"The trench was a horrible sight. The dead were stretched out on one side, one on top of each other six feet high. I thought at the time I should never get the peculiar disgusting smell of the vapour of warm human blood heated by the sun out of my nostrils. I would rather have smelt gas a hundred times. I can never describe that faint sickening, horrible smell which several times nearly knocked me up altogether." - British Captain Leeham, talking about the first day of the Battle of the Somme
When forty Winters shall beseige thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a totter'd weed, of small worth held:
Then being asked where all thy beauty lies -
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days -
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer, "This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse" -
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.
SONNET INDEX
Mnemonic Image: TRENCH
Memory Passage: Beauty's ROSE in a World War I TRENCH
Idiosyncratic Abstract: The weathered and shivering Old Man, holding a handful of dried dusty rose petals, sees the fresh and flushed Young Child licking the dripping dew from a freshly cut red rose.
Couplet Images: An old and cold-blooded Weathered Wrinkled Man and a new and hot-blooded Fresh and Ruddy Faced Child.
NOTES 4/3/2017
Advancing the couplet as Key Mnemonic Images: An old and cold-blooded Weathered Wrinkled Man and a new and hot-blooded Fresh and Ruddy Faced Child.
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.
The Old Man, a ghost of former beauty, wrinkled and scarred by time, resembling Death, feels his own blood running cold over his bones, but sees it burning hot and new in the flesh his blood: his child.
This vicarious life. The Grandfather gazes upon the Grandson with quiet joy, indulges his enthusiasms, encourages his youthful dreams, sponsors his hope, while silently nursing his own regrets and despair. What hope remains is not enough to animate the tired vessel of his aching bones and wretched flesh; there is only hope for his blood within a younger form being full to the brim and not yet broken.
Kerrigan notes Richard II:
Hath love in thy old blood no living fire?
Edward's seven sons, whereof thyself art one,
Were as seven vials of his sacred blood
***
When forty Winters shall beseige thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a totter'd weed, of small worth held:
The Mnemonic Image is of a World War I trench, the "horrible sight" piled with corpses, pooled with blood, the stench of decay and death impossible to escape.
Winters shall beseige. A War in the Sonnets is always being waged against the ravages of Time. After 40 years, Time will have dug deep trenches, wrinkles, lines of age, in the Young Man's face, beauty's field. Scars and creases of age, the soft smooth cheeks and brow of innocence now de-faced, Time's cruel knife having carved deep lines of experience, of daily worry, flesh sagging under the weight of remorse, guilt, shames and the million trivial betrayals of self. The fractures of broken dreams rising visible through the skin.
Booth indicates livery as a soldier's uniform. The fresh green soldier's uniform having been worn for 40 years, reeking of human sweat and tears, splattered with blood and human waste: the totter'd weed. This weed sadly remembers the Rose - what it once was and what it once hoped to be. The Garden has been turned into a Battlefield. Eden into a Waste Land.
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Fear in the face in the mirror.
Kerrigan point to The Rape of Lucrece:
Her mistress she doth give demure good-morrow,
With soft-slow tongue, true mark of modesty,
And sorts a sad look to her lady's sorrow,
For why her face wore sorrow's livery;
But durst not ask of her audaciously
Why her two suns were cloud-eclipsed so,
Nor why her fair cheeks over-wash'd with woe.
Then being asked where all thy beauty lies -
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days -
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
The deep-sunken orbits of the eyeholes of the skull, the hollowed features of the onanist. The eyes which 40 years ago looked upon the Young Man's beauty (gazed on now), now hunger to gaze upon the treasure that must have been gained in those lusty days. Implicit questions of how did you use your beauty, your wealth, how did you spend the coin of your beauty when it was at it's greatest value?
Shakespeare's “obsessive concern with metaphorical wealth, profit, worth, value, expense, ‘content’” (Greene, “Pitiful Thrivers” 176) has of course been well-noted, as has his reliance on Erasmus's “Epistle to Persuade a Young Gentleman to Marriage” (Booth 135). Yet critics have not noted just how much Shakespeare “economizes” Erasmus's letter, which would have been widely available from Thomas Wilson's translation in The Arte of Rhetorique (1560). In this text, the speaker tries to convince a young man to marry and have children, and as one perhaps might expect from Erasmus, the primary impetus is religious:
Matrimony is even as honorable as the name of a heretic is thought shameful. What is more right or meet than to give that unto the posterity, the which we have received of our ancestors? What is more inconsiderate than under the desire of holiness to eschew that as unholy which God himself, the fountain and father of all holiness, would have to be counted as most holy? (qtd. in Wilson, Arte 81)
Not marrying is clearly unnatural, but even this argument is enfolded within a religious context, and in an interesting analogy, Erasmus equates not marrying with acting “like giants,” that is to say, fighting nature is being “a rebel to God himself (86, 87). In Shakespeare's sequence, however, the primary referent shifts from religion to economics. The addressee is guilty of “niggarding” (1); his beauty deserves “use” and not procreating is “thriftless praise” (2); Nature “lends” beauty and the addressee is a “Profitless usurer” (4) who ought to fear Nature's “audit” (4). As Greene says, “The procreation sonnets display with particular brilliance Shakespeare's ability to manipulate words which in his language belonged both to the economic and the sexual/ biological semantic fields: among others, ‘increase,’ ‘use,’ ‘spend,’ ‘free,’ ‘live,’ ‘dear,’ ‘house,’ ‘usury,’ ‘endowed,’ along with their cognates” (“ Pitiful Thrivers” 176).
- Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays - What's the Use?
Or, The Problematic of Economy in Shakespeare's Procreation Sonnets by Peter C. Herman
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
Note the resonance with the previous sonnet's images of eyes and eating,
But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
and
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.
Shame at how you have spent your beauty and what you now have to show for it. Conversely, praise at how thrifty you have saved your beauty, treasure, and how it more than adequately accounts for your years, sums your accounts, as expressed in Q3.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer, "This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse" -
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
As with most of Shakespeare, there are levels of interpretation working simultaneously. For the purposes of memorization, the sexual, as graphic as possible, is helpful as an initial repository of mnemonic images. Because there is depth here, much substance to the matter, the sexual fades over repeated recitations into the background of the sonnet.
You imagine the Young Man full of lust and spending his seed fruitlessly in acts of masturbation - perhaps even in recreational acts of homosexuality that will bear no fruit. After forty years, the Young Man is now hollow-eyed after such feeding upon himself, his face lined with Time's trenches. And not one cares to gaze upon it in a sexual manner. Then being asked about how his seed / semen / treasure was used in the world, to say it was only spend upon himself or on his clothes or covers or down a drain, is to then know what Shame is, how it, and not Lust, now feeds upon the Old Man. The Old Blood no longer has any fuel for Living Fires of lust to burn upon, only burned out coal and ash for the red flames of Shame to dance upon. But if the Old Man could point to his fresh and hot-blooded child as evidence of the good use, investment, of his seed / semen / treasure, then he is not bankrupt and the child as his fruit / profit / beauty stand in his stead as evidence for the beauty he once had.
Notes 4/10/2017
Will and the Young Man, similarly attired, again in the room with the table, two chairs, window to the Garden.
Upon the table is
a Crystal Ball
the Mirror of Narcissus
Will, playing the Magus, bids the Young Man to peer into the depth of the Crystal Ball, which is sitting on top of the Mirror of Narcissus.
When forty Winters shall beseige thy brow,
The Young Man sees the ragged skeletal hand of Winter raking over his face creating bloody wounds which instantly turn to livid scars, again and again, forty winters, lines of woe and worry deepening with each passing iteration.
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
The Young Man's beautiful face is become a battlefield. Pits and Trenches line deepen. Scars of violence inflicted from the outside. Suffering has hollowed his features from within,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
The Young Man sees himself in the Crystal Ball as a handsome fresh faced soldier at the height of summer climbing down a ladder into one of these Trenches, all the other soldiers are looking at him with envy, jealously and lust. His uniform is spotless and tight against his muscular form.
Will be a totter'd weed, of small worth held:
Then, the Young Man sees in the Crystal Ball the ragged creature of himself struggling to climb out of a trench in the cold of Winter, his face is pockmarked and creased with age, covered with dirt and grime. Behind him a group of Young Vital Soldiers mock his feeble efforts to climb up and out. Many turn their eyes away from the forlorn sight. His uniform is now filthy, like that of a beggar, torn and worn thin, covered in blood, sweat, tears, dried semen and shit, barely hanging on to the skeletal form within.
Then being asked where all thy beauty lies -
Once he is out of the Trench, a shivering pitiful Old Man, there stands before him a Tribunal composed of his family, friends and lost loves. As a group, they ask what happened to his Beauty.
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days -
A beautiful naked woman emerges from the Tribunal and mocks his impotence, points out all the the semen stains on his ragged uniform, shaming him to the others.
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
The Young Man sees forty years of flash images of every time he masturbated, semen shot onto clothes, sheets, walls, down drains, millions of seeds spilled onto fallow ground. With every ejaculation, his face hollows, the orbits of his eyes darken with rings, the skull emerges with a grim smile.
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
His gluttony for self-love judged through the eyes of the Tribunal turn to Shame, which is a slavering slovenly fanged Beast, head down, shuffling sideways to escape view, tail between its legs. This Beast of Shame begins to gnaw with toothless jaw upon his flesh.
More naked beautiful women emerge from the Tribunal, each of them a woman he has rejected. They all lay down in a circle around him, spreading their legs open wide. An accountant that looks like the Grim Reaper is compiling a tally of all the wasted semen, shaking his head at the enormous amount of treasure that was wasted. The Young Man realizes he has been wasting the great treasure of his semen upon self-love, he has been hoarding his Beauty, been a miser with his treasure / seed.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer,
The circle of naked women stare at the Young Man with relentless seduction. And while his spirit is still willing, his flesh is week. He is old and impotent. The Beast of Shame licks at his impotent cock and his empty balls. The woman all swell into pregnancy and out from between their legs, an infant crawls out of each one, a beautiful mirror image of the Young Man.
"This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse" -
The Grim Accountant indicates each child as wise investment that has paid high dividends. The Beast of Shame vasnishes. The Young Man sees in each beautiful child that his deposit of seed into fertile soil has been cultivated into a tree that has borne much fruit. His beauty has not only been added to, but multiplied.
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
The Young Man now sees himself as the Old Man surrounded by his children.
This were to be new made when thou art old,
Each of the children is illuminated from within by the burning image of the Red Rose, dripping with fresh dew, while he holds in his cold heart only memories, a dusty pile of cold dried petals.
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.
SONNET INDEX
