首日一首Sonnet (63)

LXIII

1. Against my love shall be as I am now,
2. With Time's injurious hand crush'd and o'erworn;
3. When hours have drain'd his blood and fill'd his brow
4. With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn
5. Hath travelled on to age's steepy night;
6. And all those beauties whereof now he's king
7. Are vanishing, or vanished out of sight,
8. Stealing away the treasure of his spring;
9. For such a time do I now fortify
10. Against confounding age's cruel knife,
11. That he shall never cut from memory
12. My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life:
13. His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
14. And they shall live, and he in them still green.

Commentary:
Havingregained his equilibrium once more,after some insane attacks of jealousy, the poet devotes himself againtothe question of the youth's mortality and the ravages of time againstallthings beautiful. What, he wonders, may be attempted as a means ofholdingTime's swift foot back and restraining his despoliation of beauty? That is the theme ofthis and the next two sonnets.Here and in 65 the hope is expressed that the black lines of this versewill provide a form of immortality. In the intervening sonnet, 64,nothingis suggested as a palliative, and the only remedy is to weep for whatoneis destined soon to lose.
It isworth noting the personal element in thesethree sonnets. Time is not only the universal arch-destroyer, but, whatseems even more heinous, he will cut away my sweet love'sbeauty, mylover's life, he will come and take my love away, hewill snatchaway Time's best jewel (i.e. my beloved) and if mylove shallstill shine bright despite all this destruction, it will onlybe throughsome miracle yet unknown. Each of the three sonnets passes from theuniversalityof wasteful Time's depravity, which attacks and crushes individuals,wreckscities, eats up the land, consumes brass and eternal monuments,destroysthe flowers of the summer as well as gates of steel and the stoutestrocks,and then turns its attention to my sweet love's beauty, mylove, andTime's best jewel. So all things that aremortal fade and soon areno more to be seen. What is the solution? To what must one turn toavoidthis destruction and loss? Is it to the immortality of verse? Or shouldone simply weep and acknowledge that everything which we possess is asadeath which continues to weep but must dissipate itself eventually intothe great sea of mortality?
Thissonnet shares the same opening words assonnet 49. The numbers of the two are important, as they areclimactericnumbers, and were for the Elizabethans crucial years in a person'slife.The astrologers were deeply concerned for Elizabeth's welfare in her63rdyear and foretold numerous disasters. She died in her next climactericyearat the age of 70.




Note:
1.Against = in preparation for (thetime when)

2. Time'sinjurious hand - Time is personifiedonce again as the reckless destroyer of all things. Of the 126 sonnetstothe youth, time as the invidious tyrant or fickle cheat appears in 17.Forthe record, the sonnets in which Time is mentioned in a pejorativecontextare 5, 12, 15, 16, 19, 22, 55, 60, 63, 64, 65, 77, 100, 115, 116, 123,126.The word does not occur at all in the sonnets to the dark lady.
crushed and o'erworn - the poet perceives himself, havinglooked inhis glass in the previous sonnet, as one who is more than past hisprime.It is worth mentioning that, if the sonnets were written prior to 1600,Shakespeare would have been 36 at the most. Nevertheless, it isacknowledgedthat the ageing process was more rapid in Elizabethan England than itistoday, owing to poverty of diet , poor housing and primitive medicine.Athirty year old man could therefore consider himself well advancedtowardsold age. In addition it was the necessity of convention that theaddresseeof a love sonnet would be more beautiful and youthful in comparison toallearthly things. Therefore those who admired were always, by reflection,crushed and o'erworn.
o'erworn = worn out.

3. drain'dhis blood = emptied him ofblood. It was thought that, as one aged, the blood became thinner,colder,and that there was less of it. The final act of Time and Death was toemptythe body of blood completely. fill'd his brow -since the Q spellingis fil'd there could be a reference to the use of afile. The liningof the forehead by Time with wrinkles was for poets the typical act ofdesecrationof beauty which symbolised his (Time's) destructive rage against humanachievement.

4. Themovement from youthful morn to age'ssteepy night is very swift, without any intermediate steps. Oncestartedon the downward slope there is no stopping. The speed of the decline isrepeated in lines 6-7, where the immortal beauties of youth flash oncebeforeone's eyes and then vanish. The repeated word vanish(line 7) givesthe impression of a flickering fire, which flickers briefly and is gone.

5. travelled- travail and travel werethe same word in Shakespearian times. See 27, 34, 50. (See Q'sspelling).Hence 'moved wearily along on its journey'.
age's steepy night - the steep decline of age into night,darkness andlifelessness. The word steepy is not a neologism,and is recordedby OED before Shakespeare's usage of it. It seems to be synonymous withsteep. There could be a connection with steeping objects in fluids sothatthey become flavoured or imbued with the liquid (in this case withnight).

6. wherofnow he's king = over whichhe now reigns. The particular aspects or characteristics of beautywhichthe youth possessed were in a sense under his power, as if he were therulerof them all. But like all earthly things power is illusory, and in thenextline they vanish almost as soon as they make their appearance.

7. vanishing(ed) - the repetition ofthe word makes the process more consciously visual. As one looks, thebeautiesso much vaunted, disappear before one's gaze.

8. Stealingaway - has the transitivemeaning of (Time) robbing the youth of all his treasures (his beauty),andthe intransitive sense of to steal away, in which the beauty of theyouthcreeps away imperceptibly, furtively disappears, before anyone hasnoticedits absence. In the second sense the treasure of his springwouldbe in appostion to all those beauties or hisyouthful morn,or both.

9. fortify= take up a defensive positionby building fortifications. The fortifications become the blacklinesof l.13. The word is also used in Sonn 16:
And fortify yourself in your decay
With means more blessed than my barren rhyme?
But the fortifications seem woefully inadequate in both cases.

10. confounding= destroying. See Sonn60, line 8, note. Age and Time were comparable, interchangeabledestroyers,armed as often with knives as with scythes. Sonn. 100 lists bothweapons:
Give my love fame faster than Time wastes life;
So thou prevent'st his scythe and crooked knife. 100.13-14

11. he= age, time.

12. The useof my sweet love'sbeauty and my lover's life has proveddifficult for commentatorswho are not too keen on open admissions of love between men. It isclearthat the understanding of the terms love, or lover, differed from thatofmodern times, and there are instances in the plays where men addresseachother or refer to each other in such terms without any emotive content.But as so often in writing, it is the context which determines what thewords mean. Here, with the sonnet devoted to the means by whichsomethingprecious might be preserved, and so much emphasis being placed on theadmiredbeauty of the youth, there is no doubt that love andlovermean approximately what they do in modern English, although loverhasthe more general sense of one who is loved, withoutthe unavoidablemodern overtones of one with whom one has had sex.There is no doubtthat my love and my lover aremeant to carry the full rangeof emotional overtones which any deep love for another person bringswithit. In John Lyly's Euphues : The Anatomy of Wit,published in 1578,Euphues takes as his special friend Philautus, and the two declaredtheirlove for each other. They used not only one board,(table) butone bed, one book (if so be it they thought not one too many). Theirfriendshipaugmented every day, insomuch that the one could not refrain thecompanyof the other for one minute. Lyly. p.19, Leah Scragg ed. See commentaries on Sonnet20 and the extendedcommentary on Sonnet13.

13.Blackness and beauty seem to be opposites.Partly it is the blackness of night and oblivion, set against thebrightnessof his youthful morn. Partly it may be that
In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name; 127.
The blackness of course in this case is that of ink, which here managesto preserve greeness and vitality, against all the odds.

14. Andthey shall live - the lines ofverse shall continue to live (when all else is dead). he inthem stillgreen - he (my love) shall always be flourishing in themwith youthand vitality.