Shakespeare's Sonnet 18

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st.
     So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
     So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

I caught the tail end of a Michael Wood "In Search of Shakespeare, Part III: The Duty of Poets" rebroadcast on PBS last week that has stuck in my craw. In it, Wood says that Sonnet 18 was written almost a year after the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet at age 11. Shakespeare had, at best, a distant relationship with his family in Stratford as he made a living in London, and only heard the news after Hamnet was buried. I had never seen a date associated with the sonnets other than when they were first officially published in 1601, and the dates of the writing of the sonnets wasn't mentioned. But learning this detail of Shakespeare's personal history brings such new meaning to Sonnet 18, at least to my mind.

This sonnet has so often been used to describe romantic love that it's something of a meme. In my time at UConn, in Professor Manning's Shakespeare I course, he said that this sonnet was written for a patron and dedicated, most likely to a man named Henry Wriothesley, the Third Earl of Southampton. The first publication of the sonnets, by Thomas Thorpe, included a dedication to the "onlie begetter of these ensuing sonnets, Mr W.H." [sic] --- W.H. being an inverse of Wriothesley's initials. Adherents to this attribution say that the patron's identity was concealed because of the earl's subsequent part in a conspiracy against Elizabeth I, for which he was spared death for life imprisonment. Prof. Manning's lecture posited that some one of the Wriothesley family, perhaps even Henry himself, had paid a sum of money to host Shakespeare in 1597. And it was there that he wrote a series of sonnets about a "Fair Youth" --- ostensibly encouraging the earl-in-waiting, who was reportedly homosexual, to have children so his beauty would be passed down to future generations. Evidently, it worked and Southampton was married the next year and produced several children --- though it did not put an end to the earl's... how shall we say... extracurricular activities.

And indeed, this call to a living soul is a perfectly befitting reading of Sonnet 18 and that sonnet series. It is a wistful reminder that our lives are short and the lifespan follows a pattern much like the seasons. Like a flower must produce a seed in order for the original flower's beauty to continue, so must we have children to pass down our DNA. The sonnet reflects that as long as the sire's lineage continues, a part of his fairness --- in this case, specifically, the blond hair of the "Fair Youth" will always remain on the earth. And yet, Shakespeare acknowledges that sometimes features like blond hair are lost --- "every fair from fair sometime declines." Of course, we know now that the genes for blond hair are recessive and are masked in the presence of genes for darker hair in a recombination in offspring. In lieu of hard science, the poet's eye has a remarkable perception of nature given his time. Recombinant genetics combined with Darwin's theories really hit home the truth in "chance or nature's changing course."

But Shakespeare didn't just show up empty-handed at the Wriothesley estate. These lines were at least sketched beforehand. And in them, I can clearly see a father reminiscing about his departed son, his grasps at a deeper meaning, and a resolve to preserve his memory in the year since Hamnet's death. Some of the other sonnets in the series dwell on the word "sun" --- a homonym for "son" --- in a way that, to borrow a phrase from the Bard himself, "doth protest too much" for a man who was a master of double-meanings. While the sun is not directly worded here, it is described as "the eye of heaven" as a common descriptor.

Surely, the Elizabethan people were much more used to this situation of child mortality, but that doesn't mean it was easier to bear. Doubtless, even then, it caused degrees of depression, marital strain, questioning of religion and God, et cetera. Shakespeare was away in London during the illness, death and burial, and I suppose that may have both saved him some particular griefs in having to witness the details of passing, but also inspired others in the vein he wasn't there to see Hamnet or have a final word of parting with his son. With the line "... and often is his gold complexion dimmed," one can see a kind of struggle --- that, in an age where there were no photographs and portraiture was relatively rare, and with the passing of time, Hamnet's face and blond hair were becoming harder to accurately picture. The human brain is a kind of computer that does frequent massive memory dumps so we aren't overwhelmed by information, and it is true that the harder one tries to visualize the face of someone we know well, even, the details often escape us, leaving instead a dimmed impression.

Despite this struggle for visual recollection, Will is determined to remember and to have Hamnet be remembered. He is determined all the more by the dimming, I think. Having been in London and not seeing any stage of the death... in a strange way, the boy isn't terminally dead to Shakespeare. Will never actually saw him so. And so, the Fair Youth retains his fairness --- caught in a kind of mental limbo where he does not give back what he "ow'st," (in that time's sense that every person owes God a death in order to enter heaven), nor does he reside in the "shade" of the underworld. There is a poignant delivery in the last six lines, of the poet swearing that the memory of his son --- trapped forever in an "eternal summer" of age 11 --- will be alive on paper and on the lips of the reader, through the "eternal lines" (the lines of the sonnets) that his father has written. An eternal summer preserved by eternal lines.