not “die to themselves” (11) in onanistic barrenness; in the generative fashion identified by115’s “babe,” true loves’ sweet congress (their “sweet deathes” [12]), joyous and good in themselves, also produce a yield of “sweetest odors” (12) for the further pleasure and benefit of others. L.13’s transitional phrase, “And so of you,” may explicitly function as a device to hammer home the figurative parallelism between the uniquely productive worth of the sweet roses of ll.12–13 and the love to be identified by the Bard in the couplet; but through the agency of l.13’s “of,” now heard to mean “from” or “out of,” it further specifies that parallelism in suggesting that the virtue or truth of the love he would praise is indeed borne within and born from within its very beauty. As with the prized roses to which he compares it, its virtue and truth live ever fused to its beauty: its “sweet odor” (4) “doth in it live” (4). In the copycat facsimile of the sweet rose of true love (a “painted counterfeit” to the “living hue” and “living you,” so to speak), when “sommers breath” discloses its “masked buds” (8) the revelation merely disappoints, like the less than magical sight of Venetian revelers unmasked at dawn; but when summer’s breath discloses the masked buds of the truly sweet rose of love in bloom, its deeper mystery, its interior “worth unknowne,” simply grows, as its odor, in melting intercourse with the breezes that “carry it away,” blend, fuse with, and even increase in intensity “summers hunny breath” (65:5).

The “that” (14) which “vades” (14) could conceivably refer to the beauteous loveliness of youth from the previous line, which, as it ages, may grow wiser about the true nature of love to be distilled from the Bard’s verse, its heady perfume permeating each poem to its depths; but if so, that eventuality would be something still less than the pinnacle of the Bard’s possible achievement because in it body would be bruised to pleasure soul. More heartening yet is a reading in which the “that” which “vades” or “fades” is the comparative value of corrupting facsimiles of true love whose superficial charms and enticements “unrespected fade” (10) because they lack the depth and richer satisfactions of virtue and truth. “That” lesser beauty pales when compared to a love whose mysterious depths can never be plumbed, though “beautious and lovely youth,” reading with care, can keep distilling pleasure and benefit from it. Thus beautious and lovely youth may share unfettered intimacy with the sweetly veiled virtues and truth of the Bard’s verse in a generative congress gratifying to poet and reader alike and, better yet, potentially productive of even greater yield to come.

In a metapoetical sense, the “Canker bloomes” (5) can, then, be read as allegorical emblem of the image of fair young man and dark female consort, alluring figures whose purported beauty and veiled charm entice poet-speaker and reader alike, but subsequently lead to no deeper and richer satisfactions. They never exhibit any further sign of virtue or fidelity, the ornamenting “essences” of a worthy satisfaction to be shared. These “painted counterfeits” of narcissism and lust—each and together lifeless icons the persona himself idolatrously worships in prostration—do exert for some interim their meretricious appeal to both poet-speaker and reader “alike,” but when their shallow worth “vades” and pales inconsequentially, the sweet essence of the Bard’s true devotion to the most high within us all still waits veiled, an eager and willing bride committed to the promise of blissful marital union ever available between poet and reader. Through the congress of his poetic rose’s “living hue” and the “living you” of his readers, we are free to take whatever time we might wish to appreciate and distill the “perfumed tincture” of this bridal rose’s sweet essence to the full, her masked buds gradually opening to our sweet summer breath’s embrace.

In 101, the poet-speaker reprises 54’s preoccupation with “beauties truth” (101:7) and the distance between lovely semblances and a yet greater ideal reality, though here these concerns are taken up in a colloquy between the rhetor and his “Muse” (1) regarding the proper function of the poet’s semblances in honoring the beloved’s ideal essence. Having accused his “truant Muse” (1) of delinquency in the proper exercise of her “office” (13) as servant to the beloved, in Q2 the poet-speaker whimsically imagines how his Muse might respond to justify her inactivity. He depicts the Muse arguing that the Platonic forms of “Truth” (6), “Beautie” (7), and “Good” (l.8’s “best is best”) are all so “fixt” (6), through and through, in the beloved that the work of cosmetic enhancement (l.7’s “pensell” work) and rhetorical embellishment (l.6’s “collours” of rhetorical ornament) the poet’s art might lavish upon him could only gild the lily. So perfect is the beloved, purity unalloyed, that were his parts to be “intermixt” (8) with any outside elements—even the poet’s sincerest efforts at proper praise—his essence would only be debased by the contact. The poetic Muse certainly seems to be laying it on pretty thick for someone claiming principled reluctance to “lay” (7) on anything at all. (The Bard’s use of the word “amends” [1] in such proximity to the phrase “best is best” [8] in its perfection ironically summons the proverbial “the best may amend” [Tilley B321] as ironic counterpoint to the Muse’s stance.)

However suspiciously outlandish her talk may be, the poet-speaker registers no disagreement with the Muse’s arguments thereafter in the sestet. Instead he summons her to renewed labor on other grounds. In the manner of divine being’s self-sufficiency that in no way depends upon or “needs” (9) anything humans can provide it, the speaker argues that the Muse should reason not the need. The beloved, like God himself, commands unstinting commendation, not because poetic praise augments his glory but from sheer gratitude for his grace-bearing sustenance of our lives. Then, later, at a time when the beloved should make his “ascension” to the heavens, so to speak, the Muse’s office will become important as the means by which the beloved can live in future memory “praised of ages yet to be” (12).

If the “(designedly) blasphemous” (Vendler 430) transference of conventional religious veneration to the poet-speaker’s proper poetic “worship” of the beloved has not already made readers a bit uneasy with the speaker’s argument, the couplet certainly will.9 The speaker’s declaration that the Muse’s proper office is to “make [the beloved] seeme long hence, as he showes now” (14) immediately proves disturbing because it “brings back connotations of deceit, pretense, and vanity in the very line that defines the honorable action of telling the plain truth” (Booth 329). The use of the words “seemes” and “showes” in l.14 as “synonyms for ‘be’ and ‘is,’” represents “the very kind of cosmetic praise which the muse has already sworn to have no part in” (Hammond 153)—without, one might add, any word of controversion from the poet-speaker when responding. Moreover, in the vicinity of suggestions that the beloved, when dead, may yet “out-live a gilded tombe” (11), can the notion that the Muse may make him “seeme long hence, as he showes now” ever manage to escape disconcerting intimations that the poetic art is but a mortician’s satisfaction at having discovered a superior form of preservation of the bodies he prepares for viewing? In any case, if one plays along with the fictional colloquy still going on in the couplet between the poet-speaker and a Muse from whom he has become alienated, then, when the speaker sets himself up to “teach” the Muse “how” to do her office, one cannot help but ask upon what resources of inspiration and superior knowledge he can possibly draw with which to justify confidence in his unspecified directives? Isn’t there a prima facie case that any advice he might forward in the Muse’s absence would be uninspired and therefore uninspiring?

For the Bard, however, the Muse is not a quasi-immodest euphemism for his own poetic genius; his Muse is a genuine “other”—his readers—who remain ever and at once his sole inspiration and the wholly consuming object of his art’s devotions. For him, “my love” (3) is not a reference to an anonymous romantic favorite but instead the “sweet love” the Bard “alwaies write[s] of” (76:9), the love in which he fondly hopes his auditors will share fully themselves. It is a love at once true and beautiful (l.2) by which he and we are “therein dignifi’d” (4), a love “he showes now” (14) in his un-deviating concern for his auditors’ more abundant welfare. The danger, of course, is that his readers may miss his point, taking the curious love stories the poems appear to tell for their deeper and truer import, that richer and yet more beautiful “truth” (3) in which beauty is not merely spent promiscuously but indissolubly married to fidelity and virtue in Q2’s Platonic triad. As long as his delinquent Muse—“truant” (1) readers—“neglect [this] truth in beauty di’d” (2) for a superficial beauty more readily available without it— the equivalent of 54’s “canker bloom”—then the Bard’s “love” (3) “lies [or ‘utters falsehoods’] in thee” (10); but if readers should realize the error of such ways, re-deem themselves and begin to appreciate the value of the true love that “dignifies” us all, then they will have begun to realize that the love the Bard truly speaks of here “lies [or ‘resides’] in thee” as surely as it does in him.

As branches on the true vine of this eternal love, we can participate in bringing the Bard’s love to fruition and “much out-live [any] gilded tombe” (11) because this love remains united to flourishing life itself and not all manner of inert and dispensable ornamentation of that life, even the deictics of praise. By his own admission, the love he now speaks of “needs no praise” (9) to enjoy ample satisfaction in its progenitive strength. But though it has no need of praise, its amplitude does require partners. It “lies” in readers alone to bring the Bard’s wisdom to life again and make it “much out-live [the] gilded tombe” (11) of the verses in which it will otherwise remain imprisoned lifelessly. Once again, as in 55:2, the quirky orthography of “out-live” directs readers to realize that what the Bard is concerned with here is not sheer endurance in time, but a richer life as long as he and we both shall live. In no way is he concerned that some personal favorite “be praisd of ages yet to be” (12) as an inimitable nonpareil held up to inspire the envy of ordinary mortals; rather, he wants it known that it “lies” in us, his beloved readers, to determine whether anything that we and the Bard will have done with our lives may deserve to be “praisd of ages yet to be” (Sonnet 2’s “praise deserved”) so as to inspire that age, in turn, to action of comparable worth. If we were to see that this is what “lies in thee” and to bring it to fruition, both he and we would have “out-lived a gilded tombe”—not finally in order to be “praisd of ages yet to be” in self-glorification, but in order to be “praisd of ages” for intrinsic worth realized. In short, the love the Bard would celebrate “lies in” us all to be “praisd of ages [,] yet to be” alive to the world’s joys and needs. Were we to realize the potential the Bard sees in us, his love, shown or “thus demonstrated” here and “now” (14) toward us will “seeme long hence” (14) identical with itself in its vibrancy and power to inspire gratitude and worthy emulation (compare to 14’s sestet.)

The only other sonnet in the sequence that would seem to advance the immortalization theme, 100, is perhaps the most tentative, beset as it is by unresolved anxiety regarding the poet-speaker’s powers to battle wasting time successfully. The poem begins with the speaker’s claim that any verse he has been writing besides that dedicated to the praise of his beloved faithlessly composes but a “worthlesse songe, / Darkning” (3–4) his powers of inspiration merely to “lend base subjects light” (4). Armed with that recognition, he now summons his Muse to “redeeme . . . time so idely spent” (6) by returning to an exclusive focus on the subject matter that alone gives her “all thy might” (2). Once focused again on the beloved, in Q3 the speaker urges his “resty Muse” (9) to spend its time scrutinizing the beloved’s youthful face for any signs of aging. Should the Muse discover any “wrincle graven there” (10) he urges her to take out her rage at the dying of the light by writing embittered satires on the subject of decay in order to “make times spoiles dispised every where” (12) because then it would have become clear that no thing, however peerless, might be preserved from time’s degradation. Should such scrutiny discover no signs of aging, however, the couplet seemingly advises that the Muse generate for the beloved such “fame” (13) for his present perfection that the Muse’s accomplishment may outpace the inexorable action of decay and thus “prevenst” (14) time’s otherwise universal morbidity by immortalizing the beloved’s untarnished present glory in verse.

In view of the centrality of the speaker’s anxiety about his beloved’s possibly showing signs of aging and his panicky urgency in suggesting that the Muse commemorate the beloved’s present perfection before it is too late, one can readily see that his fear of time’s depradations has nearly overwhelmed his confidence in his own powers of resistance to its corrosive sway. There is little sign here of the confident boasting about his poetry’s power to defeat time in 55 and 107. Indeed, what “might” (2) can she display in a renewed focus on the beloved? Should the Muse discover aging in him upon returning to its “office” (101:13), what good could come of any subsequent verse satire to decay, calling redundant attention to time’s power to waste all things, no matter how embittered and caustic the speaker’s expression of a fine satiric “furie” (3)? Wouldn’t such verse only serve to contradict the speaker’s earlier advice to the Muse in Q1 not to “spend thou thy furie on some worthless songe, / Darkning thy powre to lend base subjects light” yet again? Certainly, such fury could not “redeeme” wasted “time” (5–6) in “gentle numbers” (6), but only yield more time “idely spent” (6) bitterly protesting a degeneration about which nothing can be done. On the other hand, even should the Muse’s inspection turn up no trace of deterioration in the beloved, with what likelihood could she generate fame for his present perfection before it should begin to decline? And given the inconsequentiality of such perfection thus celebrated, wouldn’t doing so, even if successful, amount to “darkning” the Muse’s power in order to give “base subjects light” rather than “redeeme . . . time” in some more constructive, life-furthering fashion?10 Likewise, the speaker’s exhortation in the couplet leaves room for doubt whether the Muse’s labors can outpace time’s swiftly decaying action even if she should recommit herself to the effort.

Some sign of this is generated by the disconcerting ambiguity of the couplet’s syntax in Q. L.13’s “then” is always modernized to “than” in keeping with the presumed purposes of the most readily imagined speaker of these lines, but to do so short-circuits the couplet’s push me/pull me effect by restricting “than” to its comparative function. If, however, “then” should be read with temporal force, the couplet transforms itself momentarily from an imperative into a declarative description of a hypothetical consequence of an art concerned with celebrating itself, emphasizing the ironic claim that the more one makes the effort to give one’s feelings an immortal “fame” (13) in verse the more rapidly one wastes one’s time. Hence, the purposefully ironic choice of Q’s “prevenst” (14) in preference to “prevents” since acting in this fashion (acting “So” [14]) actually “comes before” (pre-venio)—that is, “gets the start of” or “preempts”—the wasteful and thievish action of wasting time itself, redoubling the effect of time’s destructive forces.

If one pulls back to view the poem entire, it clearly stands as a naked contradiction in terms. How can the speaker’s urging the Muse to return to “gentle numbers” (6) as a way to redeem her wasted “furie” (3) in having composed “worthlesse song” (3) be reconciled with his urging in Q3 that she recommit herself to a poetic “furie” that would pen pointless satires to decay? But no such self-contradictory advice is evident if the couplet is not an imperative but a warning not to waste yet more time. Then Q3 can embody the “gentle numbers” that might redeem time wasted in poetic furies dedicated to “worthless song.” Q3’s “My love’s sweet face” (9) need not refer to the beloved young man but to the Bard’s sweet feeling of love directed to his beloved readers who may properly “esteeme” these “laies” (7) in that when they recognize the open face of love in them they will rightly determine that the poet who wrote them has no apprehension on account of time’s eternal youth, no apprehension that might “wrincle” his brow in consternation or anxiety or urge him to wasteful action. His Muse need never resort to satiric verses expressing bitterness at his inability to preserve the things he values from time’s decay because for him it is only in time that his “loves sweet face” can show itself unharried, its delight undimmed, to and in those he loves, without the slightest concern for personal or poetic repute for it. Should devoted readers give this sort of love fame’s most authentic currency by emulating it, they would “prevenst” time’s “sieth, and crooked knife” (14) by disarming time of these terrifying weapons completely.

Notes

1. Booth’s analysis in An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets is a locus classicus, 69–84.

2. Compare to Ferry 42, remarking on the speaker’s “speaking . . . cruelties directly to his friend” in a sonnet whose last word, “dead,” “rings out with frightening finality.”

3. The reading developed here clearly takes exception to Joel Fineman’s argument that love’s babe “amounts to an abortion” (266) in that its growth must be “permanently stunted because incomparable to itself” (269).

4. One of The Perjured Eye’s profoundest insights is the peculiar deathliness of Shakespeare’s claims to immortality for his friend: “praise . . . colored by an elegiac mood . . . more appropriate for a funeral remembrance of things past than for a celebration of things current” (50). There is, Fineman adds, something “necrophiliac” (157) in Shakespeare’s elegiac praise that remains “oddly morbid in its iconicity, as in Sonnet 55, where the poet’s ‘living record of your memory’ gloomily memorializes a kind of living death” (157).

5. In A Window to Criticism, Krieger claims that 65 “is at least as resentfully respectful of time’s universal powers as was 64. . . . But out of this almost unbounded awe issues the unreasonable alternative as an almost unbelievable counter-assertion” (70). Ferry’s claim to the contrary (15–19) is unimpressive.

6. Citing Booth’s Shake-speare’s Sonnets 229, Lars Engle notes: “Even as [lines 7-8] assert the immortality of the poem [they] remind a reader of the flimsiness and vulnerability of anything written on paper” (Toward Shakespearean Pragmatism 39). Compare to Felperin 103 and 119.

7. Ferry calls 18’s couplet an “arrogant claim” (12) that only “boasts of [the speaker’s] power in rivalry with death’s ‘brag’” (13).

8. Ferry’s analysis of 54 (29–35) is particularly elucidating on its darker insinuations.

9. Roessner claims that the speaker’s advice to the Muse in the couplet does nothing more than “push back the inevitable” (367).

10. “Rather than rescuing the friend from ‘decay,’” the Muse’s Satire will merely “publish its destruction of his lovely appearance” (Ferry 38). Compare to Roessner 366.