Art vs. Time
Shakespeare, like many sonneteers, portrays time as an
enemy of love. Time destroys love because time causes beauty to
fade, people to age, and life to end. One common convention of sonnets
in general is to flatter either a beloved or a patron by promising
immortality through verse. As long as readers read the poem, the
object of the poem’s love will remain alive. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15,
the speaker talks of being “in war with time” (13):
time causes the young man’s beauty to fade, but the speaker’s verse
shall entomb the young man and keep him beautiful. The speaker begins
by pleading with time in another sonnet, yet he ends by taunting
time, confidently asserting that his verse will counteract time’s
ravages. From our contemporary vantage point, the speaker was correct,
and art has beaten time: the young man remains young since we continue
to read of his youth in Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Through art, nature and beauty overcome time. Several
sonnets use the seasons to symbolize the passage of time and to
show that everything in nature—from plants to people—is mortal.
But nature creates beauty, which poets capture and render immortal
in their verse. Sonnet 106 portrays the speaker
reading poems from the past and recognizing his beloved’s beauty
portrayed therein. The speaker then suggests that these earlier poets
were prophesizing the future beauty of the young man by describing
the beauty of their contemporaries. In other words, past poets described
the beautiful people of their day and, like Shakespeare’s speaker,
perhaps urged these beautiful people to procreate and so on, through
the poetic ages, until the birth of the young man portrayed in Shakespeare’s
sonnets. In this way—that is, as beautiful people of one generation
produce more beautiful people in the subsequent generation and as
all this beauty is written about by poets—nature, art, and beauty
triumph over time.
Stopping the March Toward Death
Growing older and dying are inescapable aspects of the
human condition, but Shakespeare’s sonnets give suggestions for
halting the progress toward death. Shakespeare’s speaker spends
a lot of time trying to convince the young man to cheat death by
having children. In Sonnets 1–17,
the speaker argues that the young man is too beautiful to die without
leaving behind his replica, and the idea that the young man has
a duty to procreate becomes the dominant motif of the first several
sonnets. In Sonnet 3, the speaker continues
his urgent prodding and concludes, “Die single and thine image dies
with thee” (14). The speaker’s words aren’t
just the flirtatious ramblings of a smitten man: Elizabethan England
was rife with disease, and early death was common. Producing children
guaranteed the continuation of the species. Therefore, falling in
love has a social benefit, a benefit indirectly stressed by Shakespeare’s
sonnets. We might die, but our children—and the human race—shall
live on.
The Significance of Sight
Shakespeare used images of eyes throughout the sonnets
to emphasize other themes and motifs, including children as an antidote
to death, art’s struggle to overcome time, and the painfulness of
love. For instance, in several poems, the speaker urges the young
man to admire himself in the mirror. Noticing and admiring his own
beauty, the speaker argues, will encourage the young man to father
a child. Other sonnets link writing and painting with sight: in
Sonnet 24, the speaker’s eye becomes a pen
or paintbrush that captures the young man’s beauty and imprints
it on the blank page of the speaker’s heart. But our loving eyes
can also distort our sight, causing us to misperceive reality. In
the sonnets addressed to the dark lady, the speaker criticizes his eyes
for causing him to fall in love with a beautiful but duplicitous
woman. Ultimately, Shakespeare uses eyes to act as a warning: while
our eyes allow us to perceive beauty, they sometimes get so captivated
by beauty that they cause us to misjudge character and other attributes
not visible to the naked eye.
Readers’ eyes are as significant in the sonnets as the
speaker’s eyes. Shakespeare encourages his readers to see by providing
vivid visual descriptions. One sonnet compares the young man’s beauty
to the glory of the rising sun, while another uses the image of
clouds obscuring the sun as a metaphor for the young man’s faithlessness
and still another contrasts the beauty of a rose with one rotten
spot to warn the young man to cease his sinning ways. Other poems
describe bare trees to symbolize aging. The sonnets devoted to the
dark lady emphasize her coloring, noting in particular her black eyes
and hair, and Sonnet 130 describes her by
noting all the colors she does not possess. Stressing
the visual helps Shakespeare to heighten our experience of the poems by
giving us the precise tools with which to imagine the metaphors,
similes, and descriptions contained therein.
