Chapter Four

The Procreation Group

As Vendler rightly observes, Sonnet 1 serves as “preface” and “index” to the sequence. In its annunciation of so many of the “values, images, and concepts important” (47) throughout the cycle, it rebukes niggardliness. Weaving figures from horticulture and marital fertility vis à vis sterile self-preoccupation into the paradoxes of “famine [in] aboundance” (7) and “wast in niggarding” (12), the speaker takes to task his “tender chorle” (12), the peerless “Rose” (2) of beauty who is “now the worlds fresh ornament” (9). In a tone mingling admiration, affection, and rebuke, he warns him that the only avoidance of sinful complicity on this side of the “grave” (14) in the crime worms perpetrate against humanity on the other is to “increase” (1) “now” (9). Thus at the very inception of things he places front and center the emblematic distinction and choice to be made everywhere in the sequence between being’s magnification and its diminishment, between a re-deemed paradisal world in which love’s babe is the lively enaction of the divine injunction to increase and multiply and a postlapsarian desert in which humanity’s “rude will” does nothing but expend itself over and over in a thriftless “waste of shame” (129:1).

The “increase” the Bard and his ever disquieted alter ego mean to encourage, however, is quite distinct. For Shake-speare, the “Rose” of beauty is not a species to be nurtured, cultivated, and improved, but a singularly lovely paragon to be preserved, progeny serving to keep him one step ahead of the devil seeking his due. In l.10 he narrows all life’s hope, in fact, to the addressee as the “only herauld to the gaudy spring,” whose loss is the speaker’s fearful anxiety. For him, “increase” does not represent life abounding but the production of a “tender heire” (4) as inferior “coppy” (11:14) whose greatest virtue would be to “beare [the ever receding] memory” (4) of its progenitor, he himself an inadequate memorial replica of his dead ancestor’s beauty. For Shake-speare the fact that the beloved must die leads him not to make the most of his time with him; it leads him to a barren “increase” in his desire for an already absent presence (himself “making a famine where aboundance lies” [7] before him), even if the youth should beget a child in whose face the speaker might see ghostly traces of it at a further remove.

Utilizing a sententious manner that hides his self-interested stake in the youth’s purported paideia, the speaker employs the “we” (1) of a consensus gentium to distinguish between his wisdom and the pointless narcissism of the “thou” he rebukes in Q2 and Q3. “Contracted” (5) to no marriage directed toward “increase,” the beloved is comically pilloried in his vanity as a being “betrothed” only to his own “bright eyes[’]” (5) mirroring reflection, a laughably infertile “contraction” of spirit. The addressee’s “lights flame” (6) of desire (absent a change of heart) will soon gutter when the “selfe substantiall fewell” (6) of its own being exhausts itself in narcissistic yearning.1 Even more “cruell[y]” (9) deprivational than the coldest courtly mistress could be to her lover’s petitioning, in his purely self-gratifying desire, not only has the youth’s selfishness (his “selfe” [9]) become its own foe in clamoring for what it already possesses, but it has “also” (“too” [8]) and “excessively” (“too cruell[y]”) become foe to the “sweet [potential] selfe” (8) his short-sightedness shackles within. As “the worlds . . . only herauld to the gaudy spring” (9–10), the beloved owes it more than the folly of burying “thy content” (11)—both his “substance” and his “happiness”—within in fear, its own rose’s unopened “bud” (11) forfeiting a grander efflorescence in a miser’s hoarding embrace of itself, beauty, and grandeur withheld.

Though the speaker does not appear to recognize that the basis of his plea depends almost exclusively on an appeal to the very narcissism the body of the poem reproaches, in the end he urges the youth to reproduce himself as an act of “pitty” directed to the world or else continue to be mocked as an ever-famished “glutton” (13) feeding on himself from within while alive just as the worms will once he is dead.

Though anyone would be flattered by all this admiring attention being paid his merit, it is difficult to imagine that the speaker’s suasion stands much of a chance to effect the change he desires. If the object to be “shared” is the self imagined as a meal to be devoured—feeding nothing but “appetite”—what reason could a gluttonous “chorle” have for preferring that the “world” (14) get its “fair share” when, alternatively, he alone might feed to his heart’s content on the world’s fresh ornament in private? The speaker’s lack of a compelling logic thus drains his humorous accusation of its power to shame. If expelled “wast” (12) is the end result no matter how one might eat or be eaten, what difference does it make whether one is “niggardly” or open-handed with the beauty one has been given? As Hammond insightfully observed, the “horror of death” the imagery in the procreation group mines outstrips “the proposed consolation” (23).

True good will/Will means to tell a different story entirely. He takes full advantage of the themes of love sonnet sequences generally and the consistent abstraction of the poem’s figurative diction to throw readers off the scent initially. If he had not, l.2’s indefinite “thou” might well tip the poet’s hand prematurely. The mystifying context we stumble upon here when, ignorant of subsequent sonnets’ clarifications, we first hear the poem voice itself, leaves us to wonder (rather foolishly it turns out) who this completely unspecified “thou” might be. Should we not ever come to imagine, however, that the poem may be addressed to each of us personally, the poet’s joke will remain as much on us as on his ever-unsettled persona. For Shake-speare l.1’s “increase” stands as a verb, with vain “desire” (1) as its perpetually unrealized object; but the Bard’s deeper point is that “increase” can be a substantive functioning as the object that human “desire” can always act upon and indeed realize. As 2’s organizing allusion to the parable of the talents immediately hereafter establishes, the “increase” the Bard desires has nothing to do with the vain, zero-sum reproduction of ourselves, but only with the quasi-divine multiplication of being’s unfolding riches. Those who care to father children of limitless promise in nurturing love will never do so at someone else’s bidding, merely to “breed” (12:14) copies of themselves whose only apparent purpose is to “beare [their] memory” once they themselves have died. They will do so out of the fullness of their own hearts overflowing in the glorious anticipation that “thereby beauties Rose might never die” (2). The “Rose” the Bard admires so is not Shake-speare’s singular specimen to be appropriated, but the true vine of eternity, a fecund stability in flux, in the cultivation of which all “thous” are urged and invited to share.

In his voice there is no hint of his surrogate’s eugenic elitism (compare to 11); the Bard’s world is not one of special privilege in which breeding is to be reserved solely for the “fairest creatures” (1) in physical grace. Once we realize that the Bard’s manifesto is a challenging invitation to each of us personally, we likewise realize that he does not divide the world into one beautiful specimen who should be kept to breed and the “harsh, featureless and rude” remainder who should “barrenly perrish” (11:10); for him all the begetters he addresses and joins as one should increase, their “fairness” not the random blessing of genetic inheritance, but accomplishments of character and good will from which his every hope is for yet more of the same. The inclusively distributive and deeply personal “thou” has been directed for its own good to turn away from the sterile folly outlined in Q2 to a vigorous exercise of humanity’s latent powers of increase, allowing each of us to tease out the buried “bud” (11) into “beauties Rose” (2) fully flowering. Thus the singularity of the persona’s “only herauld” trumpeting itself can come to see that doing so makes it “only” the herald of the burgeoning season itself rather than a far, far better thing, a living Rose blooming vigorously, a growing part and parcel of the burgeoning “spring” itself. In other words, we can be changed, changed utterly from a “fresh [yet otiose and sterile] ornament” (9) of Being into the very substance of divine plenitude itself.

Shake-speare’s “tender heire” (4) inherits a diminished “estate” in which the bequest given is nothing more substantial than a phantom image of loveliness lost; but for the Bard, the heir is not himself “tender” or “vulnerable.” He is instead an heir that “tends,” a being who, as nurse or gardener, is a “tender” of “beauties Rose.” Even when the bush’s “riper” (3) blooms fade and die away in the natural course of things, he “beares” not merely the memory of a once-glorious past but the memory of the art he practices in improving the cultivar. The antecedent of l.4’s “his” need not be a singularly lovely specimen in presently withering flower but the “Rose” itself, every bloom’s progenitor. The tender of roses joys in that what the bush has once produced may be renewed, regenerated, improved, and multiplied over and over again. The concluding couplet need not represent Shake-speare’s exaggerated flattery urging the youth to a “pitty” (13) for the world, the young man’s only reason for honoring his injunction the condescension of a vain noblesse oblige; it might stand as the Bard’s earnest effort to persuade each and every one of us to sustain ourselves with a fair share of the world’s goods, our “pitty” for the world in doing so the charis of a generous sense that we all share equally in the need for the increase that sustains us. The fundamental choice is an all or nothing contingency: either we shall be known by the fruits we cultivate and share or everything will simply go to waste no matter how gluttonously we might serve appetite, confirming nothing more substantial than the pitiless law of diminishing returns.

As a portion of a broader discussion of how an underlying sense of mutability outstrips the seemingly hopeful advice the speaker offers in the initial group of sonnets, Hammond (19) declares of 3:

[T]he prospective child functions as memory, an excuse for age, and a vision in age of past golden time. This may be some consolation but to see it as a [salvific] vision is to suppress the forcefulness of the image of decay and death which these sonnets present.

The couplet plumps for propagation on the basis of an unnerving alternative. Should the addressee not heed the speaker’s injunction, then, like Narcissus, he will “Die single” and the child he might have fathered (as well as the phantasmal object he and the persona worship)—“thine Image”—will die “with thee” (14). By combining with such cleverness an accusation of narcissism (following up on ll.7–8) with the wasted opportunity to generate a child, the speaker may well feel that he has cornered his interlocutor rhetorically. Two things show, however, that the couplet does not administer a coup dê grace. The first is the implicit contradiction built into the couplet’s diction when the speaker describes the addressee’s progeny as merely “thine Image.” The speaker wants to make use of the self-defeating implications of narcissism to win the addressee over to propagating an “other” (2); but to describe that “other” as nothing more than “thine Image” fails to distinguish narcissism’s phantasmal inconsequence from a reality of greater substance. In other words, the very appeal he makes in the couplet against narcissism argues its case by appealing to it—seemingly without awareness of the contradiction—in the same breath. Despite the fact that the speaker may well believe he has had the last word in this argument at poem’s end, if the addressee should take “thine Image” as an allusion to the child he might sire, what forbids him the rejoinder: “True, if I do not sire a child, my potential progeny will die with me; but if I were to father the child, wouldn’t that dim reflection of my beauty itself soon come to nothing? Doesn’t begetting progeny merely delay the inevitable? Of what use to me would keeping my ‘Image’ with me be, when to do so can no more satisfy my immortal yearnings than Narcissus’ image in the pool did his?”

Other mixed signals in the quatrains add to the second thoughts the couplet evinces to undermine the speaker’s hopes to win the addressee over. Though the upshot of Q1 is simply that the addressee should impregnate “some mother” (4), isn’t the context of vain self-preoccupation upon which it rests so overt and potentially comical that the speaker risks giving offense in his flattery? Might not anyone with an ounce of self-consciousness feel he is being made a laughingstock if asked to look in a mirror and then tell the reflection he lingers over there that now, in his perfection, he should reproduce that beauty in a child? The female receptacle of his seed is clearly of no consequence: she is simply “some mother,” waved away with the back of the speaker’s hand, an “un-eard wombe” (5) to be ploughed. Nor is the child itself of any consequence; it functions as nothing more substantial than the punning “repaire/[re-pere]” (3) of a face scrutinizing its beauty for any sign of its own diminishment, intent solely on gilding the lily of its present physical perfection with a superfluous cosmetic “touch-up.” Just how vain would the addressee have to be not to feel embarrassed by such a characterization of his being in the world? Isn’t it more than a bit much for the speaker to insinuate that the addressee’s impregnation of any “un-eard wombe” will convert the female so graced into a latter-day “blessed mother” (compare to l.4) bearing unto the world that world’s divine salvation?

Q3 seemingly argues: just as your mother recaptures “the lovely April of her prime” in your beauty, so should you in old age, “dispight of wrinkles” (12), maintain contact with your own prime in that of your son, should you reproduce. But it is demeaning to imagine that the only noteworthy aspect of a mother’s relationship to her offspring would be the child’s capacity to remind her of the bittersweet image of her own otherwise lost prime. If the addressee should be as vain in fact as the speaker presumes him to be, how much consolation will he be able to take in a child who will remind him, as he reminds his own mother, that above and beyond the humiliating insult of his aging appearance, the son who resembles him as he once was will now supplant him in “this thy goulden time” (12)? If this is alone what the image of the child will represent once born, the addressee might well reject the speaker’s petition and prefer to “Die single,” since then the recollection of this image of supplantation might better be kept out of sight and out of mind.

No such double-edged messages trouble the Bard’s advice. He knows that both Luxuria and Prudence are iconically identified by mirrors. The “glasse” (1)—whether mirror or hourglass—into which he would have readers take a long hard look is not one before which we are urged to talk idly to ourselves in foolish self-preoccupation, imagining that the world would be beguiled and every woman in it crestfallen were we not to grace their “un-eard wombes” with some trace of our magnificence. For him, if 2’s good stewards, we have no time to lose in such folderol. L.3’s “fresh repaire” for him represents no superfluous attention to a cosmetic beauty regimen; it is the unending opportunity to re-deem the time. Whether it is l.2’s “now” or “an other” that we “repaire” (and macaronically “re-pere”), it is ever anew a “now” (3) that we may “renewest” for our own and the world’s benefit. The “other” that summons us to renewing action need not be an inert duplicate copy of ourselves generated in idle self-satisfaction, the “tombe” (7) guarded by miserly self-love to “stop posterity” (8). It should be, instead, a transfiguring contrast to such self-regard, a re-deeming sense of self that looks beyond reflections of what is, no matter how lovely, to an image of self and time “whose fresh repaire” is that self’s sole and ameliorating concern. However “faire” within herself already, what woman would “disdain the tillage” or “cultivation” of an enriching “husbandry” (6) of that sort? What man could be so foolishly self-absorbed that he would “stop” such greater “posterity” (8) merely to spend his entire life fondly digging his own “tombe”(7)?

In the volta the Bard enunciates a new figure, one closely related to the “glasse” of l.1—the addressee now seen as his or her “mothers glasse” (9). For the Bard, l.11’s “so” does not mean “in the same way” nor need it signal a separate construction in ll.11–12 paralleling 9–10; it continues the same construction begun in 9 if “so” is taken to mean “in order that.” The standard gloss of the first half of l.9 is that the image of her son is one that reminds the mother of her own youth; but what if l.9’s “in” does not mean “in order that” but “within”? Then, the reflected image of the mother in the “lovely Aprill of her prime” may well live everlastingly, “dispight of wrinkles” that have come with her aging, in the unaging recollection of her that her appreciative child cherishes. This—not a vain replica of ourselves—is the “other” (2) that the Bard would have us reflect upon and repair/“re-pere” in order to deliver us from sterile self-preoccupation and not “unblesse” (4) our own mothers, whose unstinting care for us has made everything still possible in our lives. That caring image rightly re-cognized, repaired, and reciprocated within us transforms involuted vanity mirror into our cleansed eyes’ “windowes” (11) upon a livelier world, a window that, despite distorting “wrinkles” (12) in its glass (no more incapacitating than the wrinkles in our aging faces), still and ever allows visionary wonder before “this thy goulden time” (12). The re-deemed vision of a “goulden” age about which the Bard speaks is not a single, now-lapsed moment of perfection haplessly condemned to its own diminishment, but all time itself—every “now” (3)—endlessly capable of generating a locus amoenus where “beauties Rose might never die” (1:2). In the couplet, with a wink and a nod to the figure he has been elaborating in Q3, the Bard transforms Shake-speare’s self-satisfying flattery of a personal favorite into a consequential challenge to each of the readers he would nurture. If we fail to live and love as did our blessed mothers, memorably, so that both we and the world might be “remembred” (13) in new life’s fresh repaire/“re-pere,” not only shall we merely waste away one by one but the redeeming “Image” (14) or reflection of our capacity for blessed mothering shall likewise perish without living progeny.

Despite its conspicuous paradoxes (“Unthrifty lovelinesse” [1], “beautious nigard” [5], and “profitles usurer” [7]), 4 proves to be one of the most straightforward poems in the entire sequence. The speaker hopes to correct his mute interlocutor without alienating him, his stark criticism softened and balanced by lavish praise. (He or she is “beauties legacy” [2] and “bountious largesse” [6] of “so great a summe of summes” [8]—as in 1 a “sweet selfe” [10] needlessly diminished.) The correction forwards themes announced throughout the early stages of the procreation group—1’s “wast in niggarding” (12); the good steward’s wise investment of what his master “lend[s]” (4:3) so that, as in 2, he can “sum [his] count” (2:11), returning 6’s “ten for one” (8) when asked for an acceptable “Audit” (4:12) [compare to Matthew 25:14–30].

Yet in the midst of this straightforwardly repetitive questioning, some mysteries abide, namely the identity of the addressee and for that matter the exact nature of the “legacy” (2) he or she should “give” (6) so as properly to “execute” his will. Context clues from surrounding sonnets may not leave readers scratching their heads for long over this issue, but when the speaker’s advice is taken to be a rebuke of the addressee’s quasi-onanistic folly (compare to 1–2, 9) in favor of begetting a child who might sum his count and “live th’ executor to be” of the addressee’s legacy, the argument begins to eat away at its own intended effect. In begetting a child, one may have provided for an executor to one’s estate, but the risk of familial betrayal argues that that is no guarantee the executor may not betray the trust placed in him. The pun operative in “executor” allows the couplet to hide a mordant irony instead of a salvific transcendence of death. It is true that whatever beauty goes “unus’d” (13) gets buried with us; but is that any more troubling than the use of our beauty to generate offspring that may merely “live th’ executor to be” of our peace of mind in our shared lifetime, the child only then to be supplanted in its turn? Yet again Shake-speare seems to have said more than he had hoped. There is simply no failsafe way to secure the rich legacy one hopes to perpetuate.

No such disconcerting double take troubles the poem’s ending, however, if we hear in it the Bard’s address to an indefinite yet enduring line of readers. Then the turn from wasteful “traffike with thy selfe alone” (9) to good stewardship of nature’s “bequest” (7) to each of us need not die when we pay our debt to nature but may “live” (14) beyond our bodily decay, the “executor to be” of our good will: that spirit which is the “better part” (74:8) of each of us, the executor “of being” itself’s increase.

Were it not for the context clues surrounding poems seemingly provide, readers would have little indication that 5 is a figurative injunction to a young man to marry and reproduce when it draws its contrast between the “inexorable destructions of time” and “an apparently available defense here named ‘distillation’” (Vendler 66). But no sooner has one drawn that inference than unintended effects make themselves felt. Not only is the description of one’s offspring as the distilled essence derived from the parent, a “liquid prisoner pent in walls of glasse” (10), a peculiarly “uninviting analogy with a disturbingly lifeless end product” (Weiser 10), but the insinuation that paternity represents an effective transcendence of death’s tyranny seems almost laughably unpersuasive. Perfumes, even those distilled from “beauties Rose,” have limited life spans of their own, one is tempted to remind the speaker. The couplet’s effort to identify the young man’s physical decline with the inconsequential “show” (14) of a beauteous flower fading while arguing that his willingness to father a child will mean the preservation of “substance” (14) is itself more show than substance—a hapless defiance of tempus edax as “thriftless” as anything 2 earlier demonstrated. In this way, the poem “fails to imagine resolution” effectively when it would seemingly persuade the young man to turn from the mirroring “glasse of selfe-love” (3.1) to the “walls of glasse” in which a distillation is “pent” (5.10) (Freinkel 199). Indeed, how truly different, figuratively speaking, is the vanity mirror the speaker rejects in 3 from 5’s child conceived in terms as aptly descriptive of a Renaissance mirror’s construction as it is of a perfume flask? Vanity mirror might be thought to have been displaced by yet another.

The poem makes a more compelling case, however, if it is not finally a warning to the youth, but a gracious one to readers. The redeeming “essence” for which the Bard argues is not a mere “show” of defiance toward death by means of a perfume that can mask the smell of corruption only temporarily; it is an ever-lively, regenerational “substance” (14) in which throughout all time men and women are free to “dwell” (2) at ease and in fulfillment, “still” living “sweet” (14). Time need not be what the persona imagines, merely a looming threat to human well-being, a mad artist who forms beautiful faces only then to “play the tirant” (3) and deface them, soon enough rendering “unfaire” that which “fairely doth excell” (4). For the Bard, Time is instead a creative helpmate to be lovingly embraced. “Those hours” (and we as laboring “howers” [1] in Q) in our “gentle worke” (1) can together create or “frame” (1) not only sustaining yield but also the “lovely gaze” (2) itself “where every eye [‘I’ and ‘aye’]” can “dwell” in the satisfaction of “this thy goulden time” and there “still live sweet” (14). This “lovely gaze” is not a metonym for a specific person as love object the speaker would like to control; it is a way of looking upon the world in appreciation and creative gratification.

Q2 in this reading then goes on to explain how our psychic “fall” takes place. In the poem’s second quatrain—one that slides by Q’s period at the end of l.7 unobserved—Shake-speare finds himself frozen in fear at the specter of wintry ruin awaiting us all. For the Bard, Q2 is no such thing; it is an explanation of the way that, with more productive options neglected, we play the tyrant to terrorize ourselves in this fashion rather than opt to continue to “dwell” (2) and “still live sweet” (14) in the “gentle worke” (1) of time’s creative gestation. The perverse time the poet analyzes here is not the “howers that . . . gentle worke” (1); it is the hours of a “never resting” (5) time that, like the first speaker in Q2, gets ahead of itself in imagining Summer led on to “hidious winter” (6) and confounded there, “Sap checkt with frost and lustie leav’s quite gone / Beauty ore-snowed and barenes every where” (7–8; with Q’s l.7 period occluded)—all, ironically, “ere Summer half be done” (V&A 802). It is not so much beauty or “Summer” or the young man’s “lovely gaze” that “never resting time . . . confounds” (5–6) with winter’s chill, “sap checkt with frost” (7). The “him” (6) that is confounded “there” (6) in this winter of the spirit’s discontent is but an indefinite reference that includes in its critique any restless spirit so lost in anxiety about future decline that it cannot enjoy or profit from the present vigor and warmth of “this thy goulden time.”

L.8’s seeming continuity with the previous line and the standard structural expectation that the volta will coincide with Q3’s beginning make it perfectly understandable that the reader’s eye will bypass the period at the end of l.7 initially. But one’s recalibration of the new syntax allows the Bard’s fracturing Q2 in this curious fashion to lessen the antithetical force of Q3. With Q’s period reinstated, ll.8–14 may mean that nature possesses the power to renew our sense of the beautiful even after we may have “ore-snow’d” (8) all sense of it in the death-in-life of wintry fears, confounded by hidious winter’s “bareness every where” (8). “Then were not” the “distillation” (9) of “summers” (9) essence able with the revolving seasons periodically to thaw our spirits so that the sap might run again no matter how seemingly inert that essence may have become as “liquid prisoner pent in [ice’s] walls of glasse” (10), then “beauties effect” (11) along “with beauty” (11) would be lost entirely, beyond recollection or reinvigoration (“nor it nor noe remembrance what it was” [12]). In this new contextualization, the couplet would then declare: Summer’s distillation, its resurgent “essence,” is not lost with its “show” (14) of beauty; its renewing “substance” (14) “ever” or “still lives sweet” (14) no matter how deeply “ore-snow’d” (8), no matter what “hidious winter” (6) of the spirit it might “meete” (13).

The Bard may also intend Q3 to declare that in the “fallen” state of our consciousness outlined in Q1 and Q2, then did we not hope to preserve in memory some distilled essence for our imaginative consolation, living beauty as it fades would leave us totally “bereft” (11), all “remembrance” (12) of it lost to us in our snow-blinded distress. The couplet then would not be an expansion of the point made in Q3 but a reversal of it. Our world need not be one of pinched satisfactions where our only joys are tattered souvenirs, remnants of a lost loveliness and beauty. The poem’s ending need not restrict its meaning to an unconvincing defiance of death spoken over his shoulder by a man still in full metaphorical flight from it; it may be a confident declaration of faith by a being whose satisfied and “lovely gaze” at the life we can live is meant to attract us all. “Distil’d” (13) need not function as an adjective modifying “flowers” (13); it may be a participle describing the action of “winter” (13) when “with” (13) means “by.” “Meete” (13) may not be an intransitive verb but an adjective, meaning that in this distilling function winter is “meete” or “perfectly adapted to a particular situation” as an unlikely but significant agency of renewal. Finally, Q’s “leese” may not be the only recorded instance of an alternative spelling for “Lose”; it may mean “Lease” as in “put out over time [italics mine] for profitable return.” Then the couplet, recalibrating the declaration of winter’s value declared in Q3, would argue, not simply for memory’s inert saving remnant, but for being in flower through all time, a condition in both our blooming and its sweet perfume that may well enrich us, time’s lease holders. Its profit or loss to us personally is not the flower of being’s essence, however. Its “substance still lives sweet” (14) in the moveable feast at which ever-resurrected life’s joys and fruits manifest a divine plenitude to which our only proper response should be a bow.

When 6 reverts immediately to the imagery of the distillation of the essence of summer’s beauty in “some vial” (3) as a means of stymying “winters” defacing “hand” (1), its argument and tropes so clearly reiterate its predecessor’s that one may conclude the two poems are a double sonnet. But the contrasts between the two poems are as revealing as their obvious kinship. As if to confess the inadequacy of the figure of distilled perfume inertly stored as a convincing means of transcending death’s ravages, the poem’s “vial” exchanges chilly and inorganic “walls of glasse” (5:10) for the sustaining warmth of the female womb as the hidden preserve of the addressee’s “beautits treasure” (4) defiantly squirreled away from the threat of death’s pillage. The female womb, wed to the multiplying returns on the addressee’s “investment” (“ten of thine ten times refigur’d” [10]) promises a “living . . . posterity” (12) that the speaker would like to convince him will leave “death” (9) vanquished, not the youth, alternatively, “deaths conquest” (14).

“Less than convincing” in its logic (Vendler 72), the poem’s argument is not rendered more enticing by its crass hints of misogyny nor by its equation of impregnation with loans proffered at usurious rates. Given the proximity of 5, l.3’s “viall” conjures the image of a perfume flask; but the phrase “make sweet some viall,” given the last word’s homonymic duplicity in the vicinity of the word “sweet” also insinuates misogynistic contempt for the “vile” womb of woman—indeed, that of any and all women—“perfumed” to sweetness by male insemination alone. Nor can a boldly comical rhetorical reversal legitimizing usury completely sanitize the speaker’s identification of progeny with usurious returns on investment at rates as high as ten to one. Elizabeth may have legalized usury in 1571, but that act could not instantaneously erase centuries of opprobrium heaped on the practice, one still considered sinful. If “breed” (7) that “happies those that pay the willing lone” refers to the usurious loan’s beleaguered recipient, one cannot completely quarantine the giddy delight that would first attend securing the loan in one’s distress from the very different sort of “happiness”—more “exhausted relief” than “delight”—when, after years of unrelenting toil to repay it, the debtor is finally able to “pay” the loan’s last installment off. If the procreative usury that “happies those that pay the willing lone” refers to the act of the lending agent rather than to its recipient, the figure’s buried implications turn out to be no less ironic. Is the happiness of a creditor profiteering from the suffering of others morally justified, even if it should bring the creditor a return of ten for one? Wouldn’t acting on such grounds prove “selfe-wil[le]d” (13) behavior as egregious as that the speaker forbids in the couplet?

The Bard, by contrast, reads out a far more generous last will and testament to us, his legatees. In it he cautions that we not allow the winter of a fearful discontent of the spirit to “deface” (1) the “summer” (2) of our fecundity prematurely. The distillation of what is best in us is to “make sweet some viall” (3), transforming vile misery to sweet joy by means of love’s “treasure” (4) openly shared rather than self-protectively hidden away. Both parties to a “willing lone” (6) of this sort—a loan or bequest given without hope of gain at the expense of another nor accepted solely because of desperate distress, but one given in the mutual trust of reciprocal love. Only a “lone” of this generous sort can “happy those that pay” (6) it in kindness exchanged. This is the one truly blameless form of “usery” (5): “that use” (5) that in investing talents to multiply good blessedly returns ten for the one it was given, as in Matthew’s parable. This “selfe” that “breed[s] an other thee” (7) is not an agent of reproduction merely, making relatively worthless copies of a priceless original in self-preoccupation. This self that breeds “an other thee” is instead a transformative disposition earned within, aiming to improve the species by improving the self—realizing “an other thee” (7) in place of the “selfe-wild” (13) self. That loving identification with and engagement to others can multiply happiness by a factor of ten (9) and, thereafter, in that ten squared (10).

Should the “self-wild” (13) self not seize upon this transformational capability, the Bard knows, the self in its passivity will simply become “deaths conquest” (that is, an “estate acquired otherwise than by inheritance”) even before the leaseholder’s demise; but if the self takes appropriate advantage of its freedom to pass on anything of worth it cares to in love for others, that generous bequest can bypass death’s default claim upon the self’s legacy. With our generous forethought exercised, death can seize nothing but our bodies from us; indeed, it must “leave” us “living in posterity” (13), alive and sustained “into perpetuity” in the very “goods” we have bequeathed to others. Will-I-Am Shake-speare may unpersuasively boast that death can be outmaneuvered simply by producing more of our kind to survive us; but the Bard argues more effectively that death can only be transcended by a legacy of kindness perpetuated in our renewed life among others now and hereafter.

In 7 the Bard’s fictive surrogate makes the case for procreative self-duplication based on his satirical view of the world’s corrupted and shifting allegiances wherein anyone’s rising star will elicit “homage” (3) only so long as it continues to rise (Q2) or “sustain its beneficiaries”; but once that star’s “wery car, / Like feeble age” (9–10) begins to set, those who once offered calculating homage and adoration will turn their eyes away from the declining luminary to “looke an other way” (12) for a benefactor more able to shower them with the favors they seek. (Booth cites Tilley 5979: “The rising, not the setting sun, is worshipped by most men.”) Consequently, if the young luminary the speaker worships should hope not to die eclipsed, neglected, and alone (“Unlokt on” [14]), he should now, while he still possesses “strong youth” (6) generate a “sonne” [sun] (14) of his own to attend him with reassuring companionship (“sonne”) and illumination (“sun”) as his “goulden pilgrimage” (8) proceeds into black night.2

The aphoristic injunction in the couplet cannot quite seal the deal, however. If the speaker’s knowing satirical gaze can so clearly discern the world’s faithless ways, why does he not recognize in his own advice here but another cautionary illustration of fair-weather friendship? If indeed he truly worships the youth as the ceaseless “homage” his poetry offers would insist, why then does he risk identifying himself with the loveless lip service of the worldly by threatening him coldly with dying alone in a bereft and enfeebled old age to come unless he has a son? Have sons never been known to desert infirm parents? Why doesn’t the speaker put some distance between himself and the ways of the world by now vowing fidelity to the beauteous youth till death do them part?

Bearing a son would do more to intensify the problem the speaker stipulates than to solve it. In terms of the figure that dominates the quatrains, the sudden appearance of a new son/sun in the firmament will actually grease the skids for worldly defections from the setting star to the rising one. How would that ease the addressee’s troubled mind in his eclipse? Or if the son should truly love his father rather than yearn impatiently to displace him and, for his part, the father truly love his son, not simply hope to take advantage of him by siring a warm body to dance attendance upon his “highness” as he sinks ever lower into the dying of the light, what consolation to either would it be that the addressee’s son will one day need to “look on” helplessly at his father’s decline?

The veiled allegory here, however, tells a different story. The history of critical response to this sonnet confirms that the path of least resistance to sense in it has been to construe the poem as a generalized narrative exemplum developed in clearly sequential stages (each discretely articulated in its own quatrain) followed by a couplet that draws a “moral” from it, recommending procreation as a self-interested prudential hedge against a lonely and inevitable decline in a world where true devotion is seemingly but a chimera.

Understood in that fashion, however, the speaker’s stance in the poem traps us in the liar’s paradox. If human relations are as false as the speaker would insist here, why should the addressee trust the speaker? In terms of the underlying figure in which the speaker urges him to father a child, why should the addressee believe that he has now solved his problem when in old age he is to be “lok’d on” dying by his own son? In the paragon’s decline wouldn’t the child watching him die also be “keeping his other eye out” for some new source of benefit to be determined by looking “an other way” (12) to find a better way his bread might be buttered?

Moreover, how would the father’s so “get[ting] a sonne”/[sun] (14) of his own for companionship and guiding illumination free him from subtly implicating himself in the same bad faith the speaker satirizes in the poem’s body since now he would be serving with looks the sacred majesty of his son only so long as that son/sun served his own calculating interests? If the addressee’s sole reason for begetting a child is to produce someone to dance attendance upon him, were his child to fail to deliver on this unspoken compact, wouldn’t it be likely that the father would then “looke an other way” (12) just as faithlessly?

Can readers escape these disconcerting feedback loops? The most evident cue to a more self-consistent directive to readers rests in the couplet’s seemingly summational “so” (13). On the assumption that the structural design of the poem is tripartite parable, one would expect that l.13’s “so” should introduce the moral of the story, but instead these last two lines restrict themselves logically to the situation outlined in Q3 alone—a curious effect reinforced when “out-going” (13) is taken as a possible allusion to this heavenly luminary’s own extinction as it “reeleth from the day” (10) and not alone as a reference to how that same star out-goes or “paces-forth” progressively on its golden pilgrimage. Thus, an alternative structural principle presents itself alongside the first—an antithesis between the octave and the sestet. Q1 need not simply conjure up a satirical portrait of a roi soleil whose all-too-human “majesty” (4) is honored as “sacred” (4) only because his retainers live “under [a scrutinizing] eye” (2) from the threatening “glare” of their ruler’s “burning head” (2), their “homage” (3) one that dutifully offers service “with lookes” (4) but as little else as possible. Alternatively, Q1 may more wondrously depict—without satirical intent—the truly “sacred majesty” of the rising sun’s illumination of our otherwise darksome house, the “gracious light” (1) from its “burning head” (2) the epiphanic manifestation of a dying and resurrecting god’s liberation of us all from our otherwise blind impotence. The ambiguity of reference in l.3’s “his” allows that the “homage” we joyously offer for such benefice can represent both the deference we show to that luminary’s greater power than our own and the appropriate honor we may do to our own reflected glory—that capacity the sun gives that alone frees us to see and enjoy all that there is to be seen. Our greatest challenge on earth is our richly ambiguous capacity to “know our place among infinities.” When all our limitations have been scrupulously recognized, we yet remain free to explore our own limitlessness: “The best thing that we’re put here for’s to see” (Robert Frost “The Star-Splitter” 33).

Q2 could continue this line of thought. It may seem as if it is the heavenly luminary that is the understood subject of “having climbed the steepe up heavenly hill” (5); but according to the sentence’s syntax, it is l.7’s “yet mortall lookes” that in so climbing the heavenly hill “still” (7) remain capable of demonstrating “strong youth in . . . middle age” (6) by properly appreciating “beauty[,] . . . / attending on his goulden pilgrimage” (7–8). The ambiguity of reference in l.7’s “his”—like that in l.3—may imply that the reverential attention “yet mortall” human beings can show divine illumination is a deference to that power, which ever lies beyond adequate comprehension but which, nonetheless, may be apprehended ever more richly. Playing further upon the continuing ambiguity of pronominal reference initiated in Q1 and Q2, the sestet would then assert how our spirits may nevertheless fail their highest purposes. Though still perfectly capable of vigor, each and any of us may, “like feeble age” (10) reel “from the day” (10) still given us to illuminate our ascending way. Instead of proceeding to out-do ourselves in vigor and strength (“out-going” or “outstripping” ourselves “in [our] noon” [13]), we could simply extinguish our light (our selves “out-going” or “going out” in the very noon given to light our way) when, “converted” (11) from our “dutious” service to the most high, we “looke an other way” (12), short-sightedly. The penultimate line, with the end-stopping colon properly retained, thus wavers between communicating a heartening fact about our condition (the light given to overcome blindness) and a dire warning about the dying of our light should we “looke an other way” than in reverence for it. In this reading, the final line is not a dependent construction completing the previous line’s unsatisfying appeal to self-regard. Instead, it initiates a new, mildly imperative and modestly hopeful, construction warning of the fearful void awaiting us should we not, in emulation of the divine progenitor, ourselves “get”—in other words, “beget”—a son/sun to orient life more richly through its dazzling light.

Except for its musical focus, 8 seems an unexceptional reiteration of the procreation argument. Invoking the young man as “Musick to heare” (1), the speaker again implicitly urges him to marry and reproduce. That prospect should not put him off any more than “unions married” (6) of “well-tuned sounds” (5) should “offend thine eare” (6). In direct contrast to polyphonic music’s capacity to generate pleasing unity from multiplicity, his remaining “single” (14) in narcissistic self-preoccupation “wilt prove none” (14), simply wasting manhood inconsequentially.

The piece’s complexion takes on a richer color, however, should it not prove a tediously reiterated command to propagate but an address to readers it “sweetly chide[s]” (7). The traditional reading’s tortured vocative in l.1 can give way to a metapoetical address to individual readers as “thou” (1), to inquire puckishly how we can mistake or misprize what l.2 identifies as his sweet song—“Musick to heare” (1)—by hearing it “sadly” (1). In the “true concord” (5) of successful marriages (“unions married” [6] in life or art), “sweets warre not” (2) with the “sweets” to which they are wed; rather “joy delights in joy” (2). When he asks, “why lov’st thou that which thou receavst not gladly, / Or else receav’st with pleasure thine annoy?” (3–4), his consternation simultaneously calls up the life his readers are given to lead themselves even as it protests on his art’s behalf, urging a richer and more satisfying appreciation of both life and art. Compromising calculations of the sort ll.3 and 4 interrogate are chosen solely by those whose notions of intimacy are merely concerned with instrumental goods and not the embrace of mutual benefice to be had in the “music” we might yet make together. They are decidedly not a sign of the true concord of unions married wherein the polyphonic harmonies accomplished can make marital partners (like musical notes or voices) “being many” yet “seem one” (13) as “all in one” they “sing” one “pleasing note” (12).

To read the sequence alone in terms of the discordant notes the persona records rather than in terms of the more satisfying harmonies in the Bard’s “speechlesse song” (13) means that readers remain condemned to receive “with” what “pleasure” (4) they can—weak relief— a repeated “annoy” (4), at best loving “that which [they] receavst not gladly” (3) as they take in the sequence’s frustrating narrative. If one “confounds / In singlenesse the parts” that thou “should’st beare” (7–8) redoublingly, then “thou single wilt prove none” (14), where “none” here refers to life’s entropic decline. The harmonic “musick” (1) the Bard would have us hear and make cannot be accomplished when we bear these (the poems) and our “parts” alone; only in the “true concord” (5) of our married union to others, bearing our “part” to, among, and together with them can we become “sweet husband to an other” (9) (the Bard’s poems included) and harmonically generate “one pleasing note” made together in mutual joy. “Being many” can thus seem “one” (13); no such claim can be made for the reverse: one intent on remaining alone can never be united harmonically and creatively to “being[s] many” since one, as the jesting pun proves, can never be a “number.” Instead of generating more and greater good, the poet fears “thou single wilt prove none” (14).

Returning to the persuasive tactics railing against onanistic dissipation in Sonnets 1 and 4, the speaker in 9 makes his most impatient and withering protest yet of the young man’s blindly self-destructive ways: the “murdrous shame” he commits “on himselfe” (14). To the hint he drops of onanism meant to shame the addressee for “consum[ing] thy self in single life” (2), the spear-speaker (it takes one to know one) adds the sly erotic jest in l.1 that the addressee’s possible anxiety on behalf of his imagined widow may actually be face-saving cover for a callow anxiety about sexual consummation itself. Chiding the hypersensitive refinement alluded to in l.1, he warns the young man that there can be no escape from his causing the world grief by his “premature withdrawal” from it. If he should leave no bride to grieve his absence, the world itself “will be thy widdow” (5) and “waile thee like a makelesse wife” (4) jealously envying every “private widow[’s]” (7) ability to keep her husband’s shape alive whenever she looks into his “childrens eyes” (8). Overstating the situation wildly to flatter the auditor, he personifies a lonesome, inconsolable “world” thus left utterly bereft.

The sestet continues the raillery with an unflattering comparison between the wasteful death of the young man should he not propagate and the prodigality of a dissipated “unthrift” (9). Though the “unthrift” himself personally “shifts . . . his place” (10) from well-being to personal ruin, the capital he squanders will remain in circulation so that “still the worlde injoyes it” (10). The skittish narcissist’s dissipation, however, is a far more serious crime. The withheld beauty he wastes is sui generis: “kept unused,” paradoxically, its “user” (12) dissipates it once and for all. The “murdrous shame” (14) that he thus commits—by his own hand, so to speak—means that his “beauties waste hath in the world” a definitive “end” (11), with no warm womb to receive it and gestate new life. The addressee’s seemingly loving concern, previously imagined, devolves by poem’s end into the self-certain speaker’s blunt rebuttal: “no love toward others in that bosome sits / That on himselfe such murdrous shame commits” (13–14).

How could outlandish flattery and off-color ridicule of this sort prove pleasing? Once we discern, however, that “issulesse” (3) need not necessarily or even primarily be a reference to biological progeny, but rather a to a concern, more broadly speaking, with the kind of “increase” (1) Sonnet 1 had enjoined (such that “beauties Rose might never die,” its flowering ever more fruitfully tended), then both the melodramatic spectacle of a personified world wailing its lost paragon and the mocking sexual innuendo associated with the narcissism the first speaker conjured yields to a more abstract reflection. If even filthy lucre prodigally wasted still circulates in the world to do someone else some good, then surely none of us has any excuse whatever to “consumst thy selfe” (2) unlovingly, because, as the Bard would argue—without the slightest flattery or exaggeration—each of us possesses a uniquely valuable “currency” of our own in the world that may consume itself without a trace, benefitting no one. Were the Bard to keep this truth to himself, uncommunicated to those who might most benefit from it for fear of offense, then he, too would risk rebuke: “No love toward others in that bosome sits / That on himself such murdrous shame commits” (14).

Continuity between 9’s rebuke of the addressee’s “murdrous shame” (14) and 10 is immediately established by the indictment the speaker once again levels at the addressee’s “murdrous hate” (5), berating him “For shame” (1). In preemptive contempt for any objection his interlocutor may have previously made or might yet make, the speaker begins with a command that the addressee recant any claim to “bear’st” (1) love toward anyone at all—even himself (compare to ll.5–8). So “possest” (5) is his auditor by the devil of “murdrous hate” (5) that he doesn’t even have the sense left to act in his own best interest (“gainst thy selfe thou stickst not to conspire” [7]); instead he acts merely to “ruinate” (7) the “house” it should be his “chief desire” (8) to “repaire” (8) by “re-pere-ing” it. Nearly at wit’s end over the addressee’s failure to love, the speaker seems ready to give up on his protegé completely. The volta, however, summons up one last ditch appeal. As editors have often noted, the poem’s penultimate line surprises when for the first time the speaker softens and personalizes his appeal to the interlocutor in unexpectedly intimate terms. But given the level of frustration and impatience expressed throughout the sonnet, perhaps just as surprising is that the spur to the heart’s reform he would vocalize is the suddenly tender “for love of me” (13) when those of us overhearing the splenetic outburst preceding it probably expected the more idiomatic expletive “for the love of God” instead. In the couplet, when the speaker urges his beloved to “Make thee an other selfe” (13), it is clearly more than a simple repetition of his recurrent demand to “get a sonne” (7:14); if the youth is to prove “gracious” (11) and “kind harted” (12), he must show by his actions generally as well that he does indeed love others and himself, making of himself “an other selfe” (13) than he has been until now so “that beauty still may live in thine or thee” (14) and, thus, like 9’s currency, keep circulating in the world.

If none of these first poems have yet moved the addressee to propagate, it is difficult to imagine why this argument would tip the scale. The speaker’s expressions of exasperation are not likely to endear him to his interlocutor; indeed, they may even smack of the pot calling the kettle black, where in him, even more overtly than in the addressee, “hate” seems “fairer log’d then gentle love” (10). But if instead the Bard is heard chiding readers here, the poem’s tone modulates, if not initially, then certainly by poem’s end when the poet’s condemnation of narcissistic behavior has given way to his, and hopefully our, “gentle love” for the “gracious . . . and . . . kind harted” behavior he would in its place instill in us for good. The grace-bearing “presence” (11) he would inculcate and celebrate in his auditors is not a physical beauty he is attempting to preserve through biological replication but an engagement of the spirit with life and others just discussed in 9. When we hear this voice in the finale, l.14’s “that” ceases to mean “in order that” life may maintain a tenuous hold for a generation or two; instead, it becomes a demonstrative to which the Bard points reverently: the gracious and kind hearted beauty of love itself manifested beneficially whenever it lives “in thine or thee” (14). The poet’s inversion of the common idiom “thee and thine” in the final hemistitch is not elegant variation: it is an opportunity for him to declare that in the proper exercise of our powers a divine beauty and benefice abides not only in what we may have created or done (“thine”), but also in our very persons (“thee”).

Sonnet 13 reprises 10’s warning that a “faire . . . house” (9) may “fall to decay” (9), absent adequate “husbandry” (10). Here, too, it would appear, the only means to “uphold” (10) the young man’s beautiful house “in [a] lease” (5) without “determination” (6)—in other words, “indefinitely”—is to sire a “Son” (14).

The octave and sestet operate on two somewhat contradictory planes of argument. Though l.4’s talk of “sweet semblance” and the references to leaseholds that need “find no determination” (6) do loosely link Q1 and Q2 to the resolve, nevertheless the “octave argues for preservation of the individual self; the sestet for preservation of family lineage” (Vendler 102). A major consequence of this rhetorical divide is to render the advice of the sestet largely beside the point as a resolution to the sense of personal disturbance the octave rouses despite the utility of the sestet’s logic as a prescribed antidote to wasteful dissipation of resources. The sestet can do nothing to exorcise the devil of an impending personal decay whose chilling breath lurks in the darker recesses of the octave. Saving one’s house from “decay” (9) is not an exact equivalent to saving oneself from decay. Can fathering a “Son” restore one’s own health to one who has not “been himself” lately (the implication of the first half of l.1), especially if, near the phrase “selfes decease” (7) and the eighth line of 12, “beare” your “sweet forme” (8) should conjure the thought of a son bearing his father’s bier to his grave. Nothing in the sestet can manage to erase the cumulative impression these hints leave that the life we “hold in lease” (5) will have a definitive expiration date, its “determination” settled by the death of the leaseholder, if by nothing short of it.

The Bard sings more self-coherently. In his song octave and sestet play not two discordant tunes, but one harmonious one. Addressing each of us as “deare . . . love” (13) who may yet misprisingly prove “unthrifts” (13), his sweet chiding argues for increase, not dissipation of the “estate” we inherit. When he refers to the “beauty which you hold in lease” (5) and the “faire . . . house” (9) we inhabit, he is not speaking of one boy’s youthful body, but the lovely spirit we may all share. The “selfe” (7) we are and may yet become is not an exteriority destined for decay but a welcoming interiority, our true home, that may be husbanded “in honour” (10) and shared undyingly with others. The warming spirit of love that animates it can always and everywhere prove safe haven from whatever “stormy gusts of winters day” (11) or “barren rage of deaths eternall cold” (12) may loom beyond it. Indeed, no external challenge can destroy the leasehold’s security. So long as the “selfe here lives” (2) (itself working “heir” to this estate), the self may sustain itself and even multiply in health and vigor, passing its “sweet semblances” (4)—its “tokens” of itself—on to others in loving gestures as the Bard does his “semblances” in the figures of his verse. “So should that beauty which you hold in lease / Find no determination” (5–6) whatever since in passing love’s estate from leaseholder to leaseholder, that beauty never knows weakening nor limit. This “house of the spirit” can decay only from the inside out: its canker, “beauty within itself” narcissistically “wasted” (V&A 130). The loving self, by contrast, knows only to increase and multiply: “You had a Father, let your Son say so” in love’s grateful reciprocation. In this way the fair house of love may remain “re-pered,” the “sweet issue” (8) of our love tokens bearing our “sweet forme” (8) through them and with them and in them into resurrected life such that “you selfe again” (7) “here live” (2) richly, wholly alive presently even “after your selfes decease” (7).

On its face, 11 argues (once again less than convincingly) how a “purely vicarious triumph over time” (Weiser 7) can overcome the young man’s mortal estate. In declaring how Nature “carv’d thee for her seale” (13), the speaker clearly hopes to persuade his young nonpareil to go to stud. But even as he attempts to close that deal in the couplet, his own words eat away at their effectiveness from within. Even authorized “seales” eventually wear down, no longer able to serve their purpose. Is there, then, anything the young man can in fact do “not” to “let that coppy die” (14)? If he carefully contemplates what he is being asked to do here, what would prevent him from quoting Yeats as rejoinder:

What youthful mother . . .

Would think her son did she but see that shape,

With sixty winters on its head

A compensation for the pang of his birth

Or the uncertainty of his setting forth? (“Among School Children”)

What’s more, the doubts the couplet raise are really the least of the ambiguities the speaker’s words unwittingly inspire. What, for example, is more likely to depopulate the earth and “make the world away” in “threescoore year” (8): an insistence that those squeamishly reluctant to have children be obliged to do so or a eugenic program that would rule out breeding for any and all deemed “harsh, featurelesse, and rude” (10)? What living beings, one might ask, hath nature “not made for store” (9)? Who has the authority to determine the few prize specimens to be kept as “store” animals in this selective breeding program? Isn’t such presumptuous gall itself more “harsh, featurelesse, and rude” than any quirks of physiognomy insultingly demeaned in this way? Indeed, if, with Booth (149n2–3), one were to take Q1 as a veiled account of detumescent and tumescent coition that eventuates in progeny (“fresh bloud” [3] as a reference to deposited semen), wouldn’t the speaker’s suggestion that so growing “in one of thine from that which thou departest” (2) be as “harsh, featurelesse, and rude” a depiction of propagation and paternity as one is likely to encounter? Wouldn’t one hope that any new father would wish to “call” his newborn “thine” (4) as soon as the child was born, not alone “when thou from youth convertest” (4), reeling into “feeble age” (7:10)? At no point in the sequence thus far has the speaker sounded more cretinous in presuming to offer his protegé purportedly civilizing advice.

The Bard sings more humanely. Addressing readers intimately in Q1, he affirms that the gifts we may “bestow’st” (3) in the world (figuratively the “fresh bloud” [3] of our own vigor “yongly” [3] or zestfully given—whether offered “to the young” or, alternatively, “in a spirit of youthful potency”) need know no age limit or decline. Even when “thou from youth convertest” (4) into middle or old age, such “bounty” (12) can more richly flow. But one can do so only if “thou from youth convertest” refers less to the body’s enfeebling decline than to its spiritual maturity (hence the otherwise curious word “convertest” [4]; compare to 14:12). While the sexually explicit undertone in Q1 may suggest that one form of “giving” might proceed through propagation and cultivation of one’s young, by no means is the quatrain’s sense restricted to that context thanks to the level of abstraction the Bard adopts throughout it. Nothing “harsh, featurelesse, and rude” is in his advice so far. Indeed, in this mature spirit of generosity that knows no diminishment in its vigor, regardless of age, rests life’s most vital enlightenment: “herein lives wisdome, beauty, and increase” (5)—displacing self-satisfied contemplation of mirroring images of ourselves with an increase, a bounty, that knows no limit, “ten of thine ten times refiguring” (6:10) the goods with which we have been favored. Anything less merely proves “folly, age, and could decay” (6) as we try to “hold our own” against the inevitable. The spiritual maturity he thus enjoins urges us all to “live” (5) undiminished in eternal presence. “If all were minded so, the times should cease, / And threescoore year would make the world away” (7–8)—not in an apocalyptic disaster but, millennially, in each life span that vanquishes the selfish way of the “world” in a transforming enlightenment wherein all agonized sense of temporality has been absorbed into the perpetual contemplation and enjoyment of the divine plenitude’s multifoliate Rose. In this sort of “increase” (11:5 recalling 1:1), beauties Rose need “never die” (1:2) but blooms ever new.

The sestet reiterates the point, not by condemning inadequately attractive beings to barrenness, but by arguing an exclusionary hypothetical, the Bard expects us to recognize as contrary to inclusional fact: Nature has made everything for store. Nothing that lives is condemned to perish “barrenly” (10). What the Bard notes, however, in ll.11–12 is that to those to whom much has been given, much is expected. To “cherrish” (12) bounty is not to grasp to oneself one’s miserly goods but to be bountiful. Each of us addressed as enjoying the “seale” (13) of Nature’s approval and her authorization to act in her stead at our discretion is “ment thereby . . . [to] print more” (13)—the “more” that is expected of those to whom much has been given—“not let that coppy die” (14). In this reading, “that coppy” refers not to ourselves as beings destined to die, but to our deathless spiritual status before Nature herself, in whose generative image and likeness we were ourselves created to multiply her bounty. The Bard’s last words would have each of us live as the “seale” of Nature’s power, authorized by our maker to act to increase a bounty she sows as far as the eye can see.

Until its final line’s ominous tone displaces the mood it had previously established, 14 exhibits the lightest touch of any poem in the procreation group. Utilizing playfully alliterative diction (“pluck[ing]” [1], “pointing” [6], “predict[ing]” [8], and “prognosticat[ing]” [13] about “plagues” [4] and “Princes” [7]) and “awkwardly elliptical syntax” that “suggests the pompous obfuscations of a smug hack” (Booth 155), Shake-speare sets up a mocking contrast between the prophetic capabilities of overconfident astrologers and his own more impressive self-assurance about his powers of penetration. In the course of doing so he implicitly waves away other seers’ questionable abilities to predict “good and evil luck [3], dearths and plenty [4], glad and sorry seasons [4], uncertain weather [5–6] and princely vicissitudes [7]” (Vendler 105) to substitute for it the astrology he himself has figuratively derived, like Sidney’s Astrophil, from his beloved’s eyes—those “constant stars” (10) he never tires of reading. In those constant stars he sees that if the young man were to “convert” (12) from self-preoccupation to procreation (“store” [12]) the result would mean that “truth and beautie” (11) will “together thrive” (11), in and through him (seemingly to the exclusion of their embodiment elsewhere, given the burden of the poem’s concluding line). If, however, he does not do as he has now been told, the young man’s death, his “end” (14), instead will mean “Truthes and Beauties doome and date” (14)—as flatteringly catastrophic a prognostication as anyone could wish to hear.

Though he doesn’t seem to realize it, the persona is playing with fire here. It is dangerous to acclaim oneself the most accomplished practitioner of an “art” (10) that one is simultaneously at pains to mock, however gently. If astrologers have been known to be most uncertain life guides, isn’t there room to question whether this astrologer’s self-certainties are any less dubious? If the auditor has an ounce of modesty, he might easily turn aside the outlandish flattery in the speaker’s final pronouncement by reminding his interlocutor that surely his reluctance to propagate and subsequent demise would not represent the “doome” of all Truth and Beauty in the world.

Questionable logic of this sort does not, however, threaten the Bard’s address to the reader; nor does his concluding injunction display a cocksure overconfidence in his special powers of penetration. Indeed, the prophetic vision he would share here is a mutual accomplishment of two sets of eyes (and “ayes” and “I’s”) meeting responsively in love—the poet’s own and that of every reader who in comparable constancy would “appreciate” what wisdom the poet might provide—in each party, joy delighting in joy. The prophetic “knowledge” he would “derive” (9) from the constant stars of his readers’ eyes illuminating his verses is not his alone as smug high priest casting pearls before swine. It is as much a knowledge “of him” and his true purposes as it is one derived exclusively “from him”; it is one to be realized by an act of re-cognition that matches and could conceivably even exceed the poet’s own. When the Bard refers to the “art” (10) he reads from his beloved’s eyes, it is not a boast about his proprietary hold on all truth and beauty; it is, instead, a declaration of a capacity shared equally and in equality between his insight as poet and his addressee’s insight as reader, an art in which they “shall together thrive” (11) so long as they shall each labor to “appreciate” the possibilities to which good will/Will may yet be put. “Thy end” (14) in this reading is not a reference to the young man’s death; nor does the remainder of the line make a megalomaniacal claim that the Platonic forms of “Truth and Beautie” (14) are subject to decay. No florid flattery of the sort, the Bard’s prognostication is a more modest and chastening warning: absent the conversion to store advocated in l.12, our only “end” or “purpose”—however unwittingly—is but the hapless effort to diminish Truth and Beauty, one that merely diminishes the self in its mean-spirited folly.

The last in the series to be discussed, 16, is a poem that has engendered more commentary than any other in the group, largely because of the dizzying syntactic and semantic polyvalences of Q3 (compare to, for example, Empson Seven Types of Ambiguity 71; Ingram and Redpath 38, and Booth xiii–xvii). Nor is that the sole hurdle to comprehension in it. Wed closely to the argument its immediate predecessor had made by the antithetical conjunction “But” (1) that signals its “on second thought” logic to come, 16 immediately rescinds the honor 15 had proudly accorded to the speaker’s poetry. Now he unaccountably deprecates his “engrafting” power to perpetuate the life of the beloved as nothing more than “barren rime” (4). With his verses thus discredited, the speaker reverts to yet another stale repetition of his advice to propagate children as the last means of according himself an enduring afterlife on earth. Less than convincing as a promising means of making “warre upon this bloudie tyrant time” (2) in its own right, once readers have meditated upon the argument 2 and 12 elaborate (and 64 will reiterate in unrelieved desperation), the speaker’s logic here dramatizes him swimming against a fast-moving and ultimately unassailable tide. One other oddity: the speaker’s fear here is that the addressee might comically choose to gift the woman or women in his life with nothing more than a “painted counterfeit” (8) of himself instead of the “living flowers” (7) he might better offer in generous tribute to their beauty. If so, isn’t it seemingly counterproductive (if not thoroughly confusing) to characterize creating that living progeny by means of a metaphor “drawne” (14) from the painterly arts—the addressee’s superiority to “Times pensel” and the speaker’s “pupill pen” (10)—crediting his greater “skill” (14) in rendering a verisimilar facsimile of himself in his child? What then should we understand his child to be: a “living flower” in its own right or but another “painted counterfeit” of the addressee himself by means of which the speaker hopes to flatter the young man into the vain contemplation of the larger dimensions of his own skill?

These apparently moot questions can resolve themselves, however, when the true addressee is recognized as each of the poet’s readers. Then the two questions in Q1 transform themselves (at least initially) from exhortational ones nerving the addressee to a more warlike assault on time’s power (a line of thought difficult to reconcile tonally with the quasi-religious meekness enjoined in the resolve), into chiding rhetorical ones. They would then ask us in bewildered consternation “wherefore” (1)—that is, “on what account”—we would do anything so foolish as to “make warre” on time at all when just moments ago, in 15, he had warned that such action was nothing more than “wastfull time” debating with “decay / To change [our] day of youth to sullied night” (11–12). Nothing but folly is to be garnered from a desperate war to tyrannize over a tyrant; a better way, 16’s resolve informs us, is to “keep your selfe still” (13)—that is, “in a self-sustaining quietude and peace.” In so doing, we may bind ourselves with and to the Bard’s express desire in 15 that, as grafted scions that may yet “take” restoratively in time, we may be fused anew and flourishingly by the “lines of life” (9) set in the rootbed of our own decaying stock.

His persona may well think that a war with time is a sensible way to “fortifie your selfe in your decay” (3); but the Bard knows that embattled efforts of this sort merely place a filthy poultice over an open cancer—misguidedly fortifying the selfe “in” a dis-ease that continues to fester. He knows that there are “means more blessed” (4) than his alter-ego’s “barren rime” (4) and logic, means of lively healing and creative transformation, than bending time to our will. Only the “lines of life” in gardens we can now “set” can “repaire” (and “re-pere”) “that life” (9) and thus “keep the selfe still” even as we “give” the selfe “away” (13). We cannot truly fortify ourselves—that is, “make ourselves genuinely better and healthier”—by challenging or even ignoring decay in time. Only by embracing it and remaining grafted to it is the “blessed” miracle of human rebirth possible, ever burning the long-lived Phoenix in our own blood.

Now if the Bard’s initial questions in Q1 are taken as exhortational in a novel sense (not merely as rhetorical ones voicing his exasperation to chide us), then in Q2 he goes on to answer them by urging, in effect, that we beat our swords into ploughshares. The “blessed” means by which we may genuinely strengthen ourselves in acceptance of our very weakness and in the process overcome a sense of time as tyrannical lies in our enduring capacity to cultivate “beauties Rose” (1:2). “Now” (5) in our own decaying time’s being we perpetually stand atop the “happie houres” (5) with which we may cultivate ourselves. The “vertuous wish” (7) he speaks of is not meant to characterize the good will of l.6’s maidens, but the good will required of us if we are to multiply our talents. The persona tries to convince his young protegé to go to stud by appealing to his vanity: picturing a bevy of beautiful maidens before him longing to be “deflowered”; but with an urgency appealing to a “vertuous wish” any of us can summon, the Bard would have us multiply the spirit’s living flower in which no maiden garden we might cultivate is left “unset” (6).

In the sestet, the “lines of life” that the Bard identifies as repairing “life” (9) itself do not refer, as Shake-speare would have it, to reconstituted DNA about which we might preen nor does it even refer to some figurative activity of “line” elevating the addressee’s skill above that of the poet-speaker or time itself. Instead, the Bard’s contextualization of this phrase builds intimately upon the gardening trope of Q2. In it, “So” (9) does not ultimately mean “therefore” but “in the manner Q2 describes”; and the “lines of life” that repair (and re-pere) “that life” (9) refer, as previously noted, to the lines or “rows” of flowers, healing herbs, and fruit set in a well-tended garden to flourish in beauty and utility. The editorial tradition’s common excision of the parenthesis in l.9 provides an apparent clarification of the sestet’s syntax at far too great a cost to the richness of its import. “Times pensel” and the Bard’s “pupill pen” (9) are appropriately bracketed together in Q as two comparable “instruments” awaiting artistic “use” by the readers here addressed. In and of themselves, neither can “make” any reader “live your selfe in eies of men” (12). It is up to the genius of each man and woman to realize a self-portrait as close “to life” as is humanly possible. Neither time nor the poet can be anything but pencil or pen to that masterstroke, but their proper use is essential to the success and sophistication of the enterprise. Though they provide necessary aids, the poet knows it is each artist himself, not simply the tools he uses, who must engender an art that “makes you live” (12), an art whose greatest excellence is to make its subject “come to life.” Nor can anything he or time itself do in and of themselves “make you live—[meaning ‘force you to live’] your selfe in eies of men” (12); that choice awaits a discretion each of us alone must enact for ourselves. The “sweet[er] skill” (14) than his by which our self-portraits are to be “drawne” (14) is thus genuinely superior to anything “Times pensel” or the Bard’s “pupill pen” could draw without our cooperation, but not because we can print copies of ourselves in our children. It is a “sweet skill,” both in “inward worth” and “outward faire” (11), that enacts “vertuous wishes” cultivating a boundless multiplication of yield. In the end, the sestet does not compare our artistry to the poet’s invidiously; his urging is that we live out our days “drawne”—that is, “attracted” or “led out of oneself” (“To give away the selfe keeps the selfe still” [13])—by what we all own within, the “sweet skill” of good will/Will itself, to be practiced and perfected in acting upon it, bringing it to life. The bliss he knows in love is that this sweet skill truly knows no rival.

Notes

1. Fineman rightly invokes Dante’s vision of the rose as a contrast here: “This self-contracted, self-substantial ‘light’ of the young man repeats Dante’s vision of the ‘light eternal, that alone knowest Thyself!’ But where for Dante this displays the solipsistic yet expansive plenitude of God, the young man’s poet sees instead in this the self-depleting narcissistic mechanism of ‘making a famine where aboundance lies’” (245).

2. Yet, as Fineman notes of the couplet in Sonnet 7, “the young man’s procreated reappearance is what makes the young man disappear” (262) as well.