That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west.
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
– William Shakespeare, Sonnet 73
This sumptuous & celebrated sonnet is, on the surface, deceptively simple. Each of the three quatrains takes a standard trope indicating waning energies / the end of life – the autumn of the year, sunset & night falling, a fire dying into embers – & works it into a vivid poetic statement, followed by a concluding couplet suggesting the recipient, seeing these things, can only feel love strengthened by impending loss.
The first quatrain portrays Fall not in the usual terms of fields bared by harvest but by the dying leaves (there's nothing fruitful here). Yet there's something odd in the second line when the poet initially says no leaves are left on the boughs but then immediately amends that to "well, maybe a few" – why the self-revision? Why the insistence on some remaining energy? It's not a word order necessitated by rhyme, so something else must be going on.
After this odd moment, the poet returns to the description of Fall: cold (the coldness of Winter / Death) is approaching, which makes the boughs shake (almost as if they were human limbs shivering). The boughs are likened, in a famous phrase, to bare ruined choirs, likening the natural world of trees stripped of leaves to the surrounding English landscape dotted with monastic ruins. It's worth remembering that those ruins were, just a few decades before Shakespeare was born, vital institutions, until Henry VIII decided he was better off without them. Again, this is perhaps a suggestion that beneath this image of wasting away is some underlying vitality, at least until quite recently, which is what late means in this context (as when we refer to a recently deceased person as the late X). Associating himself with the choirs is also a way of emphasizing that the speaker is older than the recipient, perhaps of a generation that could remember back to the choirs when they were, like the poet, singing. Is there something a touch histrionic in the sweet birds, especially coming, as they do, after a sere series of terms: dead leaves, stripped boughs, shaking with cold, bare, ruined: even words that have a different function, like hang & late, carry overtones of suffering & missing out.
The second stanza runs along much the same lines: the speaker compares himself to twilight; the busy day has sunk out of sight, & by and by black night (oblivion, & not just the temporary oblivion of sleep, Death's second self) covers all. By and by also seems perhaps a touch melodramatic, indicating an impending darkness that is less imminent than it actually would be at that time of day.
The third stanza follows a similar pattern: it opens, as does the second, with In me thou seest, followed by an elaboration of a basic metaphor for ending: this time, it's a fire dying out. The fire, reduced to a glow, is at the stage where it is being consumed by the ash it has already produced, the ashes, specifically, of a spent youth. The metaphor is strengthened by the invocation of a deathbed. But, again, there is an emphasis on the strength that was there, & which has not quite entirely disappeared, though the end is near.
So what is going on here? It's important to remember that Shakespeare's sonnets were initially circulated in manuscript (this was not an unusual practice) & when they were published, it was, apparently, without the poet's agreement or supervision. No one really know why or to whom Shakespeare wrote the series (though theories, of course, abound). This sonnet is part of the series traditionally held to have been addressed to an unknown young man, though there's nothing in the phrasing of this particular poem that genders the recipient, & the order of the sonnets as they've come down to us may be by someone other than the poet.
Clearly, though, a single individual is being addressed here: the thou who is repeatedly conjured to notice the impending end of the speaker must be not only an individual, but an intimate (thou strikes a modern reader as formal, because it is archaic, but in Shakespeare's day it was, like the French tu, the singular second person, used for an intimate or social inferior). One of the many unknowable things about the sonnets is when exactly they were written, but scholarly speculation is that he wrote them, give or take a few years, around the age of 30. Even considering that death came earlier then for most people (Shakespeare himself was 52 when he died), it seems a bit odd for a man in his 30s – out of his youth, but one would think in the prime of his life – to draw repeated & elaborate attention to his oncoming demise. And he seems aware that his recipient is maybe not giving him his full attention; each quatrain opens with instructions on what the recipient is supposed to be seeing, & the speaker feels the need to make his point three separate times, in three separate ways, though always with some similar adjuration: thou mayst in me behold or (twice) In me thou seest.
After repeatedly telling his apparently younger friend that the end is near, the concluding couplet sums up the lesson, as it usually does in sonnets with this three-quatrains-and-a-couplet construction: all this I'm telling you is going to make your love for me even stronger, as you won't have me around to love for much longer. But the phrasing is notable: this thou perceiv'st: perceive means to become aware or conscious of something, to come to a realization, to interpret or view someone or something in a particular way: in other words, this is not something the recipient is realizing on his own (otherwise, why would the speaker have to reinforce the image repeatedly?) but something the speaker hopes the recipient will come to realize, a learned response, an insight he will, at some point, achieve – someday, when I'm gone, you'll wish you'd loved me more! Also, given the preceding quatrains, all of which suggest it is the speaker who will be leaving, the last line suddenly makes the recipient the one who will be leaving. Is the speaker perhaps aware that the recipient is drifting away from him, & the whole sonnet is, essentially, a dramatic speech warning him that the speaker won't be around forever & he should keep loving him while he can? Does the strange shift in who is leaving intimate that the speaker knows, perhaps on a not-quite conscious level, that the recipient is planning on leaving him?
Another thing no one knows about Shakespeare's sonnets is what relation, if any, they bear to his life. There is an assumption that they are autobiographical (if only we could crack the code!), but that may or may not be true – we are, after all, talking about probably the greatest dramatist in history; clearly he was able to imagine himself into all sorts of moods & situations that have little, no, or tangential connection to the facts of his biography. There seems something a touch theatrical, even slightly comic, but also deeply moving, about this sonnet read as a speech (& keep in mind that Shakespeare did incorporate sonnets into some of his plays, most famously when Romeo & Juliet meet for the first time): we have here a man summoning up dazzling rhetorical powers to persuade a younger & perhaps slightly uninterested friend that in fact his (the poet's) end is near & that's all the more reason to keep his (the friend's) love strong. Hence the underlying hints of on-going vigor beneath the eloquent, picturesque invocations of impending death. In this light, the poem, no matter what remove it is from Shakespeare's lived experience, is not only gorgeous, but also slightly comic, & also deeply poignant: comic & poignant in the way of all attempts to persuade someone else that their love for us should be as strong (at least!) as our love for them.
There are many editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, of course: I use the Signet Classic.
No comments:
Post a Comment