1] When I do count the clock that tells the time
[2] And see the brave day sunk in hideous night,
[3] When I behold the violet past prime
[4] And sable curls all silvered o’er with white;
[5] When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
[6] Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
[7] And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
[8] Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard;
[9] Then of thy beauty do I question make
[10] That thou among the wastes of time must go,
[11] Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
[12] And die as fast as they see others grow;
[13] And nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defense
[14] Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
First Stanza
[1] When I do count the clock that tells the time
[2] And see the brave day sunk in hideous night,
[3] When I behold the violet past prime
[4] And sable curls all silvered o’er with white;
The matter of change, of mutability has been a theme of poets: although it is not a theme I see taken up much of late. The issue is one of change: how do we account for change? What does change mean? What can we do about change?
I don’t believe this theme has the same resonance of late, because we do not believe in any permanence. We are nominalist: there are no universals, no nature. Things are what they call them.
This has a cost: nothing can change, because nothing is something truly. This or that is only as much as I call it by name.
The matter of mutability is a question of why the particular fades from the essence, from the permanent form. That does not trouble us as it would have troubled a careful observer of Shakespeare’s time.
And so when he sees change: the clock face move, the night comes on, black hair turn white, he forces him to contemplate death (stanza three).
The phrase “hideous night” is a striking phrase: why hideous? It is only hideous as the best fades off to danger and death.
Second Stanza
[5] When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
[6] Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
[7] And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
[8] Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard;
This is not quite a move to “nature”, but rather to living things. The first stanza concerns time, this concerns most particularly plants. It’s the end of Eden.
Trees become bare of leaves; and summer fields turn to a “white and bristly beard”.
It is an interesting image: summer is being borne out on a bier. This bearing summer out on a bier, no longer green by now with a “white and bristly beard” would have struck Shakespeare’s first readers more directly. The Golden Bough, by Frazer, provides numerous examples of folk festivals involving bringing in summer and taking out summer by means of some vegetation for the purpose of maintaining fertility.
These images become the basis for an encouragement of the object of the poem to himself be fertile.
Shakespeare takes the inherent purpose of the ancient rituals and uses them as a basis for encouraging the fertility of one.
Third Stanza
[9] Then of thy beauty do I question make
[10] That thou among the wastes of time must go,
[11] Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
[12] And die as fast as they see others grow;
Death comes around constantly in this world. There is no manner of surviving return of winter but some new fertility.
I know that you will not last the winter: nothing does. There is only one answer to the winter, spring.
You, my friend will “among the wastes of time [] go”. Everything which is sweet and beautiful will be lost: that which is beautiful today will “die”. There is only one solution, new life (since the current life will not persist).
Couplet
[13] And nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defense
[14] Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
The only thing which survives the winter is a new birth in Spring. There is nothing which survives the death of a man except a child.
Time comes like the “scythe” of harvest in autumn, to be followed by winter. Only the spring crop will survive the harvest and winter.
memoirandremains 