SOURCE: Montgomery, Robert L. “The Present Tense: Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Menaces of Time.” The Ben Jonson Journal 6 (1999): 147-60.

[In the following essay, Montgomery focuses on the depth and emotionalism of Shakespeare's conception of the present in the sonnets. In most of the sonnets to the young man, the critic contends, only the present is valued, though it is unstable and variable; by contrast, the imminent future promises only death, deprivation, and destruction.]

In Shakespeare's Sonnets time has structural and emotional functions that make it the dominant and most persistent of all the issues the speaker has on his mind. As such it has drawn the attention of almost every reader and critic. In as succinct a summary of the theme as one could devise, John Kerrigan remarks that “On every side, its [time's] harsh calligraphy is seen.”¹ The repeated perception of its relentless and irreducible destructiveness conditions the mood of the sequence, and familiarly it is the antagonist against which the speaker mobilizes his art. The most prominent literary models Shakespeare used are also well known: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book XV, and Spenser's Ruins of Time. Between these sits Petrarch's Trionfi, presumably available to Shakespeare in Lord Morley's translation. All of them dilate on the universal and unstoppable progress of Time, and all of them are in some fashion warnings about pride, the neglect of attention to mortality, or the inevitable passing of beauty. The prophetic thrust of this commonplace hardly needs reminding, except to note that it is also a feature of some of the plays, especially Richard II and Troilus and Cressida, and in both plays, as in the Sonnets, time works to frustrate hope and humble the will. It is also a commonplace in French Petrarchism. Du Bellay refers to “temps injurieux” in Olive 34.4, and in 39 assures his interlocutor that his love will protect her against time and death.² Ronsard offers another precedent in poems sometimes very close to Shakespeare's usage, as in Le Premier livre des sonnets pour Hélène, 14, whose “trois ans sont ja passez que ton oeuil me tient pris” suggests Shakespeare's 104 (“Three winters cold … three summers' pride … three beauteous springs … Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned”), though Shakespeare's treatment is different.³

Shakespeare's adaptations and the resemblances of his treatment of time to earlier precedents, both classical and Renaissance, are of interest to me here not because I wish to explore the details of his borrowings. Most of these can be found in Rollins's Variorum edition, and my remarks above are merely a brief summary underlining Shakespeare's use of conventional material. More important to this essay are the depth and intensity of Shakespeare's use of the temporal commonplaces. He outdoes all his models and all the analogues, even Petrarch, in making the speaker's obsession with time an expression of his temperament and an index of mood, ultimately a profound shift in mood.

The Sonnets are above all distinctive in their urgent, emotional cultivation of the present. The present in turn affects a sense of the future, imagined in sonnet 104 as deprived:

To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold
Have from the forests shook three summers' pride,
Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned
In process of the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned,
Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.
Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial hand,
Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived;
So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and my eye may be deceived;
          For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred:
          Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead.

Shakespeare turns Ronsard's three years of bondage to a different theme. Together with sonnets 67, 68, and 105, sonnet 104 perpetuates the idea of the young man's uniqueness, figured here as “beauty's summer,” and in miniature its octave acts out the memorial mood the speaker imagines for his poems in the future. Even so, as throughout the young man sonnets, the present tense is unstable and under threat; and the present compared to the past or the future, occupies by far the greatest amount of attention, emotionally clung to by the speaker as to a guest about to leave who must somehow be made to stay. His use of philosophical commonplaces is, as always, tuned to personal and emotional rhythms. Any future present, especially after the first seventeen sonnets, is at best served by memory. Otherwise, in the speaker's imagination, the future is a waste, empty of what he now so uneasily enjoys. Yet its imminence, just off stage, sharpens the mood, either of joy or anxiety, in the here-and-now. To give point to the value of the present, the future is almost entirely occupied by loss, death, or oblivion. In sonnet 104 this point is underlined by the insistent redundancy of the passage of three years, as if the rhetorical repetitions are themselves a model of time's stealthy movement as well as an illustration of the illusion of stability. Under such conditions, the present is much more than simply the usual grammatical tense of lyric expression. The poetic idea of the present is cultivated almost ferociously, even in its evident instability. Sonnet 73, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold,” is perhaps the most familiar of the poems meditating on the soon-expected death of the present, as well as that of the speaker:

In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west.

To emphasize the emotional extremity of Shakespeare's representation we can set it against Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion, a work more like Petrarch's in possessing a teleology and a vision of eternity, a “short time's endlesse monument,” as the envoi to the Epithalamion declares. Spenser orders the sonnets in Amoretti according to the liturgical calendar, and at key points he marks the passage of real time, as in 62, “The weary yeare his race now having run.” Spenser imagines a benefit beyond time; Shakespeare's speaker comes close to thinking of time as the ultimate but negative value. But Spenser's sequence may also be thought to be marked by what Germaine Warkentin calls “psychic stasis,” the condition of unachieved hope and desire that colors, for example, Astrophil and Stella, and in places Petrarch's own sequence.⁴ Yet, however mordant Spenser's meditations on time, as in his versions of Du Bellay, The Ruines of Time, or in The Cantos of Mutabilitie, he can imagine a transcendence to set against the temptation to dwell on time's deadly grip.

In most of Shakespeare's sonnets no such relief is available, though this generalization has to be qualified by keeping in mind those poems offering the comfort of poetic immortality, however dubious a comfort that may seem, and the optimistic sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds.” But more characteristic of the mood of the young man sonnets is 49, one of the more depressed of the speaker's meditations in which a triply bleak and threatening future controls the present:

Against that time—if ever that time come—
When I shall see thee frown on my defects,
Whenas thy love has cast his utmost sum,
Called to that audit by advised respects;
Against that time when thou shalt strangely pass,
And scarcely greet me with that sun, thine eye,
When love, converted from the thing it was,
Shall reasons find of settled gravity;
Against that time do I ensconce me here
Within the knowledge of mine own desert,
And this hand against my self uprear
To guard the lawful reasons of thy part.
          To leave poor me thou hast the strength of laws,
          Since why to love I can allege no cause.

In apparent confirmation of what I have been saying, this sonnet dwells repetitively upon a future of love gone sour, “converted from the thing it was.” Syntactically anaphoric, it begins with “my defects,” implicitly a motive for the expected cooling of the young man's affection, then seems to use the present to arm the speaker against abandonment, moves on to the ambiguous “my desert,” and concludes with the drastic concession of supporting the young man's “lawful reasons.” This is the second occurrence of “reasons,” the first being in line 8, which I read as partly ironic: if affection wears off, the young man will borrow reasons to reject the speaker from a rational weighing of his faults.

Sonnet 49 is also one of the poems that mentions a fault or “defects” but fails to identify them. Nor do we learn what the “advised respects” or the “reasons … of settled gravity” are. Yet the emotion, evoked by the insertion of the nearly lachrimose “poor me,” at first reading seems almost irrelevant in the context of logic and sound reason conceded to the young man should he wish estrangement. We also have the irony of love casting sums, adding up reasons to desist, suggesting, as does the whole structure and manner of the poem, a formal circumstance of stifling impersonality in which the speaker has no resources, no good argument to persuade the young man “why to love.” This negative motive might just as well serve the speaker's turn, since his anticipation of the young man's displeasure might supply a reason to cut his losses now. It is, decidedly, the imagining of an utterly sterile emotional future, but, it must be added, one that hasn't yet arrived. Finally, it is important to note that sonnet 49 is among a group harping on a conventional theme, the young man's absence, and added to that is the worry, expressed in sonnet 48, that the young man might be stolen away from him. We can, if we wish, read the poem as a momentary depression, since a group beginning with sonnet 52 and reaching through 56 expresses more optimistic moods.

Nevertheless, sonnet 49 is characteristic of the generally bleak rendering of the future in the young man sonnets, a future sweetened at best only by poems testifying to a present to be remembered long hence and brightened only by flashes of the young man's excellence. In sonnet 52 the speaker poses as a miser cherishing his “sweet up-lockèd treasure” and continues the application in the final quatrain:

So is the time that keeps you as my chest,
Or as the wardrobe which the robe dost hide,
To make some special instant special blest,
By new unfolding his imprisoned pride.

(9-12)

In passing I want to notice Shakespeare's habit, reflected in line 12, of qualifying a positive statement by a single term—in this case “imprisoned”—placed sufficiently aslant the context to make us look twice and consider the possibility of an ambiguous or even self-contradictory meaning, in this case the dubious blessing of confinement and concealment as a way of characterizing the young man's value. Or to put it another way, anxiety about the present reflects the speaker's desire to possess the young man continually. The poems immediately following this reiterate his current worth (53), perpetuated by the speaker's verse (54, 55), but made precarious by the need to keep on renewing the intensity of emotion (56). The present, if love has staled, may be as empty as the future; the speaker's sense of time is emotionally negative if love's “edge should blunter be than appetite,” a comment that anticipates sonnet 129's more drastic evocation of the negative process of renewal in the context of lust. Sonnet 49, together with 32, discussed below, offers at best a conditional future.

A similarly complex reading of time informs sonnets 31 and 32. In 31 the conceit is that the young man subsumes all the speaker's dead, previous loves, which now possess a curious, revived existence:

How many a holy and obsequious tear
Hath dear religious love stol'n from mine eye,
As interest of the dead, which now appear
But things removed that hidden in thee lie.
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. …

(5-11)

Here the present virtually cancels the past by enclosing it; I say virtually, because of course, as the speaker says in line 11, these buried loves are still on view. If the present doesn't quite obliterate the past, it certainly reshapes it. Past loves are reborn in the young man, a kind of raising from the dead. And so it is with the future, though in sonnet 32 the argument is tortuous:

If thou survive my well-contented day,
When that churl Death my bones with dust shall cover,
And shalt by fortune once more resurvey
These poor rude lines of thy deceased lover,
Compare them with the bettering of the time,
And though they be outstripped by every pen,
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,
Exceeded by the height of happier men.
O, then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:
“Had my friend's Muse grown with this growing age,
A dearer birth than this his love had brought
To march in ranks of better equipage;
          But since he died, and poets better prove,
          Theirs for their style I'll read, his for his Love.

The speaker expects his “poor rude lines” to be “outstripped by every pen.” He imagines the young man speaking (the closest we come to any direct utterance of his) and concluding by separating style and emotion, a separation elsewhere thought inadmissable, as for example in 105. In a restricted sense the emotional value of the present is still dominant, even though it means contradicting all those poems promising the young man immortality, as well as those insisting that the speaker's love and his art are coextensive. In these latter the speaker seeks to integrate praise, love, and style in a commanding present.

Just as the future is confined to imitating the present and the quality of the present dependent upon presence and desire, the speaker's “backward look” is likewise considered largely as analogous to his current habit of praising (59). Sonnet 60 moves on to compare the passage of time to the relentless rhythm of the surf: “And Time that gave doth now his gift confound” (l. 8). This, and the even more detailed sonnet 63 (“When hours have drained his blood and filled his brow / With lines and wrinkles”), repeats the promise of poetic immortality, as does 65, but sonnet 64 offers a personal witness to multiple instances of time's erosive power, and “This thought is as a death, which cannot choose / But weep to have that which it fears to lose.” Present possession is sharply qualified by the possibility of future loss, indeed the normal process of time offers little beyond deprivation.

An apparently more positive rendering of present, past, and future informs sonnets 106, 107, and 108, though the unstable privilege enjoyed by the present in the speaker's consciousness still obtains. The three poems, or four if we include 109 (Kerrigan sees 106-9 as a group of four), make up a kind of unit, drawing together the speaker's several preoccupations with the young man's excellence, the enduring quality of his own love, and the ability of verse to fix it eternally in spite of time. As I hope to demonstrate, the strong positive assertions of these poems are crossed by the speaker's anxiety, or if one does not wish to concede that term, with a ferocious clinging to the here and now, a particular here and now invested with the young man so that the present becomes equivalent to the verse, “this poor rhyme” (107.11), as we read it. And the verse contains the future and is and will be the young man's “monument.”

Sonnet 106, on the other hand, is one of the few poems in the collection that invokes the past, in this case a past of romance:

When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights;
Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty's best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow,
I see their antique pen would have expressed
Even such a beauty as you master now.
So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this our time, all you prefiguring,
And, for they looked but with divining eyes,
They had not skill enough your worth to sing:
          For we, which now behold these present days
          Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

A number of the speaker's familiar maneuvers are here: he repeats his belief that the object of poetry is the cause of its beauty, coupled with the by-no-means logical corollary that no verse is adequate to the young man's worth. Both propositions are conventional, elaborate, and contrived gestures of praise. But what interests me more is the attention riveted on “this our time … these present days,” a moment that compels speechless wonder. It is also a moment “prefigured” by a past confined to epideictic poetry whose value in turn is defined entirely as an analogue to poetry written now to celebrate the young man. Both kinds of poetry, the antique and the contemporary, are, in the hyperbole of this sort of poem, inadequate. But we might notice that if the older verse anticipates the young man's beauty, it also prefigures the speaker's praise which seems, as we read it, not quite so deficient as the last line pretends after all. And we must concede that this poem, in its own time, doesn't say as much about the young man as it does about the process of writing about him: a secondary meaning of “these present days” could refer to antique days made “present” by the poet's power. And finally that narrowing of the range of epideictic verse to the blazon and so to the very elements of beauty most vulnerable to time—hand, foot, lip, eye, brow—all of them with the possible exception of foot, among the most relentlessly conventional synechdoches in Petrarchan and courtly verse, further impersonalizes the young man even in the process of celebrating his ineffability.

Appropriately sonnet 107 scans the future and opens majestically on a note of high visionary emotion:

Not mine own fears nor the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come
Can yet the lease of my true love control,
Supposed as forfeit to a confined doom.
The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured,
And the sad augurs mock their own presage,
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and Death to me subscribes,
Since, spite of him, I'll live in this poor rhyme,
While he insults o'er dull and speechless tribes.
          And thou in this shalt find thy monument,
          When tyrants crests and tombs of brass are spent.

The rhetoric of the challenge to time is interesting. The speaker's mood and tone, just previously laced with self-deprecation, doubt, and anxiety, all in the midst of efforts to praise and champion the young man's special beauty, are now positively triumphant. And added to his claim that “thou in this [verse] shalt find thy monument” is the power of his love to challenge death, though poetry is still the medium for preservation. For the speaker the monument is in this, this rhyme, this here and now, this moment stretched beyond death. And how does rhyme memorialize? In sonnet 108, if we consider it part of a group, the speaker insists,

                                                  But yet, like prayers divine,
I must each day say o'er the very same,
Counting no thing old—thou mine, I thine—
Even as when first I hallowed thy fair name.
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,(5)

It should be understood specifically that it is language, poetic language, that accomplishes this miracle of illusion, and it does so through a prayer-like form of repetition, timed and ultimately timeless: “my life hath in this line some interest / Which for memorial still with thee shall stay” (74.3-4), or so the speaker maintains. The present is still triumphant precisely through the agency of repetition.⁶ It also invests repetition with the guarantee of sameness, of authenticity, so, I think the speaker would claim, that we can know that his present devotion is continuous and unchanging. But for us as readers it is not just the monotony that makes the speaker's love present. The present tense and the emotion are realized each time we read the poems: “The rhyme, the verse, is really only a notation to memory, the record of a speaking now, which, when spoken, becomes a here and now.”⁷ There are, therefore, two kinds of repetition: first the speaker's reiteration of a style throughout the poems, a style of repeated praise of the young man that the speaker believes guarantees his sincerity, and second the re-creation of the present of the speaker's speaking in the poems. Thus we can understand the argument as claiming this immortal and death-defying love to be eternal not only through the quality of the speaker's feeling and the repetitiveness of his style, but also in the awareness that future readers will inevitably re-experience his present tense. At the very least, reading this poem we cannot understand the speaker's emotion as distinct from the timelessness of his art. Sonnet 116, “Let me not to the marriage of two minds,” is the most confident, and most familiar, example of the symbiosis of emotional claim and written expression:

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-fixèd mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering 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 proved,
          I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

The assertion of timeless and inalterable affection is uttered almost entirely in negatives, in denials of mortality and change, so that the claim can hardly be called triumphant. If we take the sonnet positively, at least as a sign of hope, it can be grouped with 123 and 124 to create the mood in which the speaker uses all his verbal resources to justify his defiance of time and error: “This I do vow, and this shall ever be: / I will be true despite thy scythe and thee” (123.13-14). In other poems the speaker does find alteration and strives mightily not to warp his own feeling. And if we take him literally, he succeeds, doing so by acknowledging the young man's trespasses and yet accepting and almost conspiring in them. Therefore it can be said that he preserves his love but also preserves and memorializes flaws, faults, transgressions, and his own complicity in their acceptance. So time becomes the agency not just of physical destruction but of moral failure as well, and the due registering of those severe penalties.

If the speaker's fixation on the present translates into anxiety or confessed guilt on the one hand and a kind of boasting on the other, it also suggests a lack of direction or progress, a general feature of the entire collection. We may add this unsettledness of mood to the apparent absence of even a modest narrative structure, a feature of the Sonnets that has sometimes prompted critics to attempt their rearrangement. But such fickleness and such indefiniteness are, I would argue, intended characteristics of this and other sequences. Petrarch's collection is so characterized by the poet himself, though it has a resolution quite lacking in Shakespeare. In Shakespeare's collection one of the consequences of desire is to burden the lover with a failure of progress, or at best a progress towards death sweetened only by the fame that poetry offers to both beloved and poet.

Yet Shakespeare's speaker would also claim that his love—his emotion, his sense of identity with the young man—“Weighs not the dust and injury of age” (108.10), and sonnet 109 reiterates this assertion in its last lines, “For nothing this wide universe I call / Save thou, my rose; in it thou art my all.” It is interesting to see this poem also making its challenge to alienation and moral “frailties” a matter of vocal summons—“I call” is his phrasing, yet the urgency and force of the assertion summon up the rose, the most fragile image of temporary beauty. We may glance again at the last six lines of sonnet 108 and see in it a will to ignore the evidence of time's ravages:

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.

It should be evident from this review that in spite of such declarations, the speaker's moods are variable and alternative; they clash against each other near at hand and in widely spaced poems, offering us an emotional struggle but not in any clear sense a narrative one. Poems in such a mode generate the rhythms of uncertainty, compounded not only by the worry about time, but also the mulling over of estrangement, involving physical absence as well as the young man's fault (“thou dost common grow,” the speaker tells him in 69.14.) and the speaker's repeated mention of his own complicity, pointing perhaps to the broadly confessional octave sonnet 110, which begins “Alas, 'tis true, I have gone here and there.” Yet to reemphasize the shifts in mood and attitude, we must keep in mind that other poems, like 107-9, or 55-56, and 102, are far more positive, at least on the surface. Shakespeare's speaker is forever claiming a territory, leaving it for some antipodal place, abandoning that, returning to the original, yet not staying there either for more than a few lines. Poems whose conclusions, if we let them stand alone, would seem to have settled the issues they work through, when set against other poems arguing something else with just as much firmness become part of a persistent habit of irony and contradiction.

Another group reveals the speaker's persistent devotion in spite of potential rejection, as in 87-89, or in spite of the young man's infidelity, as in 93: “So shall I live supposing thou art true, / Like a deceivèd husband.” All the speaker's positive assertions, of the worth of the young man, his feeling for him, and its endurance, are nevertheless crossed and repeatedly qualified by the intrusion of the young man's fault and by the speaker's own confessed unworthiness. And the ways that the speaker dwells on the present, indeed feels totally bound to it, are surely more than the ordinary reflexive use of the present tense in lyric speech: they contain, translate, and in an important way underscore the discovery and rediscovery of moral damage and the obsessiveness of desire that saturate the entire sequence.

Notes

1. John Kerrigan, ed., The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint (London: Penguin Books, 1986), 39. Subsequent quotations of Shakespeare are from this edition.

2. J. Du Bellay, L'Olive, ed. E. Caldarini (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1974), sonnet 34, cites Horace as an example of this classical commonplace. For Petrarch on destructive time, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, The Worlds of Petrarch (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 18-19.

3. Pierre de Ronsard, Les Amours, ed. Marc Bensimon and James L. Martin (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1981), 267-68. A useful general commentary on the Renaissance concept of time is Ricardo Quinones' Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1972), esp. 107.

4. Cf. Germaine Warkentin, Amoretti, Epithalamion, in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1992).

5. Kerrigan and Stephen Booth in his edition, Shakespeare's Sonnets (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977) read “page” as “servant.” Helen Vendler argues, I think correctly, that “Page” refers to a page in a book: eternal love reads its origin in antiquity. See Helen Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 461.

6. See Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and Its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 35-39, on the prevalence of repetition as a topic in Petrarch's Rime and more generally in the Renaissance lyric. Dubrow's interest is in the way concentration on the present works against the narrative disposition towards change. “Petrarchan repetition,” she writes, “is … the trope that writes and is written by erotic desire. For repetition represents the way that impulse is never fully satisfied and hence never fully controlled …”(36).

7. Joyce Sutphen in a communication to the author.