SOURCE: Turner, Frederick. “Time the ‘Destroyer’ in the Sonnets.” In Shakespeare and the Nature of Time, pp. 7-27. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

[In the following essay, Turner examines the associated themes of love and time in Shakespeare's sonnets. He argues that even though these verses depict time as corrupting all material or external things, especially beauty, they also represent true love as a transcendent, spiritual relationship to which time is irrelevant.]

It is, perhaps, dangerous to ascribe a philosophy or a conceptual view of time to the sonnets. J. B. Leishman, in his Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets (1961), makes an instructive contrast between the intellectual and even speculative tone of Michelangelo's sonnets and the more metaphorical and imagistic tone of Shakespeare's. Shakespeare did consider the nature of the world we live in; but he saw abstract ideas in concrete terms, and for him stones and animals and trees were incarnate thoughts and feelings.

If, then, we are to pursue Shakespeare's ideas about time, we must do it largely through the images he uses. Shakespeare thinks in symbols and in emotional and moral intuitions. He tests an idea not by its internal logical coherence but rather by its appeal to his imagination, his heart, and his moral sense; and by its applicability in a real situation or a concrete image. Often the different contexts and uses of an image will point out to us the associations of ideas that Shakespeare is forming within it. If, for instance, the image of ruins is associated in one poem with the poet's old age, and in another with the decay of the most durable structure by the agency of time, we can infer that Shakespeare associates the loss of youth and physical beauty with the breakdown of order and structure occasioned by the decay of time. A simple example; but we will find whole arguments in the sonnets conducted in terms of the permutations of a single image, like, for instance, the flower-canker-scent-distillation image. Many of these images recur in the plays, and an understanding of their use in the sonnets can help us to perceive their moral colour and relevance there.

In the sonnets as a whole, there are two great themes: love and time. Love is associated by Shakespeare with all that is warmest and most physically present in life: that sense of the living touch of reality which is celebrated in Venus and Adonis, the dearness of the relationship of Lear and Cordelia at the end of the play, the warmth of romantic love at the end of the Merchant of Venice. Time is the great enemy of all these beautiful and especial things; it seems to question their validity or to give a pessimistic answer to the questions they raise.

Time is a destroyer. It not only carries us towards the end of our lives, but destroys us in every moment. We die in ‘every moment’, as T. S. Eliot puts it.¹ In Sonnet 60 Shakespeare sees in one sweep all of man's life from birth to death, and identifies the process of time with death. The passing of the minutes is part of the whole system of death in which time involves us:

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend. …
… 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 …(2)

Philosophically there is a profound sense in which we are not the same individual as we were a year or even a moment ago: something in us had died. We do not possess that instantaneous and eternal consistency which is ascribed to God or the angels; we are almost a succession of entities, each giving way to its successor, ended by only the last death of many. Death itself is not a single event at the end of a life, but a continuous process.

Time destroys the order and coherence of things, even the most firmly founded:

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-rased,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the wat'ry main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate—
That Time will come and take my love away.(3)

Shakespeare looks at material things, however durable or however constructed with craft and skill to defy the ravages of time, and perceives that nevertheless they fall and decay. There is in this sonnet a curious acceleration of the destructive processes of time, which makes the cliffs and towers seem to crumble in a moment—a mockery of their seeming strength! In a thousand years even enduring stone will crumble; how much swifter will be the decay of human beauty and the ending of human life.

In this sonnet is expressed the flux of time, and the very sound and rhythm of the perpetual change and destruction of the sea-coast is evoked: ‘Increasing store with loss and loss with store’. The waves seem to beat against the rocks and retreat again and again. (A similar effect is gained in Gerard Manley Hopkins's poem ‘The Sea and the Skylark’: ‘Low lull off, and all roar’.) This is the same coast as that of T. S. Eliot's ‘The Dry Salvages’, one feels, an ocean equally inimical to the especial and unique beauty of transient things. To ‘destroy’ means literally to ‘unstructure’: time attacks order and form. Time's glory in The Rape of Lucrece is

To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours,
And smear with dust their glitt'ring golden tow'rs;
To fill with worm-holes stately monuments,
To feed oblivion with decay of things,
To blot old books and alter their contents …(4)

Time attacks identity itself:

Or state itself confounded to decay.(5)

Here ‘state’ means not only the pomp and dignity of high position or great riches, but also echoes the meaning of the same word in the previous line: a concept as basic as ‘form’, ‘existence’, or ‘identity’—the grid-lines of creation itself.

The process of decay which gives time its direction is evoked in various different images in the sonnets. Sometimes, as in the quotation from Lucrece, it is shown in the most homely images of all. If we are not always at work maintaining, tidying, and repairing the ordered and formed things we need about us to keep us alive, they will revert to filth and chaos. If we do not sweep a room, it becomes less of a dwelling-place; wood or iron unpainted rots or rusts; at all times disorder creeps up on us:

… And smear with dust their glitt'ring golden tow'rs;
To fill with worm-holes stately monuments …
… unswept stone, besmear'd with sluttish time.(6)

The image that occurs again and again, as if its associations were so heart-breaking and inexhaustible that Shakespeare could not let it go, is the image of the dying flower:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date: …
… And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd.(7)
… That thereby beauty's rose might never die …(8)
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?(9)

In this last quotation the word ‘action’ keeps its legal sense, but it contains also the simpler and sublime sense of ‘power of action’. A flower has no strength at all, and the pathos of this total powerlessness when pitted against the brutal ‘rage’ of time is enormously effective. The image appeals to our muscle-memories of weakness and to the sense of paralysis we sometimes feel in dreams.

The effectiveness of the flower image used in this way lies largely in the fact that flowers are among the most delicately ordered and intricately formed of creations; they exemplify beauty: but they are at the same time the most fragile of natural objects. If the massive and stubborn order even of works of masonry falls into decay, what chance has the transient order which alone sustains the most intense and sweetest beauty? Time seems to attack order in particular; and it is order from which we get our values and in which we see the possibility of a world untouched by death.

A modern term for the destructive force of time might be the ‘increase of entropy’. From a scientific point of view, the process of time can be more or less identified with the increase of entropy, or disorder, in the universe. Shakespeare's intuition of time as increasing disorder and perpetual interchange of state seems oddly echoed by the results of the laboratory. (Yet Herakleitos had come to similar conclusions: ‘Fire lives in the death of earth, air in the death of fire, water in the death of air, and earth in the death of water.’)¹⁰

Shakespeare looks at his young friend and at his own youth and sees the forces arrayed against them:

Against my love shall be as I am now,
With Time's injurious hand crush'd and o'erworn.(11)

In the Renaissance, when life was shorter and youth more fleeting than they are today, the ideal of beauty was a far younger one. At sixteen one was at the height of beauty; by twenty-five one was middle-aged. Youth is indeed like a flower: the body functions as it should, decrepitude has not yet set in, and the flesh seems for once in life to be a true expression of Man's spirit. Like a flower, youth is a promise; like a promise, it is sometimes sweeter than its fulfilment.

Time is a ‘tyrant’¹² who destroys all that he rules over; what are the limits of his dominion? Time's assault is perhaps only on external things. Here social externals are shown to be transient:

Great princes' favourites their fair leaves spread
But as the marigold at the sun's eye;
And in themselves their pride lies buried,
For at a frown they in their glory die.(13)
If my dear love were but the child of state,
It might for Fortune's bastard be unfather'd,
As subject to Time's love or to Time's hate,
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gather'd.(14)

Fortune can swiftly disown any emotion based on merely superficial considerations, since such an emotion lays itself open not only to the favour of the temporal but also to its enmity. In Sonnet 125 this subjection of externals to the destructive forces of time is stated clearly:

Were't aught to me I bore the canopy,
With my extern the outward honouring,
Or laid great bases for eternity,
Which proves more short than waste or ruining?(15)

As in Love's Labour's Lost, external rhetoric is opposed to internal feeling:

… yet when they have devis'd
What strained touches rhetoric can lend,
Thou truly fair wert truly sympathiz'd
In true plain words by thy true-telling friend …(16)
I never saw that you did painting need,
And therefore to your fair no painting set …
… For I impair not beauty, being mute,
When others would give life, and bring a tomb.
There lives more life in one of your fair eyes
Than both your poets can in praise devise.(17)

Here again it is the externals that bring death, and are involved with death.

This contrast between external, physical things (which pass away) and internal, spiritual things (which can perhaps endure) is very important in the sonnets. We see it stated most effectively, perhaps, in the great flower-scent-distillate image. The external show of beauty is doomed unless it is accompanied by an inner wholesomeness: the internally cankered rose has no perfume, and thus, no hope of continuance:

The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem
For that sweet odour which doth in it live.
The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumed tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer's breath their masked buds discloses;
But for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwoo'd, and unrespected fade;
Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so:
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made.(18)

But here a new problem arises; the image of the canker cannot be made to signify anything but the idea of sin. Shakespeare's vision of the destructive effects of time has become an ethic. The moral tone of these lines is unmistakable:

Ah! wherefore with infection should he live
And with his presence grace impiety … ?
… Why should false painting imitate his cheek,
And steal dead seeming of his living hue?(19)

Sin is marked by a subordination of the inner self to the external world, and to those externals by which the inner self is expressed. Here is a compelling and gruesome image of this:

… Before the golden tresses of the dead,
The right of sepulchres, were shorn away
To live a second life on second head,
Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay.(20)

Sin seeks out dead things to be its expression. There is a curious appropriateness about this: the wages of sin is death. Sin is the rank smell of flowers that have become internally rotten and dead, and have lost their fragrance, their spiritual essence:

Then, churls, their thoughts, although their eyes were kind,
To thy fair flower add the rank smell of weeds.
But why thy odour matcheth not thy show,
The soil is this—that thou dost common grow.(21)
… For canker vice the sweetest buds doth love …(22)
… Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.(23)

Shakespeare's approach to sin, then, is twofold. Sin can originate in an involvement of the inner self with its external show; and it becomes in corollary an inner corruption or infection masked by a fair exterior. The soul, in loving dead externals, becomes dead in turn. Sin inverts the proper precedence of human personality, in that it reverses the dependence of outward expression on the inner spirit. For Shakespeare the worst sin is hypocrisy, as we can see clearly in Hamlet, Lear, and Othello. Beauty, which is noble as the expression of inner worth, becomes the mask of the hypocrite alike in the sonnets and in these plays. In modern psychology there is an interesting analogy with Shakespeare's diagnosis of human evil: the attribution of many of the illnesses of personality to a similar discrepancy between the external persona of an individual, and his inner ego. Moreover, when the spirit of a man becomes subordinate to his social or physical self, it comes under the deterministic rules of temporality.

If all that is important in an event or action is its past and future, how can we say that it is not determined, that it is not merely caused by its past and a cause of its future? Within the world of time, the cause-effect relationship is all-powerful: there would be no law in the universe if this were not so. But we can say also that within this world there can be no qualitative judgements, only quantitative ones, for we cannot give value to something which is solely a link in a causal chain. Our feeling of value can apply only to things which are in some way ultimate, which are uncaused, or related to the purpose or end of all existence. Cause denies purpose and intrinsic worth, just as in human affairs it denies responsibility. The bitter pathos in the dying-flower image lay in the fact that Shakespeare saw value and purpose in something which he could not consider at that time as anything but subject to the laws of time. The tragedy of beauty and love is that they demand of us imperatively a recognition and belief in their ultimate value and purpose, but that they exist within the world of time, seemingly ruled over by an unalterable determinism.

It is obvious that if the apparently inexorable laws of entropy and determination have the ultimate sway in the lives of men, we face an existence which is insupportable to our spiritual and moral instincts. We have already seen how in the sonnets the decay of things offends our sense of the everlastingness of that which is beautiful. But time is not only the destroyer of the physical order as we find it in beautiful things; it is also the destroyer of the moral order in Man, if he succumbs to its tyranny. Time the corrupter of the flesh is also the corrupter of the soul. It corrupts us if we involve ourselves with externals, with the world of social favour and outward show that is subject to time. And if we are only creatures of time, then we are governed in our every action by an irreversible deterministic process.

The love that is rooted in appetency is subject to time's laws, and is ended by the bitterness of satiety or forgetfulness. The tragedy of Troilus and Cressida is precisely that sensual love is created but also destroyed by time;²⁴ this feeling is strong also in the sonnets:

Sweet love, renew thy force; be it not said
Thy edge should blunter be than appetite …(25)

Here the tone is comparatively lighthearted; but the implication that love is limited by time underlies it, and the same image of bluntness is used in Sonnet 95 with the gravest ethical overtones. The last line, which concludes a poem about evil hiding itself beneath a fair outward appearance, is full of foreboding:

The hardest knife ill-us'd doth lose his edge.

In the following lines, we see in the starkest terms the determinism of lust, which destroys the infinitude of the spirit by a temporal craving or compulsion:

Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjur'd, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted, and, no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad—
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme …(26)

Here the present moment, wherein lies our only hope of freedom from time, becomes only the intermediary stage in a causal sequence between desire and satiety. This terrible bondage is occasioned by a relatively voluntary surrender to the temporal process of cause and effect. The lines themselves seem to follow each other with an inevitable momentum, the repetitions emphasizing the irresistible current of craving.

The flesh itself, then, is one of the externals which must not be allowed to rule over the inner spirit. Physical love must be the external expression of a deeper spiritual movement, if it is not to destroy our freedom. Lust is a fever which perpetuates and increases itself at the price of the individual's free will:

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease;
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Th' uncertain sickly appetite to please.(27)

In Shakespeare the themes of external show and inner reality are often paired with and balanced by the ideas of spiritual blindness and spiritual sight. If the eye is deceived as to the true nature of what it perceives, this can be the result either of the deception of appearances or of some deficiency in perception. In the sonnets time rules autocratically over all false outward appearances; similarly, time is the falsifier of true vision, the deceiver of true sight:

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.(28)
Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceiv'd;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceiv'd …(29)

It is the ‘dwellers on form and favour’, those who live the materialistic and expedient life of external appearance, whose senses are corrupted, who, for ‘compound sweet’ forgo ‘simple savour’; whose ‘oblation’ is therefore ‘mix'd with seconds’.³⁰ This image of impurity in sense impressions has a curious power; when our senses are perverted we cannot taste the refreshment of reality. Touchstone in As You Like It satirizes the tastes of the court, which prizes the ‘most uncleanly flux of a cat’ as a perfume, and whose very perceptions are based on a false scale of values and a retreat from reality into external show.

The love that is based on appetency imposes a temporal tyranny not only on the soul, but also on the sense. Or rather, since it is the soul's business to apprehend reality through the senses, a sick soul cannot have healthy perceptions:³¹

My love is as a fever, longing still …
… Th' uncertain sickly appetite to please.(32)
O me, what eyes hath Love put in my head,
Which have no correspondence with true sight!(33)
In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes,
For they in thee a thousand errors note.
But 'tis my heart that loves what they despise,
Who in despite of view is pleas'd to dote.
Nor are mine ears with thy tongue's tune delighted;
Nor tender feeling to base touches prone,
Nor taste nor smell desire to be invited
To any sensual feast with thee alone;
But my five wits nor my five senses can
Dissuade one foolish heart from serving thee …(34)
O cunning Love! with tears thou keep'st me blind,
Lest eyes well seeing thy foul faults should find.(35)

Lust presents us with the paradox that the sensual life once chosen does not open but closes the gates of perception. A surrender to sense destroys sense. Sense in Gertrude is ‘apoplex'd’;³⁶ the bait of lust makes the taker mad. The determinism which is imposed by time on the will when it surrenders to temporal things, is extended in the most sinister way to the senses—the only possible instruments of a true perception of reality, and consequently of a cure.

Shakespeare's idea of time, then, has developed from a vision of time as the destroyer of order and beauty, through the conception of time as the ruler of all external and material things, towards an ethic in which time becomes the corrupter of the soul and the senses when human beings yield to the domination of its determinism. All these effects of time seem to aim a destructive blow at love: for love is nourished by beauty, which time destroys; love expresses itself in external and material ways; love is wedded to sensual pleasure; and love demands freedom and a sense of value, neither of which seems to be permitted by the necessity of temporal existence.

How does Shakespeare solve these problems? The first, simplest, and most inadequate answer is the possibility of reproduction. A scientist would say that the living cell is the only thing in nature capable of resisting, by means of resources within itself, the effects of the process of increasing entropy. Life has, in fact, been defined in this way. Life builds and orders; records the past, reproduces itself for the future; and is Shakespeare's first answer to the problems of time. What is today a biological formula Shakespeare would have seen in terms of the resemblance of child to parent, the wonder of an old man at his child's youth and vigour, and the faint sense of immortality we feel at having reproduced our own life in another generation. If the especial beauty of his friend is forever doomed, it may at least be partially and imperfectly transmitted to the future through his children:

This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see the blood warm when thou feel'st it cold(37)

The major image for this in the Sonnets is that of the distilled perfume of a flower. Though the flower dies, the distillate, the seed, the ‘D.N.A.’, as it were, perpetuates the beauty that must pass:

From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die …(38)
Then, were not summer's distillation left
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was;
But flowers distill'd, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.(39)

Again we see the contrast between the external accidents of beauty, which are transient, and the inner essence which may survive.

The cycle of the seasons is another image which Shakespeare uses when he pits the power of physical life and reproduction against the power of time. The distillate that is preserved is the distillation of summer which can resist the ravages of winter and become the seed of a new spring.

But Shakespeare was dissatisfied with this merely cyclic reproduction of lost beauty. There is something so especial about his friend's beauty, so archetypal, that once it has gone, it is as if the essence of beauty itself were destroyed, as if nature had cracked the mould: ‘Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date’.⁴⁰ In Sonnet 53 all forms of beauty are only Platonic shadows of his substance. No genetic replica can do justice to its original. That uniqueness which gives beauty its character is welded to all that is most temporal and transient in it. Shakespeare faces T. S. Eliot's problem:

Time and the bell have buried the day
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us; will the clematis
Stray down, bend us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?(41)

Although, says Eliot, we may find a way to the ‘stillness that is the dance’ by means of rejection and darkness, there is still the problem of what happens to the transient beauty that we feel to be valid. That the cycle of the seasons will bring another spring is not enough. There is something especial and particular that must, it seems, pass away. Shakespeare must search for another answer to the problem of beauty's transience. In Sonnet 19 he accepts that time will devour his friend's beauty; it is in desperation that he defies time with his poetry, admitting that beauty will pass, but asserting that something can be rescued from its wreck:

But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
O, carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.
Yet, do thy worst, old Time. Despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.(42)

The word ‘love’ in this last line is perhaps ambiguous: it could refer not only to Shakespeare's friend but also to his own feeling of love. If the ambiguity is there, then we can infer that Shakespeare is groping towards a conception of beauty as the effect of love, which can be preserved, where beauty cannot. The argument might in this case go thus: ‘Time can indeed irrecoverably destroy those physical externals which love invests with beauty: but in order to destroy the inner essence of beauty, which is the love we feel for what we call beautiful, time must destroy the love that gave it beauty: but this love is preserved in verse.’ In Sonnet 130 Shakespeare, because of his love for her, finds beauty in a woman who appears to have no justification for being called beautiful. If human beauty is no more than the effect of the loved one on the lover, it can perhaps be preserved by recording the love that produced it.

The pathos of beauty was that it was external, and thus subject to time; and that it was a delicate order, and time's most savage assault was on order. But poetry is an imperishable order, in contrast with all the structures of Man's hand or nature's, and is independent of the physical means of its expression.

The image of distilled perfume is used also in this, the second of Shakespeare's answers to the problem of time:

… Sweet roses do not so:
Of their sweet deaths are sweetest odours made.
And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,
When that shall vade, by verse distills your truth.(43)

The inner spirit, ‘truth’ (or, as often, ‘worth’) is preserved by poetry. A kind of immortality is promised, though it is the immortality only of the essence, not the accidents of beauty:

Gainst death and all-oblivious(44) enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.(45)

Even poetry can last only as long as the earth endures. But with that objection poetry is as good a way as any of preserving something of one's personal identity:

The earth can have but earth, which is his due;
My spirit is thine, the better part of me.
So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,
The prey of worms, my body being dead;
The coward conquest of a wretch's knife,
Too base of thee to be remembered.
The worth of that is that which it contains,
And that is this, and this with thee remains.(46)

These sonnets do not just describe the fear that Shakespeare's friend must lose his youth: there is also an undercurrent of terror at his own personal extinction, and, worse still, a foreboding that perhaps that love which the poet feels and celebrates will itself fade away. Why else does Shakespeare dwell not only on the possibility of his friend's death, but also on the disappearance of those charms that compel his love? Indeed, if we accept the suggestion that beauty was to Shakespeare the externalization of love, then the vanishing of beauty would naturally imply the disappearance of love. In a sense ‘every poem’ is ‘an epitaph’;⁴⁷ each of these poems celebrates and attempts to eternalize a state of mind and soul that may pass away. And here, ultimately, the power of poetry is an inadequate answer to the problem of time. Poetry can only preserve beauty when it is informed by love; but poetry does not guarantee the endurance of love itself. We have seen the traps which time lays for the lover: the snare of superficiality, the pitfall of appetency, the prison of behavioural determinism. Poetry merely extends the memory of love (and hence the beauty projected by love on what is loved) in time: it is only a recording, not the perpetuation of an entity. Shakespeare had recognized in the early sonnets that ‘barren rime’ was second-best; at best, a second-hand version of reality. What he is looking for is a vision of love which is eternally valid in itself, which triumphs over time not just by being recorded, but by being independent of time. Poetry is an attempt to internalize external beauty, to give it a reinforcement of form and order which it does not already possess, so that it may endure in time. Shakespeare's final answer is that true beauty is internal, that true beauty is generated by a kind of love to which time is irrelevant: in the modern phrase, timeless.

Shakespeare is one of the creators of the modern ideal of love. In him Platonic love, courtly love, the Christian idea of Charity, that is, moral love, and a new aesthetic kind of love came together. It was a synthesis novel to the age, a unique product of the Renaissance.

The Shakespearean lover sees his beloved as the archetype of beauty, and worships him like a divine being. Not ‘worship’ as the courtly lovers would have meant it; but in the sense that we feel sometimes when we have seen something in another person to which we could go down on our knees. Beyond this, almost for the first time in history, love is here a relationship, something that is distinct from the individuals involved and which is greater than the sum of its parts: something that resolves the unbearable separateness of the closest lovers. This ecstatic love is celebrated in ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’.

Love of this kind was a novel and marvellous discovery, a view of the world with new eyes, a complete reshuffling of the priorities of motive and desire. Donne calls his mistress his ‘New-Found Land’;⁴⁸ it is perhaps fitting that while the terrestrial globe was being explored and suddenly illuminated, new areas of the human experience of personal relationship were similarly being opened up. To worship another person was not bathetic, as it sometimes appears today, but a daring leap into a new mode of experience: the worship of a person for his own sake; the desire, not for pleasure or gain, but for the good of the beloved; the rejection, finally, of anything in oneself that is unworthy of participation in that relationship.

Shakespeare meant his sonnets for ‘lovers' eyes’,⁴⁹ we must remember, and, if we do not approach them as lovers, who are quite at home among wild hyperboles, they will seem overdone, exaggerated, and cloying. We must be prepared to accept the I-thou relationship which we find there, in as humble and as proud a spirit as Shakespeare's own.

It is a love which harnesses all man's spiritual energies that Shakespeare finally opposes to the destructive and corrupting forces of time. A love which is not dependent on externals, which transcends the laws of cause and effect, and which even, perhaps, generates the only genuine beauty.

Love, in the following lines, is seen as resurrecting the past which has been destroyed by time, and making ‘what might have been’ present:

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.(50)
Thou art the grave where buried love doth live,
Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone,
Who all their parts of me to thee did give;
That due of many now is thine alone.
Their images I lov'd I view in thee,
And thou, all they, hast all the all of me.(51)

Love is the only force that can internalize and make valid the transient external beauty which is so subject to time's destruction:

So that eternal love in love's fresh case
Weighs not the dust and injury of age,
Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place,
But makes antiquity for aye his page;
Finding the first conceit of love there bred,
Where time and outward form would show it dead.(52)

Beauty is hardly important any more: it is only the outward show of something that can exist without it, or alternatively only the effect on the senses of what is loved:

In him those holy antique hours are seen,
Without all ornament, itself and true,
Making no summer of another's green,
Robbing no old to dress his beauty new …(53)

‘Itself and true’ is an almost existentialist formulation of the curious frankness and lucidity that the reality of a loved person seems to possess. What astounds the true lover, perhaps, is that he feels that for the first time he is in the unclouded presence of a reality outside himself, that what he sees is no longer falsified by the separation that exists between the self and all other things. At one blow this new concept of love has swept away the enemies of love—determinism, superficiality and deception; for this love is a going outside oneself, a renunciation of self-will and even of one's own personality. Once we are beyond our own self and our own will, we are beyond the killing touch of our own deterministic motives and temporal cravings: in a state perhaps akin to the Buddhist act of contemplation, where the soul attains freedom from the world of sensation and illusion. Love in this sense frees us from the vicious circle of time:

If my dear love were but the child of State,
It might for Fortune's bastard be unfather'd
As subject to Time's love or to Time's hate,
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gather'd.
No, it was builded far from Accident;
It suffers not in smiling Pomp, nor falls
Under the blow of thralled Discontent,
Whereto th' inviting time our fashion calls.
It fears not Policy, that heretic,
Which works on leases of short-numb'red hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic,
That it nor grows with heat nor drowns with show'rs.
To this I witness call the fools of Time
Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime.(54)

I have capitalized ‘State’, ‘Fortune’, ‘Accident’, ‘Pomp’, ‘Discontent’, ‘Time’, as well as ‘Policy’ in this poem because they are a series of personified abstractions, which are linked in a relentless logic. ‘State’, that is ‘conditions’, ‘circumstances’, or ‘the way things are’, is ruled over by ‘Fortune’; ‘Fortune’ produces ‘Accident’ or chance; ‘Accident’ may give rise to good luck or bad, either ‘Pomp’ or ‘Discontent’. To fight against this system by plots and cunning is to follow ‘Policy’, the heretic or rebel, which is in any case itself subject to ‘leases of short-numb'red hours’. Together these personifications comprise the ‘fools of Time’, which ‘die for goodness’ (must cease to exist if there is to be goodness) ‘who have lived for crime’ (and which generate sin by their presence in the human heart). They are the ‘fools of Time’ because they are all subject to time, as the poet takes pains to point out. Shakespeare summons to give witness against themselves the very forces that can weaken love in its lawsuit against time. This reading (which I have not found elsewhere) makes sense of a sonnet that has puzzled its commentators and editors.

In this sonnet love need not fear Policy, that is, the necessities of expedience and the determinism of self-will. It is neither voluntary nor does it tolerate any motive in the lover that is not concerned with the good of the loved one. It is a determinant itself, it has its own will which overrules all petty tyranny of craving and self-interest: it is ‘hugely politic’. It is not changed by externals but itself can change the external world.

True love can also open the gates of perception which have been closed by the deceptions of time. The constancy of true love is able to overcome the inconstancy of all temporal perceptions:

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.
          This do I vow, and this shall ever be:
          I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee.(55)

Lust is able to gild evil and deceive the honesty of the senses: true love can ignore the merely superficial aspects of perception and penetrate to the reality beneath. Lust is less honest than the evidence of the senses: true love is more honest than sense-perception.

Were't ought to me I bore the canopy,
With my extern the outward honouring,
Or laid great bases for eternity,
Which proves more short than waste or ruining?
Have I not seen dwellers on form and favour
Lose all, and more, by paying too much rent,
For compound sweet forgoing simple savour—
Pitiful thrivers, in their gazing spent?
No, let me be obsequious in thy heart,
And take thou my oblation, poor but free,
Which is not mix'd with seconds, knows no art
But mutual render, only me for thee.(56)

These lines sum up most of what Shakespeare has to say about true love: its inner, personal nature, untained by temporal externals; its vision, which is ‘poor but free’, and at first hand, existential, not ‘mix'd with seconds’. The gates of true perception are opened by love, so that there is nothing impure or second-hand about it. ‘Simple savour’ is rightly preferred to ‘compound sweet’; that which nourishes is better than that which merely titillates. This is a form of love which is not concerned with gratification but with existence: it makes the lover exist more fully.

Shakespeare eventually accepts the terrible temporal forces that are pitted against what he holds dear. But at the end he realizes that they are irrelevant to love:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov'd,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.(57)

Love is not time's fool. All things which are external can be measured; but love's worth cannot be so confined. If we can be certain of anything, Shakespeare asserts, we can be certain of this. He has asked what we can oppose against time's destructive and corrupting forces; he saw that the replications of the flesh and the order of poetry had some strength against its ravages, but his last and only real answer is a relationship.

Notes

1. The Dry Salvages, l. 159.

2. Sonnet 60.

3. Sonnet 64.

4. The Rape of Lucrece, ll 944 et seq.

5. Sonnet 64.

6. Sonnet 55.

7. Sonnet 18.

8. Sonnet 1.

9. Sonnet 65.

10. Fragment 34; Fragments 28, 29, 40, and 72 are also of interest here.

11. Sonnet 63.

12. Sonnet 16.

13. Sonnet 25.

14. Sonnet 124.

15. Sonnet 125.

16. Sonnet 82.

17. Sonnet 83.

18. Sonnet 54.

19. Sonnet 67.

20. Sonnet 68.

21. Sonnet 69.

22. Sonnet 70.

23. Sonnet 94.

24. See also Hamlet, IV. vii. 110-23 and my note on these lines on pp. 92-93.

25. Sonnet 56.

26. Sonnet 129.

27. Sonnet 147.

28. Sonnet 123.

29. Sonnet 104.

30. Sonnet 125.

31. ‘The light of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!’ Matt. 6: 22-3 (Authorized Version).

32. Sonnet 147.

33. Sonnet 148.

34. Sonnet 141

35. Sonnet 148.

36. Hamlet, III. iv. 73.

37. Sonnet 2.

38. Sonnet 1.

39. Sonnet 5.

40. Sonnet 14.

41. Burnt Norton, l. 127.

42. Sonnet 19.

43. Sonnet 54.

44. I am unhappy about Alexander's hyphenation here. Surely Shakespeare means ‘all things which are hostile in that they forget’ rather than ‘enmity that forgets everything’.

45. Sonnet 55.

46. Sonnet 74.

47. ‘Little Gidding’, l. 225.

48. ‘To his Mistris Going to Bed’, l. 27.

49. Sonnet 55.

50. Sonnet 30.

51. Sonnet 31.

52. Sonnet 108.

53. Sonnet 68.

54. Sonnet 124.

55. Sonnet 123.

56. Sonnet 125.

57. Sonnet 116.

List of Works Consulted

Editions of the Text

I have used Peter Alexander's edition of the Complete Works, Tudor Edition, 1964 (1951), for all quotations and references, as it is a good standard edition and the line numbers correspond to those of the great Cambridge edition of Clark and Wright.

For closer textual work the New Variorum has been used, and the New Arden edition has been consulted for its notes.

C. T. Onions' Shakespeare Glossary has also been useful.

General

Eliot, T. S., Four Quarters. London: Faber & Faber, 1964 (1944).

Collected Poems, 1909-1962. London: Faber & Faber, 1963.

Leishman, J. B., Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets. London: Hutchinson, 1961.