Shakespeare's sonnet
How plainly here the poet speaks! In the enormous plenitude of his conceptions which have not as yet found a human sphere to vent themselves, the thought occupies him that his mind as well as his body will grow old, that the exuberance, or beauty, of his intellect, now gazed on with so much admiration, the youthful freshness of his intellectual powers, which now afford him such delight, will gradually decay, some day cease to be, and that, in the field of his intellectual beauty, time will dig deep trenches. If he should then be asked where all his beauty lies, where all the treasure of his lusty days, and he be forced to reply that they were in his own, then, deep-sunken (mind's) eyes, it would be an all-devouring shame, and thriftless praise. But, how much the more would the use of his beauty praise deserve, if he could answer: "This fair child of mine shall sum up my account, and make my old, i. e. late excuse." He m
The world's and the narrator's judgements on these answers are, however, transcendental and based on value assumed to be permanent; and the necessitarian prophecy of the eventual dimming of physical beauty is likewise certain. The first arises from a social morality dependent on others_ response, in which one acts so as to avoid shame, or receive praise, or make excuse. How delightful the consolatory reflection, that even when his intellect grew aged, when the enthusiasm of youth, his intellectual blood became cold, he could still contemplate in his creations the glowing ardour of his prime!This sonnet raises the question of the locus of self-worth: Does it lie in the self, or in the world's opinion of self? We see for the first time in the sequence the technique of double exposure, by which Shakespeare offers to alternative scenarios both responding to the same situation. In an indirect discourse, the young man that Shakespeare refers to, at the age of forty, has two possible answers to the question, "Where lies thy beauty and Where all the treasure of thy lusty days? These questions are answered by the lines, "Within my own deep-sunken eyes and This fair child is of mine. By this alone can he be represented in after ages. This sonnet also offers two motives for action. The social morality of the body of the poem, however, is displaced in the closing couplet by an appeal to individual pleasure: the reward for reproducing and the source of self-worth is now narcissistic (warm blood, new self) rather than social, and, if not purely intrinsic, at least entirely self-referential. Should the young man give the second answer, he would deserve more praise from the world, first of all; then the speaker adds a judgement perhaps more persuasive, because of its narcissistic interest to the young man (repeating the subjunctive were to parallel the world_s earlier judgement): This were to be made. The beauty of his creations will be pointed out by posterity as belonging to him. Shakespeare experiments here with a "bottom-heavy" structure, in which the alternative scenarios of young man_s answer / others_ judgements are linked powerfully together by parallelism and chaismus: say, were shame, praise, //more praise, answer, were to be new made. These answers evoke a two- part judgement, one from the world, one from the speaker. Since, the young man's two answers, like the world's putative question, are hypothetical; they are phantoms of the future.
Common topics in this essay:
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fair child,
fair child mine,
social morality,
child mine,
world speaker,
alternative scenarios,
own deep-sunken,
lusty days,
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Acceptance Essays
