Theme Of Immortality In Shakespeare’s Poems
Introduction
Perhaps, the greatest writer who ever put words on paper is William Shakespeare. Shakespeare (1564 – 1616) was an English poet and playwright widely regarded as the greatest writer in English. He is often called England's national poet and the bard of Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway with whom he had three children. He began his career in London as an actor, writer and part owner of a playing company called king's Men.
Shakespeare produced most of his works between 1589 and 1613. He wrote plays of different types: comedies, tragedies, and histories. His early comedies containing tight double plots and specific comic sequence among these is the comedy of A Mid-Summer Nights Dream, a witty mixture of romance, magic, and comic low life scenes. Shakespeare's works include 36 plays published in 1623.5 Most of them are well-known by all humanity like: As You Like It, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, Julius Caesar, and others. When the theater was closed because of plague, Shakespeare turned to writing two narrative poems: 'Venus and Adonis' and 'The Rape of the Lucrece,' both proved popular and were often reprinted in his life time. He also wrote 'A Lover Complaint’.
Since Shakespeare's ideas and works embody truths that do not change over time, “he was not of an age, but for all time,' and that apply in all cultures, so that by studying them we actually study ideas that always will be relevant to human concern. Nevertheless, if considered with care, Shakespeare's works would help to a better understanding and comprehension of man. It is worthy to know that Shakespeare had not troubled himself by just creating stories, rather than the foundation of wonderful superstructures which makes him a great painter and an excellent interpreter of the world of man.
The sonnets were the last of Shakespeare's non-dramatic works to be printed. The word 'sonnet' is derived from an Italian word means a little sound. A sonnet is a form of lyric poetry with fourteen lines and a specific rhyme scheme (Lyric poetry presents the deep feelings and emotions of the poet as opposed to poetry that tells a story or presents a witty observation). Shakespearean sonnet (also called the English sonnet) has three quatrains and a couplet with abab cdcd efef gg. It, usually, introduces a subject matter in the first quatrain, expands it in the second, and once more in the third then it concludes or gives the intended meaning in the couplet.
Shakespeare has written 154 sonnet. The majority of sonnets 1-126 are addressed to a young man, the Fair Lord, with whom the poet is believed to have had an intense romantic relationship. The poet spends the first seventeen sonnets trying to convince the young man to marry and have children who will look just like their father to ensure his immortality by passing his qualities to his children, allowing the coming generations to remember and enjoy those qualities. Many of the remaining sonnets in young man's sequence concentrate on the power and effect of time. From127-154, he addresses a mysterious Lady, the dark lady, a woman of questionable morals. She was metaphorically dark in whatever sense of the word, though she is married, yet she is promiscuous.
Most commonly, sonnets reflected wretched lover, agonizing over the conflicting emotions of lust and idealized love. In addition Shakespeare's sonnets convey a great amount of contradictions, showing contrast between beauty and cold reality, hope, and despair. The sonnets represent a well-done combination of linguistic wit with deep passionate feelings.
Shakespeare's sonnets tackled different themes among which are: immortality through verse, immortality through love, compensation, love in absence, dark beauty, love turned to lust, and religion. Critics have frequently called attention to Shakespeare's paradoxical representation of love in the sonnets, they have also discussed the poet's claim that he will immortalize the young man's beauty in his verses, thereby defying the destructiveness of time.
Immortality and the search to obtain it has troubled man since the down of human race. Numerous historic figures including Ramses XV of Egypt and Julius Caesar of Rome have tried to achieve physical immortality, but all their attempts proved to be unsuccessful. So it became evident that no one could be immortalized physically; however, through memories people could last forever. When people pass away objects that are left behind serve to remind people of memories. This concept can be seen through poetry. The use of poetry is a tool that Shakespeare uses in his sonnets. He believes that poetry can out-live anything. This idea paved the way for the concept 'immortality through art.' Shakespeare believes that no one is completely dead or passive after his life time because writing and word can help bring memories and keep a person from being forgotten. The power of written memory permeates the English sonnets or texts, as well. The sonnets famously celebrate the power of black lines of writing to keep the memory green.
Shakespeare emphasized that even when he or his loved ones were dead, they would live through poetry if it was passed down to others. Memory images are sometimes image of objects and some other times image of human figures, and these memory images are considered most effective when they are visually unusual or striking. Another model of memory is the image of true beloved. Love makes the lover unable to think of anything else. Stamping the beloved's image into the brain, until the only way to remove it is to overheat the brain in the hope of dissolving the memory. A specific model of memory is shown in the opening lines of the first poem (sonnet) when the poet says:
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease
His tender heir might bear his memory.
Notably, one should know about both: memory as writing, and memory as performance.
Poetry vs Time
'One motive for much if not all art is to keep memorable what deserves to be remembered….The audience is enabled to call back the poem, or pieces of it, the poet to call back the thing itself, the subject all that was to become the poem.'
(Donald Justic, Maters and Memory)
The poetry of the sixteenth century, when Shakespeare wrote his sonnets, often used certain themes among which were: love, death and time or mutability. As long as poets in general and Shakespeare in specific were occupied with the idea that the power of time can destroy everything of human value, indeed every part of the world in which we live.
The theme of the ravage of time is frequently highlighted and in different forms through the Shakespearean sonnets. It sometimes refers to the destructive power of time and, in other times, it focuses on the effect of time on certain character or object (the most common is a young man). In his sonnets, Shakespeare seems to be distressed by the uncontrollable power that he appears to be fighting or willingly in a battle against time and trying to defeat that harsh and destructive power by his means. Despite the fact that time is a powerful destroyer, Shakespeare believes that his enemy can be defeated by the power of immortal words.
Shakespeare has taken time from different perspectives, sometimes Time is a moving object:'Make glad and sorry season as thou fleet`st' that moves and destroys everything in its path. Some other time it is personified as an agent: 'And do whate'er thou wilt'.
To combat the negative effects of time, Shakespeare presents three remedies: First he advises the young man to breed or to marry and have children or, in other words, to gain immortality through having children who bear his own features and to pass those to the succeeding generations. This remedy is quite clear in the first seventeen sonnets. The second remedy is the true love' love's not Time's fool'. The third and the most common consolatory is the immortalizing power poetry 'But you shall shine more bright in these content', demonstrating that though the body may die, yet these words will immortalize the mortals.
Shakespeare's theme of immortality reflects his own power over the object of his sonnets, the power to influence, preserve and create memory for the loved one. Sonnets 19, 55 and 65 bear strong resemblance to each other in the sense that they relate the strength of poetry with death and time. The speaker in sonnets 19, 55 and 65 wants to convey two strategies behind his theme of immortality in these three sonnets: first to establish the significance of writing and to state a way to defeat mortality, and second to promote the speaker himself as a giver of this immortality.
I. Sonnet 19
The theme of ravage of time is apparent in Sonnet 19. Instead of trying to persuade the young man to immortalize himself by procreation, Shakespeare aims to immortalize the fair lord by the power of poetry. He proceeds not by arguments but by proclamation in a dramatic soliloquy directly addressed to the personified Time 'blunt thou.' Shakespeare addresses Time as 'thou' as if it is an agent or character with whom the poet pleads. Shakespeare shows himself to be pleading with time that is characterized here by being harsh in nature and which performs violence and destructiveness on the strongest of the creatures (lion, tiger and phoenix). Time 'blunts' the paws of the lion which would have been fearful in his youth, likewise, the 'keen teeth' in the tiger's mouth decay as Time marches. Even the phoenix, the mythical bird that live for hundreds of years burn with its own blood.
Then the poet mentions 'Heinous crime' and how it is concerned with 'teeth' and 'jaws.' In the sestet the poet suggests that time is a sculptor or an artist with whom the poet pleads that 'crave not with thy hours my love's fair brow nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen.' The Fair Lord's would be craved with lines and wrinkles as he ages, and this destruction of beauty is regarded as ''one most heinous crime.' Shakespeare describes how old time is and its antique pen wishing that the Fair Lord would be 'untainted' by time that he will serve as a paradigm of beauty for the succeeding generations or as an archetype for what true beauty is.
In the concluding couplet, Shakespeare gives up trying to convince time to spare the young man. He argues no more with time but is determined to take action himself
'Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong/ My love shall in my verse ever live young.'
It is as if he wants to say that after experiencing many things which prove to be useless in stopping time's marching and destructiveness; the only way is 'my verse' through which the young man will forever live young.
II. Sonnet 55
When examining Shakespeare's sonnet 55, one can find that it clearly relates time to poetry. The poet opened his poem with a reference to things that are regarded prolonging according to earthly measure (marble, monuments, stone). He opens it with an effective declaration intending to catch the attention and interest of the readers and the listeners; he uses 'Not' twice then he uses 'But' to keep the suspense rising. The poet illustrates the inability of marbles and monuments to live through the ravage of time and through wars and their effects: 'When wasteful war shall statues overturn.' War itself is synonymous to death and destruction. Then the poet enriches his own idea by using the epithet 'sluttish time'; the word 'sluttish' actually has two meanings according to Oxford English Dictionary: first it means dirty or careless, second it means morally loose. Whether this or that, Shakespeare wants to personify and sign a gander to time. He repeats the word 'live' three times in the sonnet (outlive, living and live).
As the Shakespearean sonnet consists of three quatrain and a concluding couplet, this division corresponds also to the unity of content. The first quatrain affirms that the poem (or actually the person it praises) will not last for a short time than the monuments. The second adds that this verse will remain after all demolish by wars. In the third, the poet promises his admired friend that he will be remembered till the end of the world. The couplet summarizes the preceding, stating that the body returns to life on the Judgment Day and those who would read this poem will love and remember him.
How can people keep in mind others who disappear from their lives and no longer seen, heard nor touched? Some make monuments or draw paintings but even these, as our poet states, are object to the destructiveness of time. Shakespeare believes that the pyramids overlaid with gold and the splendid tombs left to princes are nothing to the memorial of words.
III. Sonnet 65
Sonnet 65 is an influential sonnet in the aspect of time destruction. As he has done in sonnets 19 and 55, Shakespeare here also begins his sonnet by a reference to things that are regarded everlasting according to human measure like (brass, stone and boundless sea). However, the poet considers them as nothing in the presence of the sad mortality. Then he wonders how in this extravagant ruin, a delicate and fragile thing as beauty can survive especially that beauty's action to prevent destruction is no more effective than a flower attempting to stop time's marching. Here, the sense of threatened personal loss and the inevitability of time make the remedy seem more difficult and less assured.
The sestet begins with the speaker's fear that his friend 'Time's best jewel' is under the threat of time, the thief of life. This time nothing can save the friend from death unless by a miracle. Then Shakespeare's artistry presents us a nice paradoxical statement that the ink despite its being black, yet it may preserve the light of love, that is to say poetry will withstand time.
Conclusion
In the three sonnets 19, 55 and 65 William Shakespeare describes things that are regarded stable and prolonging in life or things that by their nature are capable of holding out against mortality such as: 'lion's paws, fierce tiger's and phoenix' (sonnet 19) 'marble, gilded monuments and stone' (sonnet 5) 'brass, stone, earth and boundless sea' (sonnet 65) yet the poet concludes that their stability is a mere deception and their strength is a complete illusion. Sending his readers the message that human reproduction, love and poetry are our only defense against time's eternal marching and destructiveness. Time does many bad things: it steals one's beauty and takes away our loved ones. Shakespeare was pleading, advising and arguing with time, but finally he ends by taunting time, assuring the readers that his verses will counteract time's ravages, and from contemporary point of view, it is clear that our poet Shakespeare was right, art has beaten time: the young man remains young since his youth is read in Shakespeare's sonnets.
