SOURCE: Kaula, David. “‘In War with Time’: Temporal Perspectives in Shakespeare's Sonnets.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 3, no. 1 (Winter 1963): 45-57.

[In the following essay, Kaula discerns two different time perspectives in sonnets 1-126, and analyzes the sonnets' syntax, rhetoric, and imagery in order to explain the disparate strategies these poems use to defy the tyranny of time.]

The figure of time which occurs so often in the sonnets Shakespeare addresses to the young friend (1-126) points to one of the central preoccupations of the sequence. Appearing as it does in several of its familiar allegorical guises—as thief, tyrant, devourer, and harvester—the figure is thoroughly conventional in origin.¹ Shakespeare, however, endows it with a more than conventional vitality. In lamenting the impermanence of all the good things of the world, especially the resplendent qualities exhibited by the friend, he does not reduce them to trivial significance in comparison with whatever remains invulnerable to time and change, such as Platonic idea or Christian deity. Rather he enhances their appeal, and in the figure of time creates a formidable antagonist against which to assert the force and constancy of his devotion. But this is not the only way Shakespeare shows his responsiveness to time in the sonnets. Less obtrusively, he also exploits those subtle properties which time assumes when it is seen as an aspect of subjective experience. He treats past and future not as objective realities but as modes of awareness, ways of looking backwards and forwards, which interact with the sense of the present. By making versatile use of varying time perspectives, both objective and subjective, Shakespeare further deepens and diversifies his handling of the poet-friend relationship, and partly because of this he manages to avoid that monotonous rehearsal of stock attitudes which cripples all but a few of the Elizabethan sonnet sequences.

In view of the conceptions of time they embody, the sonnets to the friend may be divided into two fairly distinct groups. In the first, made up largely of the sonnets urging the friend to procreate and those that promise to immortalize him in the poet's verse, time is conceived in large mythic dimensions. It is a cosmic power which operates on all levels of creation and keeps them in constant flux, relentlessly destroying everything it produces. Its workings are conveyed chiefly through images of recurrent natural processes: the round of the seasons, day and night, the sun in its rise and decline, organic growth and decay, the interchange of sea and land. Equally expansive are the references to past and future, extending as far backward as the “holy antique hours” of the Golden Age (67, 68), and as far ahead as the “judgment” (55) or “edge of doom” (116). In these sonnets the poet maintains a fixed attitude towards the friend, that of formal, somewhat distant admiration, together with a concern for what in the long-range view the friend must suffer along with the rest of creation under the tyranny of time. But in the other group, the relationship, rather than being accepted as an unchanging fact, is explored and responded to as a developing situation. It assumes, in other words, a history, having a definite beginning (“when first your eye I ey'd” [104]), proceeding through various phases of estrangement and reconciliation, and having a potential ending in either the poet's death or the friend's disaffection. Hence the time perspectives in these sonnets are more restricted in scope, more subjective in orientation than those in the first group. The harmful varieties of time, those which work against the relationship, are associated not with natural processes but with social activities of the modish or opportunistic kind, such as commerce, the law, social and literary fads, and status-seeking at court. To these the poet opposes a form of time whose main characteristic is unassailable constancy, though it also includes a distinctive pattern of growth and renewal.

Just as time in the first group of sonnets is treated as a comprehensive power, so time's chief victim, the friend, is furnished with a public and symbolic role. Instead of insisting as he does in the other sonnets on an exclusive devotion, the poet addresses him as the spokesman of an admiring world, freely acknowledging that he is the cynosure of all eyes, “beloved of many” (10). The first sonnet sets the pattern for the procreation group by announcing in plural terms, “From fairest creatures we desire increase,” and by beseeching the friend to produce a copy of himself not merely for the poet's but for the world's benefit. Similarly the immortalizing sonnets assure him that his image will “dwell in lovers' eyes” (55), or endure as a public possession, until the end of time. The friend's symbolic status is further enlarged through his being identified metaphorically not only with the objects of highest prestige in the corresponding planes of being, such as the rose, gold, jewel, sun, and kingship, but also with time values of the mythic variety. Two linked sonnets (67, 68) draw upon the myth of the Golden Age to exalt the friend as the final, isolated remnant of unfallen nature: he is the “map of days outworn” in an age when nature is “bankrout” and all beauty save his artificial. In Sonnet 106, there are further mythic implications in the poet's hyperbolic claim that all the celebrations of beauty in bygone literature are “prophecies” or prefigurations of the friend. Rather than being a mere reincarnation of previous heroic figures, the present manifestation of a perpetual return, he is an authentic novelty in time: his perfections “till now never kept seat in one” (105), and future ages will never regard his like again (104). In another pair of linked sonnets (97, 98), the seasonal imagery so often applied to the friend is elaborated in such a way that he emerges as a kind of Lord of the Year reigning over natural abundance. Even though the literal season may be summer, to the poet's imagination the friend's absence from the scene changes it to winter. An image of particular significance in the procreation group—it is developed most fully in Sonnet 7—is that of the sun. Like the latter the friend's life follows a curving pattern, steadily rising until it reaches its “highmost pitch,” all the while receiving the homage of mankind. Repeatedly the friend is told, in combination of warning and compliment, that he presently stands at the zenith of the curve: “Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament” (1); “this thy golden time” (3); “Now stand you at the top of happy hours” (16). But from the foreshortened view of time implicit in the sun analogy, this present perfection appears alarmingly brief and vulnerable, since it is at this point that wasteful Time begins its debate with Decay (15), and the only direction the sun-friend can travel is downward into night.

To compensate for the inevitable descent the poet proposes two strategies. One, the friend's presenting the world with a copy of himself in the form of offspring, would have the effect of converting the single, finite curve into a cycle. Like the sun he can rise again—as one of Shakespeare's less felicitous puns has it—by producing a son (7). The other strategy, the preservation of the friend's “living” memory in deathless verse, would convert the curve at its apex into a straight line extending into the remote future, the friend's temporary summer thereby becoming an “eternal” one (18). Although both strategies are metaphorical translations of the same desire, poetically the second is more persuasive than the first. Certainly the sonnets to which it gives rise, such as 19, 55, and 60, are the more distinguished. While the doctrine of “breed” or the prudent cultivation of nature's bounty undoubtedly had profound ideological implications for Shakespeare's contemporaries,² the first strategy is inadequate to the task demanded of it, for what will be preserved of the friend is not his full, unique identity but merely his “sweet semblance” (13) or outward image. Furthermore, since the perpetuation will be limited to one repetition of the cycle, extending no further into the future than the “age to come” (17), time in the long-range view will ultimately win out. Yet another difficulty, reflected in the rhetorical qualities of the procreation sonnets, is that the poet is obliged to play a passive, hortatory role, subservient to the will of what appears to be a recalcitrant, narcissistic Mr. W. H. (or whoever the friend might be). The poet can only argue and beseech; the friend himself must choose to take the step which will counteract the onslaught of time. After a tentative comparison of the two strategies in Sonnets 16 and 17, the poet displays a greater confidence when he finally settles on his own verse as a means of perpetuation in 18 and 19. For now it is he who is actively putting the strategy into effect, its success depending not on the friend's cooperativenesss but on the strength of his own devotion distilled in his immortal lines. Accordingly he expands his vision of the present's continuation into the future from the relatively limited “age to come” to the far-reaching “eternal summer.”

The contrast becomes clearer when we consider the general grammatical arrangements through which the two strategies are presented. In the procreation sonnets, the friend's present perfection (“so gazed on now” [2]) is sharply offset by the certainty of its eventual destruction, usually expressed in the emphatic form of the future tense: “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow” (2); “thou amongst the wastes of time must go” (12). To counterbalance these two indicative tenses the poet introduces the subjunctive should of desire or duty, conveying those notions which have a general applicability unrestricted in time: either the world desires the preservation of the good (“From fairest creatures we desire increase” [1]); or, the benefits nature bestows should not be squandered but be put to profitable use (“Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish” [11]); or, the friend's own self-interest demands that he reproduce his virtues (“Which to repair should be thy chief desire” [10]). The final step in the progression is the conditional future expressed through the “if” construction and its variants, which, occurring about a dozen times in the first seventeen sonnets, have a decisive effect on their tone. The friend is confronted with rigid alternatives: if, and only if, he does what he should do, will time's dictatorial “shall” be averted. This relatively involved rhetorical pattern, characterized by the frequent repetition of general precepts, hortatory appeals and the conditional future, is contrasted by the more simple and decisive approach of the immortalizing sonnets. Here the pattern is essentially twofold: on the one hand, the comprehensive activity of time encompassing past, present and future indistinguishably; on the other, the permanent testimony of the poet's verse, usually expressed as an indicative certainty, though in one or two instances as a conditional hope. After the repeated qualifications of the procreation group, Sonnet 18, with its confident use of the emphatic future tense in the third quatrain (“But thy eternal summer shall not fade”), introduces a markedly new tone into the sequence. It appears again in Sonnet 19, where the poet for the first time directly addresses “Devouring Time” in the second person, concluding his apostrophe with the vigorous challenge of the couplet:

Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.

The pose of defiance appears to best advantage in Sonnet 55 (“Not marble nor the gilded monuments”), where after the three quatrains present a succession of six verbs preceded by the emphatic “shall,” the tense is modulated in the couplet into a continuous present extending to the farthest limit of time:

So, till the judgment that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.

It is in the immortalizing sonnets that time and its destructive powers receive their fullest poetic elaboration. In some sonnets, such as 60, 64, and 65, this elaboration comprises the sole substance of the quatrains, the counter-movement being reserved for the couplet. In addition to his virtuoso handling of rhythm, imagery, alliteration and other euphonic effects, Shakespeare accomplishes the magnification of time through what might be called the technique of foreshortening. Temporal processes which from the usual short-range view seem so gradual and prolonged as to be imperceptible he accelerates, foreshortens, into cataclysmic actions, so that rather than stealing like the dial's hand, time works as a “mortal rage” (64) or “wrackful seige of batt'ring days” (65). The technique becomes the more evident when Shakespeare's handling is compared with one of the principal sources of his imagery.³ In Pythagoras's discourse in Book XV of the Metamorphoses, Ovid describes the mutability of all things as a slow, repetitive flux, like the flowing of a river or the movement of waves.⁴ Time for him works by gradual attrition: it nibbles its victims rather than bolts them down:

O Time, thou great devourer, and thou, envious Age, together you destroy all things; and, slowly gnawing with your teeth, you finally consume all things in lingering death.⁵

In keeping with this conception of time, Ovid presents the course of human life as a gradual rise and fall proceeding through several intermediate stages:

There was a time when we lay in our first mother's womb, mere seeds and hopes of men. Then Nature wrought with her cunning hands, willed not that our bodies should lie cramped in our strained mother's body, and from our home sent us forth into the free air. Thus brought forth into the light, the infant lay without strength; but soon it lifted itself up on all fours after the manner of the beasts; then gradually in a wabbling, weak-kneed fashion it stood erect, supported by some convenient prop. Thereafter, strong and fleet, it passed over the span of youth; and when the years of middle life also have been spent, it glides along the downhill path of declining age.⁶

In Sonnet 60 (“Like as the waves make towards the pibbled shore”)—one of those which most clearly shows the Ovidian influence—Shakespeare first describes the ceaseless, wave-like procession of minutes; then, in the second quatrain, sharply compresses the Ovidian life-cycle:

Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.

The rising movement of the first two lines, prolonged by the caesuras, is abruptly arrested at its climax by the “Crooked eclipses,” and the subsequent decline is swift and final, the process being succinctly recapitulated in the fourth line in the double action of time's giving and confounding. Now that he has explicitly identified the prime antagonist, Shakespeare proceeds in the third quatrain to delineate time's frontal assault on man and nature through a series of aggressive present-tense verbs:

Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.

As ruthless as he makes time appear, Shakespeare does not regard it with the melancholy resignation of Ovid. Instead, the power he ascribes to it becomes, in a manner analogous to the primitive rhetorical technique of controlling-by-naming, his own: the more formidable the opponent, the more firmly dedicated he is to its victims, the more determined he is to resist its tyranny. Thus he concludes the sonnet with the characteristic defiance stated in the emphatic future:

And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

It is important to recognize that Shakespeare's visions of the future in the immortalizing sonnets do not involve a final leap beyond time. Unlike Spenser in the final two stanzas of the Mutabilitie Cantos, Shakespeare does not yearn to escape “this state of life so tickle” and come to rest “Upon the pillours of Eternity.” He claims, rather, that the friend's “eternal summer” will survive in his verse as long as human time lasts, as long, that is, as there is a “breathing” human audience to receive his testimony.

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

(18)

Only one sonnet in the sequence as a whole, 146 (“Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth”), presents an unequivocal movement from the secular to the divine, from the temporal to the eternal in an orthodox Christian sense—a movement which in the context seems to arise as a radical response to the poet's unsettling liaison with the dark mistress. While in the sonnets to the friend Shakespeare indeed makes frequent and obvious use of religious terms—in, for example, his “hallowing” of the friend's name (108), or in his disclaimer that his love is “idolatry” (109)—he does not follow Dante in treating his devotion as an analogue to or preparation for that kind of love which achieves its final fulfillment only in the time-transcending realm of the divine. His allusions to religious values are metaphors for the temporal human situation he is dramatizing rather than the reverse. His central allegiance is to the best that time in its positive form can produce, to the friend as “Time's best jewel” (65), and his “immortalizing” of the friend is his poetic strategy for asserting his hope that this best will endure in future memory as an imperishable value.

The sonnets in the other group, those which exploit the varieties of subjective time, presuppose a different relationship between poet and friend. The friend here is not, or should not be, the cynosure of an adoring world; nor is the poet the self-effacing spokesman for that world. They in their private relationship stand apart from the public realm, which with its preoccupation with the ephemeral, its myopic pursuit of the socially-approved forms of success, takes the place of cosmic time in the other group of sonnets as the principal antagonist. The world here is dominated not by natural but by human mutability, or all those species of deceit and infidelity the poet enumerates with wearied monotony in Sonnet 66 (“Tir'd with all these, for restful death I cry”). A recurrent danger to the relationship is that the friend, in being “woo'd of time” (70) or the fashions of the age, will permit himself to be absorbed by the public world, adopting its changeableness, and thus jeopardize those singular qualities which make him so remarkable in the poet's eyes. The first indication in the sequence that something like this has happened, that there has been a development in the relationship beyond the static situation assumed in the other group of sonnets, occurs in Sonnet 33 (“Full many a glorious morning have I seen”). Whatever the “region cloud” that comes between him and his “sun” may signify, the poet emphasizes the fact of present alienation by speaking of the friend in the third person rather than addressing him, as he usually does, in the second, and by using the past and present perfect tenses:

But out alack! he was but one hour mine,
The region cloud hath mask'd him from me now.

In the closing couplet,

Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain when heaven's sun staineth,

while he appears to condone the friend's infidelity, the poet subtly intimates his disapproval by classifying him with the “suns of the world,” thus denying him that distinct superiority to the common run of humanity which would be his had he remained the true equivalent of the sun of heaven. A further ironic qualification is evident in the subjunctive “may” of the final line, which compares so weakly with the sense of loss implicit in the hard, uncompromising finality of “hath mask'd him from me now.”

Since Shakespeare in these sonnets does not speak on behalf of the public world but is concerned rather with what the relationship means to him personally, he frames his attitudes in those time perspectives which arise directly from his subjective awareness. His procedure is, generally speaking, to reaffirm the continuing reality of his and the friend's mutual dedication against the hostile influences which might occur in past, present or future. In Sonnet 30 (“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought”), for instance, the movement from frustration to release coincides with the transference of awareness from past to present, from the memory of irretrievable losses to the recognition that they are now fully redeemed through the compensation provided by the friend. Here Shakespeare presents the saddening finitude of things not as a condition of the universe at large, objectified in the figure of time, but as something perceived and suffered inwardly. The obsessive nature of his grief, his sense of being inescapably bound to the past, he emphasizes by making uninhibited use of that commercial terminology which suggests the unsympathetic public world and its rigid insistence of the payment of debts. He emphasizes it also by repeating ideas and syntactical patterns through several lines, and, in the third quatrain, by employing the figure of epanalepsis in “grieve at grievances forgone,” “woe to woe tell o'er,” “fore-bemoaned moan,” and “new pay as if not paid before.” After this prolonged, repetitive development, the couplet through its simplicity produces an effect of sudden unburdening or freeing-into-the-present:

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

In other sonnets Shakespeare uses anticipation as a framing device, creating a tension between present and future in order to test the relationship against the possibility of either his own death (32, 71-74) or the friend's rejection of him (49, 88-90). In an example of the latter, Sonnet 49 [“Against that time (if ever that time come)”], he again draws upon the vocabulary of law and economics to suggest that if the friend ever chooses to withdraw his love, he can easily find plausible pretexts, “reasons … of settled gravity,” by comparing his own high merits with the poet's unworthiness. By claiming that he will be an advocate against himself, the poet both defines the quality of his own devotion, which is such that it will maintain its present integrity even against the prospect of future humiliation, and obliquely suggests what the friend's devotion should be—freely given, unmindful of “reasons” and “causes,” unconstrained by invidious comparisons between his and the other's deservings. The implication is that love adheres to a time scheme peculiar to itself, quite distinct from that implicit in the language of law and finance, which merely provides sophisticated pretexts for the selfish urge to renounce fidelity and seek one's personal advantage by shifting with the times. The same distinction appears again in Sonnet 87 (“Farewell! thou art too dear for my possessing”), except that here the estrangement is conceived not as a future possibility but as a present actuality, with the trenchantly ironic result that from the poet's subjective standpoint the character of the past is radically altered, its reality now becoming an illusion:

Thus have I had thee as a dream doth flatter,
In sleep a king, but waking no such matter.

Although authentic love, as Shakespeare insists in sonnet after sonnet, is distinguished by unshakable constancy, he does not for that reason elevate it into a depersonalized and immutable ideal. He seems to do so, it is true, in Sonnet 116 (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds”) by defining love as an “ever fixed mark,” a star “Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken”; but he derives the final validation for this a priori pronouncement from human experience, personal and collective:

If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

In the later sonnets of the series, those which indicate in various ways that the friendship has lasted a considerable time,⁷ we see repeated evidence of Shakespeare's awareness that his devotion is anything but a static ideal religiously adhered to, that it is a lived experience which changes and develops in time. This implies a new, positive conception of time, one which is closely involved with the poet's surer sense of his role both towards the friend and towards the world at large. Having weathered past uncertainties and humiliations, betrayals both feared and actual, he can now claim: “My love is strengthened, though more weak in seeming” (102); or, “Now with the drops of this most balmy time My love looks fresh” (107); or, in lines which anticipate the progression from alienation to atonement in the late comedies:

O benefit of ill! Now I find true
That better is by evil still made better,
And ruin'd love, when it is built anew,
Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater.

(119)

From this new vantage point the poet is able to place both past and future in truer perspective. He sees that his earlier anxiety over the possibility of change, his “fearing of Time's tyranny” (115), had provoked him into exalting the present moment as final and supreme, into proclaiming “Now I love you best”; whereas subsequent experience has shown that the future, rather than being considered a threat, can be accepted as an opportunity for further growth. Similarly, he sees the old enemy, cosmic time, in a different light. Instead of lamenting the impermanence of earthly things, he regards time with an equanimity that verges on satirical contempt, even when he observes its effects on the friend:

Rise, resty Muse, my love's sweet face survey,
If Time have any wrinkle graven there;
If any, be a satire to decay,
And make Time's spoils despised everywhere.

(100)

Thus the figure of time is no longer the predatory colossus it was in the first group of sonnets. It is now sly and insidious in its action, deceiving humanity through the “million'd accidents” which “Creep in 'twixt vows, and change decrees of kings” (115). Dominating the public world of opportunists, “dwellers on form and favor” (125), it is closely allied to Policy, “that heretic, Which works on leases of short-numb'red hours” (124). To its myopic “fools” this kind of time seems to present, and therefore to demand, incessant novelty; but to the poet, viewing it from the standpoint of an assured constancy, it offers nothing but a tedious repetition of what it has already produced in former ages:

Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wond'ring at the present nor the past,
For thy records and what we see doth lie,
Made more or less by thy continual haste.

(123)

The poet's ultimate strategy for combatting time thus differs significantly from the one which prevails in the first group of sonnets. Whereas the latter, in sharply opposing the formidable reality of time with its emphatic “shall,” involves an effort to perpetuate the present into the remote future, a projection of desire beyond the limits of immediate personal experience, here the strategy is to reduce the negative form of time and the domain it governs to trivial proportions, and to replace it with another, positive conception of time which is squarely centered in the poet's personal experience and intimately associated with his achieved sense of stability. Confidently oriented in the present, without regret for the past or anxiety for the future, the poet in the end is able to make unapologetic use of the first person pronoun in asserting “I am that I am” (121); and of his love for the friend he is able to claim, finally, that it “all alone stands hugely politic” (124), sufficient to itself, unintimidated by the public world and its exaggerated interest in transitory things.

The two groups of sonnets in general show Shakespeare's imagination working in contrasting ways. In the one, he draws upon the allegorical tradition as it is represented, say, in the iconographic images of Father Time and in Spenser's Mutabilitie. He conceives time mainly in pictorial terms as a figure of cosmic dimensions, and asserts against it the received, publicly-acknowledged values epitomized by the friend in his role as cynosure. In the other sonnets, where his style is generally less ornate and declamatory, more colloquial and ironic, he makes fuller use of the introspective possibilities of the sonnet medium. Exploring the qualities of time as it is directly experienced, he illuminates the varying perspectives in which past, present and future appear in response to his developing awareness of himself and his relationship to the friend. It is primarily in his handling of time in these latter sonnets that Shakespeare points ahead to his mature dramatic practise.

Notes

1. Erwin Panofsky considers the classical and medieval sources of some of the images of time prevalent in Renaissance art in Studies in lconology (New York, 1939), Ch. III, “Father Time.”

2. See Edward Hubler, The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Princeton, 1952), pp. 69-75.

3. On Shakespeare's borrowings from Ovid, see J. W. Lever, The Elizabethan Love Sonnet (London, 1956), pp. 248-58.

4. Metamorphoses, tr. Frank Justin Miller (London: The Loeb Classical Library, 1926), II, p. 377.

5. Metamorphoses, p. 381.

6. Metamorphoses, p. 381.

7. Three years, according to Sonnet 104. With their frequent allusions to the past and to changes of attitude in friend and poet, the final sonnets of the group addressed to the friend (100-126) on the whole seem properly placed in the 1609 quarto arrangement of the sequence, however questionable the arrangement may be in other respects.