Now the sonnets are coming to mind again, given the heightened death rates that are reported as a consequence of the coronavirus, and the grim pictures of military trucks carrying corpses in northern Italy.
It is probably still a little 'emo' to feel that the verses are apt when I'm just reading depressing news about deaths, like millions of other people have since script was first invented, not staring at the Reaper eye-to-eye.
But I guess it's fair to take comfort where one can find it.
Please forgive the crude undergraduate analysis, in advance.
***
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.
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.
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:
And yet to times in hope, my verse shall stand.
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
I like the first lines because they express very well, I think, the feeling of the benign and friendly passing of time when one is not in the middle of a personal storm.
As a teenager I spent hours walking beside the ocean and hearing the lapping of the waves, which do of course have a rhythm like the second hand of a clock. Then at rare moments, seeing the waves crashing high onto the concrete breakwaters with an arctically cold wind whistling behind.
And I like the abstracted ideas that the waves are heading somewhere; that there is an 'aim'; and that they are engaged with each other as if they were colleagues or comrades.
These are comforting thoughts.
But I don't think Shakespeare delves deeply enough — cheeky though it is for me to write this — when he portrays the worst spectre of old age as losing the beauty of youth.
I should think that being more vulnerable to mental and physical illness, losing the ability or permission to carry on one's life's work, or seeing loved ones die before their time, is worse.
And age is not always cruel. I am far happier now than I was when I was a teenager, although admittedly it's too early to tell if the worm will turn. Also, looking at others: for example I think that a lifetime of tough experiences can make characters especially loving and beloved as they become older.
Age has become a large topic with the coronavirus, although perhaps gradually less so as it becomes clear that even twenty-year-olds who are otherwise healthy may become critically ill. And I'd have to reiterate that greater statistical likelihood of death should by no means devalue the worth of a human being. Perhaps I'm biased by knowing wonderful people who were well over sixty: there are many people who, at a hundred years of age, have far more left to contribute to the world than I do.
Anyway, the last two lines of the sonnet I find a bit obnoxious — even though I like the feeling that underlies them of being determined not to forget the dead —, because writers (or first-person narrators?) rarely manage to bestow immortality as much as they think they do. Taking, again, a religious standpoint; and borrowing a few metaphors from Antony and Cleopatra; I would say that the good that men do lives after them, in an abstracter form, and gradually the bad is interred with their bones. No need for human intervention.
___
Text of the sonnet taken from Shakespeare's Sonnets, ed. William J. Rolfe (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1883), at Wikisource.
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