Time’s injurious hand

In Shakespeare’s sonnet 63, human decay becomes something of a journey through time:

Against my love shall be as I am now,
With Time’s injurious hand crushed and o’erworn;
When hours have drained his blood and filled his brow
With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn
Hath travelled on to age’s steepy night;
And all those beauties whereof now he’s king
Are vanishing, or vanished out of sight,
Stealing away the treasure of his spring;
For such a time do I now fortify
Against confounding age’s cruel knife,
That he shall never cut from memory
My sweet love’s beauty, though my lover’s life:
His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
And they shall live, and he in them still green.

Inevitable as the erosion is, the subject is envisioned as having “travelled on to age’s steepy night”, on a journey, as it were, to the river’s end. And the end is known, even if particular details and individual tributaries along the way remain unseen. The “king” of the youthful “beauties” will fall victim to a time that will “[steal] away the treasure of his spring”, as his life eventually falls under “age’s cruel knife”. The poet contrives to immortalise his “sweet love’s beauty” in the lines of the sonnet so that it will endure after his love’s death.

Frankly, it seems a cold comfort. Similar kinds of dedications were popular in Shakespeare’s day, but it is notable that the lines spend more time describing how time and age will ruin the lover’s beauty, than they do describing that beauty. “His beauty shall in these black lines be seen. . .” where, exactly? Does this durability, this denial of death, lie merely in the fact that lines have been set down in defiance of beauty’s inevitable loss? Can lost beauty be perceived in the understanding that the lines themselves were set down to “fortify” against its loss? Dependence on the durability of something as ephemeral as paper or parchment and ink seems like a poor fortification indeed. Yes, we read these lines now, albeit countless other such dedications have almost certainly been lost to time, but we have no idea about the lover’s actual beauty, only that someone once found him beautiful enough to write about it.

In one sense, it is only our very limited participation in that lover’s beauty, a participation removed both by time and by perception from that lover’s actual beauty, that gives us any sense of it. The beauty itself reaches us as a kind of ghost, if even that. Any beauty that the lover had has been filtered by the poet’s perception, by his expression, by the medium in which he set it down and which was subsequently edited, going through however many hands before being published by Thomas Thorpe in 1609. And the time since 1609 has filtered the sonnet as well, as our understandings and perceptions today cannot be assumed to be identical to those of Shakespeare’s day.

In the end, the poet’s efforts seem to result in only a partial victory against death and time. Hamlet’s list of things that keep one from committing suicide comes to mind:

To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause—there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office, and the spurns

That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Again, it comes down to a mutual participation, and this is a mutual participation (or anticipation) that keeps us from embracing death. It’s those dreams. Not that they just come to us, but that we will be likely to participate in them somehow, in ways that seem to matter more, and seem potentially far more unpleasant, than merely watching them might be.

Yet, Hamlet’s perspective, his hesitation, is hardly the only view of death. In The Tempest, when Ferdinand thinks his father has died in a shipwreck, the spirit Ariel sings:

Full fathom five thy father lies.

Of his bones are coral made.

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell

(Then the spirits chime in: Ding Dong! Ding Dong bell!)

Although Ferdinand’s father has not really died, this vision reflects a kind of wondrous transformation–a view of death that is transformative and transcendent. Yet, the transformation is still something that happens to Ferdinand’s father in the song. He does not seem to participate in it actively, at least not as far as we can tell.

Not that death can’t be something in which we actively participate. The last part of Tom Waits’ song “Shiver Me Timbers” suggests the possibility of becoming part of the process of goodbye:

And please call my missus
Tell her not to cry
My goodbye is written
By the moon in the sky
And nobody knows me
I can’t fathom my stayin’
And shiver me timbers
I’m a-sailin’ away

And the fog’s liftin’
And the sand’s shiftin’
And I’m driftin’ on out
Ol’ Captain Ahab
He ain’t got nothin’ on me
So come on and swallow me, don’t follow me
I travel alone
Blue water’s my daughter
And I’m skippin’ like a stone

And I’m leavin’ my family
And I’m leavin’ my friends
My body’s at home
But my heart’s in the wind
Where the clouds are like headlines
On a new front page sky
And shiver me timbers
I’m a-sailin’ away

Some read this song as a parting, a farewell, a goodbye song, and it is, but it also suggests more than that–a leaving that might be more permanent. Whether you take the song more literally or figuratively depends on your perspective.*

Carlos Castañeda extends the metaphor. He records the words of his teacher, the Yaqui sorcerer Don Juan Matus:

Death is our eternal companion. It is always on our left, at an arm’s length. Death is the only wise advisor that we have. Whenever you feel, as you always do, that everything is going wrong and you’re about to be annihilated, turn to your death and ask if that is so. Your death will tell you that you’re wrong; that nothing really matters outside its touch.

Here, death is more than the relief from the vicissitudes of life that Hamlet seeks. Death is a “friend”, perhaps bringing to mind the green fields that Falstaff speaks of at the end of his life, or perhaps it is more like the sleep that Hamlet and Robert Frost envision at the end of life.**

In As You Like It, after meeting a fool in the forest of Arden, the melancholic Jacques takes delight not as much in the fool’s wit, as in the fool’s observation, “And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,/ And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;/ And thereby hangs a tale.” (2.7.26-28). Time the friend. Time the foe. Steadily giving and taking away. At once paying and robbing us. Apparently, Jacques is simply one of those people who loves the depressive shit best.

If we believe the Yaqui sorcerer, maybe death is exactly as Jim Morrison described it:

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

It hurts to set you free
But you’ll never follow me
The end of laughter and soft lies
The end of nights we tried to die
This is the end***

Just as Shakespeare’s sonnet suggests, although we may preserve something in the lines of our work, in the end all that we save or capture may be the mere record of our attempt to preserve something that remains beyond our ability to save, in the face of something against which we have no real power at all.

*Tom Waits’ “Shiver Me Timbers” may be heard here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eux2qnnslac

**With the word ‘just’, Robert Frost seems a bit dismissive of ‘human sleep’ in his “After Apple Picking” poem: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44259/after-apple-picking

***Morrison’s “The End” (a famously long song–the Youtube version is combined with overwritten verse from Requiem auf einer Stele by Federico Federici) may be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GczoK62lsVY

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