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PERSONAL SONNETS.

1599-1600.

SHAKSPEARE TO THE EARL, CHIEFLY ON HIS OWN DEATH.

Nowhere

THIS is a group of very touching sonnets. else shall we draw more near to the poet in his own person. They look as if written in contemplation of death. They have a touch of physical languor: the tinge of solemn thought. And if they were composed at such a time, they show us how limitedly autobiographic the sonnets were intended to be. Shakspeare never speaks of himself except in relation to the Earl. Here his request is that, should he die, his friend is not to mourn for him any longer even than the death-bell tolls. He would rather be forgotten by the Earl than that his friend should grieve for him when he is gone. Also, he begs that the Earl will not so much as mention his name, lest the keen hard world should see the disparity betwixt what the friend in his kindness may have thought of the Poet and its own shrewder estimate; for if the world should task the living to tell what merit there was in him that is dead, the Earl will be put to shame, or be driven to speak falsely of one whom he loved truly.

The third sonnet appears to me to have in it more of

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illness than of age. The Poet is urging excuses; and, in case he should die, he is making the best of it for his friend. Then he is decrying his own appearance as one that sees himself in the glass when worn and broken by suffering. He feels his life to be in the sere and yellow leaf. The boughs are growing bare where the sweet birds lately sang. The twilight is creeping over all, cold and grey. The fire that he has warmed himself by is sinking low; there is more white ash than ruddy glow. All this he urges in case the flame should go out suddenly. The sonnet concludes with another excuse. Because this is so, and the Earl sees it, that is why his love grows stronger, fearing lest it should lose him. But do not mind,' he says, though I should die, yet shall I be with you; I shall live on in the lines which I leave; these shall stay with you as a memorial of our love. When you look at these sonnets, you will see the very part of me that was consecrated to you. Earth can but take its own as food for the worms. My spirit is yours, and that remains with you.' Against the time shall come,' he continues, when my friend shall be, as I am now, bowed down and crushed by "Time's injurious hand," when the blood runs thin, and the brow is as a map filled with the lines and crosses of care; his day is approaching "age's steepy night," and his beauty is vanishing-against such a time as this have I written these sonnets, (which are to remain with him), so that when he dies his beauty may live on in enduring youth.' Either I shall live to write your epitaph, or you will survive long after me; be this as it may, Death shall not take hence the memory of you, although I shall be quite forgotten. Your name shall have immortal life from these lines, although I, once gone, shall be gone for ever. The earth will yield me but a common grave; your grave shall be in the eyes of men, and my verse shall build your gentle monument.'

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I am by no means sure that the first two lines of the

THE POET FEELS SOMEWHAT BROKEN IN SPIRIT. 291

5th sonnet do not indicate more than age or illness. When we consider Shakspeare's reticence on the subject of self, they look particularly pointed for a passing allusion. Time is not used for age in these two lines; that follows in the next line; these contain their own particulars. The Poet is crushed and overworn by Time's injurious hand. Here is the same personification of Time, the ruling tyrant, as we find in the sonnets spoken by Southampton. It is time present, not time in general. Then injurious' is an appellation of reproach, meaning that from the present time, or at the present moment, Shakspeare is suffering some wrong which is unjustly hurtful. Time's hand is here injurious in a moral rather than physical sense. And this wrong, whether of detraction or persecution, he feels to be so great, that he is quite crushed and overworn.' Steevens remarked of this expression, that to say first he was crushed and then overworn, was little better than to say of a man that he was first killed and then wounded. But it is perfectly right, and much like the Poet's inclusive way of speaking, if he felt crushed in the moral sense, as well as worn down in physical health. And that there was such an accumulation of affliction is shown by the emphatic As I am now!' What was this heavy injustice which so bowed the Poet's spirit at the time, and caused the nearest approach to a personal cry in the whole of the sonnets? As the sonnet is addressed to Southampton, the subject will be one that he is cognisant of, and in which he is interested, or even this little allusion to himself would hardly have been permitted by the Poet. It may have to do with Shakspeare's having fallen under the suspicion of those in authority, possibly of Majesty itself, on account of Southampton's friendly intimacy and his appearance of being bound up with the cause of Essex. Had he not said something very flattering of the Earl in his Henry V.? This may have been reported to the injury of the Poet, and resented by Her

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Majesty. It was something very important, or it would not have been chronicled in a personal sonnet.

No longer mourn for me, when I am dead,
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled

From this vile world with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot,
If thinking on me then should make you woe:
O if I say you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,'
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse,
But let your love even with my life decay:
Lest the wise world should look into your moan,
And mock you with me after I am gone.

O, lest the World should task you to recite
What merit lived in me, that you should love
After my death, dear Love, forget me quite,
For you in me can nothing worthy prove;
Unless you would devise some virtuous lie,
To do more for me than mine own desert,
And hang more praise upon deceased I
Than niggard truth would willingly impart :
O lest your true love may seem false in this,
That you for love speak well of me untrue,
My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more to shame nor me nor you!

(71.)

For I am shamed by that which I bring forth,
And so should you, to love things nothing worth.

That time of year thou may'st in me behold

(72.)

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang!

In me thou seest the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

1 So 'Hamlet,' when asked what he has done with the dead body of Polonius, replies, 'Compounded it with dust, whereto 'tis kin.'

THE PROMISED IMMORTALITY.

Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest!
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by:

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This thou perceiv'st, which mak'st thy love more strong
To love that well which thou must lose ere long.

But be contented! when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away,

My life hath in this line some interest,

Which for memorial still with thee shall stay:
When thou reviewest this, thou dost review

The very part was consecrate to thee:

The Earth can have but earth, which is his due;
My spirit is thine, the better part of me!
So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,
The prey of worms-my body being dead-
The coward-conquest of a wretch's knife,
Too base of thee to be remembered:

The worth of that is that which it contains,
And that is this, and this with thee remains.

(73.)

(74.)

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, tho' my Lover's life:

His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
And they shall live, and he in them still green.

(63.)

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