Sunday, December 30, 2018

SONNET 12 TIME - When I do count the clock that tells the time,


When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls, all silvered o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves,
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
     And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
     Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.


Mnemonic Image

TIME

Memory Passage

Death places his SEAL upon TIME, assuming the role of the FATHER of Time, showing meaning in the ASTRONOMY of the stars, the figures of which move upon the STAGE in a poor COUNTERFEIT of reality. Death places it all into a TOMB for the duration of the zero SUMMER until is reborn like the PHOENIX with a new FACE.

Idiosyncratic Abstract:



Couplet Imagery

And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
     Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

I hear the Heideggerian Nothing in that nothing. What is Time's scythe? The inexorable sweeping hand of the clock mowing through the verses? What is the time inside the sonnet? For within the interior architecture of the poem, there is sanctuary - this played out in later sonnets. But for us, now, the memorization of the sonnet, the re-creation within our memory and the ability to "call it back," the double, the twin, the mirror, the representation.

Breed connotes the animal husbandry of a farmer and a sub-category of gay pornography.

Note the intimations of the afterlife in the "hence." And that it might be a hellish place, where there is need to be brave, or at least endure. 


Q1

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls, all silvered o'er with white;

Tick tock goes the meter of that first line. Father Time stepping down the echoing hallways of memory. Brave day anticipates that later bravery of the long day's journey into night. Goya's drowning dog is emblematic of the brave day sunk into hideous night. The shriek of hideous damnation, hideous annihilation, the hideous features of the Abyss, of the monster. Counting moves on to beholding. And the sexual petals of the violet past prime. Tennessee Williams's in the whorehouse:

When I was fourteen, my father decided to initiate me into the ways of manhood, and took me to the local whorehouse. The woman spread her legs, and made me look between them. All I could see was something that looked like a dyin' orchid; consequently, I have never been comfortable around women or orchids.

And there is almost a time-lapse with the dark lady of sabled curls silvering white. That confusion of color with silver as a verb to whiten. The bloody bones silvered in the sun until they were pale with whiteness.


Q2

When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves,
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,

The hero, the good man, the leader as the lofty tree. Moses with flowing locks, who once sheltered the herd, the good shepherd, turned the balding skeltal ghost of his former self. No longer able to even provide shade to disturb Diogenes. The herd now exposed to the hyenas of time.

Lusty green shoots and shafts of summer are girded up. Girding up the loins. Time's chastity. And carried around in-valid upon the stretcher. The summer soldier legless, armless. Moses with the white and bristly beard - morphing into Father Time himself.


Q3

Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;

After having counted and beholded and seen all of the deprecatory effects of time, then I wonder. It makes me wonder. Not you! Your beauty may not fade nor wander down into the bad part of town, into the wastes of time. Thoreau: you cannot waste time without injuring eternity. But where is the Platonic Form? Here is the face to face I desire. Not the emanation. Not that which will be wasted by time, but the eternal, never fading.

Everything sweet turns bitter. Beauty must fade. Note the reification. The desire to fix beauty into permanence. There is the waterfall, not the water falling. Denial of process. Denial. Would Basho even understand the underlying desire of the sonnets?


C

And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
     Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

And that Heideggerian Nothing is stronger here at the end than ever. Nothing CAN make defense.


"Nothing Exists" - the original ontological MacGuffin.


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