Sonnet 65

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,

But sad mortality o'ersways their power,

How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,

Whose action is no stronger than a flower?

O how shall summer's honey breath hold out

Against the wrackful siege of batt'ring days,

When rocks impregnable are not so stout,

Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?

O fearful meditation; where, alack,

Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?

Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back,

Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

O none, unless this miracle have might,

That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Since there is nothing on earth that isn't subject to the sway of mortality, including the most elemental forces, youthful beauty in its fragility is hardly likely to endure. The idyllic summer days of happiness are likewise perishable, since time decays everything. In this sense, everything is in the possession of Time, including the lover's handsomeness, which has no more chance of hiding from its depredations than do rocks or steel. Nothing can stop Time's fleet-footed hurry, nor prevent it from reclaiming its own... unless the act of capturing the boy's beauty in written words has a chance of cheating it of the complete victory.

The controlling metaphors of sonnet 65 are first legal, and then military. In the opening four lines, beauty is under the 'sway', or legal jurisdiction, of mortality, so that it has no chance of 'holding a plea' in Time's court, and its judicial action is no stronger than either the flower, or indeed the poem's distinctly feeble fourth line.

Then suddenly we leave the courtroom for a scene of siege, where the passing days are battering rams that will break down beauty as easily as (surely more easily than) they do natural fortifications or steel gates. As in the 64th sonnet, to which the present one can be read as a companion piece, the realisation itself is fatal. 'This thought is as a death' in 64 becomes here the equally querulous 'O fearful meditation', prior to the poem's most troubling metaphor, the idea that the lover's beauty properly belongs in the sealed chest of Time, as its 'best jewel'. By the twelfth line, it has become once again the trophy, or 'spoil', of that indomitable military campaign that Time conducts, and always wins. Its wasting action is so 'fearful' precisely because it jealously holds on to what it considers its own, with the express purpose of ruining it. Time's chest might as well be the dog's manger of classical fable.

The only wager against this fate is the poet's self-reflection at the close, that in the very act of recording the boy's beauty for posterity, of writing it down 'in black ink', it may paradoxically continue to scintillate as brightly as it does at the moment the sonnet is written. If there is any way of joining the war against Time, it lies in the possible afterlife of the literary work, for all that such a thought wryly strikes the poet as hoping for a miracle.

Art is the last resort by which the perishable may be preserved against the onslaught of the days and years, and even that seems a matter of crossed fingers. The pathos of sonnets 64 and 65, their curdled fatalism, derives from the poet's inability to treasure what beauty there is while it exists, rather than looking onward to its inevitable decay, and so already surrendering the precious jewel to Time's own treasure-chest.

Sonnet 64

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 razed

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.

This thought is as a death, which cannot choose

But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

The theme of the 64th sonnet is mortality, entropy, decay. The context is set by no fewer than ten lines of examples from the natural and political worlds. Everything falls away, into rot and ruin and desuetude and age.

Time's cruel hand is responsible for the disfigurements of age, when the richness of youth is obliterated in gradual wearing-out. Once-tall towers crumble away, supposedly durable brass is consumed by deadly tarnishing, and the ocean erodes the land, or else it drains away to dry land. These 'interchange[s] of state' all have the cumulative effect of loss, and are compounded by the fact that each state itself may as well be subject to decay as to entropic transformation (where 'state' has the supplementary meaning of the political state in which, like Hamlet, we can suspect something may be rotten).

The evidence of ruin is all around, so much so that the condition seems to seed the mental activity of rumination, where only the corruptible twin arches of an intercedent 'm' disguise the presence of more ruination. And what he ru(m)inates is love, which can't be any more immune to decay than anything else is. Whether the immediate cause be mortal illness or some other rival, Time will inevitably take the boy away.

A synthesis of ruining and ruminating produces the melancholy conclusion of the couplet: 'This thought is as a death'. Having the lover inevitably raises the possibility of one day losing him, so that joy always contains the seeds of a potential helpless sorrow. The thought has a deathly foreboding, but is also in itself the means of envisioning such a death.

One of the two partners in a relationship is always more fatalistic than the other. He foresees the end in every disagreement, in every disaffection, in every alienation of sympathy. To the common wisdom, he is the partner who 'thinks too much'. Shakespeare's lover is fully aware of the corrosive nature of such excess of thinking. The too-much-examined love is not worth living. But the implication is that all thinking about love is dangerous, as though love were at its most efficacious when simply inhabited like a building, or travelled through like air or water. To look objectively at it is to become aware of its mortality, where, for all its towering stature or brass-bound robustness now, it is as susceptible to the predation of Time as towers or brass.

In the 20th century, Coward ends a lyric of self-accusing fatalism thus:

I am no good at love

I betray it with little sins

For I feel the misery of the end

In the moment that it begins

And the bitterness of the last good-bye

Is the bitterness that wins.

In previous stanzas, he gets the tone of the love-affair wrong, or else poisons the atmosphere with unfounded jealousies. But it is here in the final lines that the most odious crime of the thinking lover emerges. He sees love's end at its very beginning, and the final moment of separation will be the prevailing mood of his memory of it. Nothing is stronger than loss, and nothing is more inevitable. The thought is not just of death, but is in itself a death.

How to love, and not think about it?