Sonnets 7, 17 & 30; Death, Time, Future & Remedies

"Lo! in the orient when the gracious light

Lifts up his burning head, each under eye

Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,

Serving with looks his sacred majesty;

And having climb’d the steep-up heavenly hill,

Resembling strong youth in his middle age,

yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,

Attending on his golden pilgrimage;

But when from highmost pitch, with weary car,

Like feeble age, he reeleth from the day,

The eyes, ‘fore duteous, now converted are

From his low tract and look another way:

So thou, thyself out-going in thy noon,

Unlook’d on diest, unless thou get a son." (Shakespeare's Sonnets, 7)

The poet thinks there are remedies that keeps the death away. The handsome young man the poet is addressing should get a son. It would be a way to let the beauty live forever.

Time in the poet's sonnets are often about the preservation of the young and beauty in relation to the old and dying; time of grief at the tomb, where spring and summer may stand as an imagery of youth and autumn and winter of ageing and transience, or the path of the sun into night which picture an arc of life and death, the budding of the plants in springtime or its the withering, or the sign of ageing in a man's appearance or his sadness of being left alone towards the end of life.

The reasons for his repeated calls is that he thinks it would be a shame to let such beauty go to the grave without giving life to an offspring. The Time is Future in the poet's sonnets. Of what Marcel Proust centuries later makes a response by saying that the Past is Future using a phrase from Shakespeare's sonnet 30:1-2 to entitle his own magnus opus, À la recherche du temps perdu:

“When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past” 

It worries the poet of the sonnets that generations to come will not believe his tribute to the beauty of the youth as he himself sees it. The inexorable passing of time is a recurring and overarching theme that the poet in different ways describe in relation to the beauty that will perish.

“The age to come would say, ‘This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.’
So should my papers (yellowed with their age)
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage,
And stretched metre of an antique song” (Shakespeare's Sonnets, 17:7-12)

Reference list

Proust, Marcel & Scott-Moncrieff, C. K. (2006). Remembrance of things past. Volume 1 / .. Wordsworth Editions

Shakespeare, William (2010). Shakespeare's sonnets. Pbk. ed., Rev. ed. London: Methuen Drama