Ode to beauty
Shakespeare says it all. The anniversary of his 154 sonnets first published May 1609 still ring the chimes of our daily lives. May blossom, May month, never can pass without 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...' This year may blossom, the flowers of the hawthorn, were thick as clotted cream in the hedges as I drove from here to South Devon during that warm spell of May 8 -12.
Within a week the blossom had been shaken and bedraggled by rough winds and rain. It happens every year.
The sonnets are reminders of the little clock of life, that never stills or fails its own appointed duty. They remind us not to tamper with our own. There is the lesson in Sonnet 57 which often beats its signal while I sit idly on Pagham seashore: 'Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end'.
Talking of passing time, can there be a better way of telling this than in Sonnet 12 which gives in four lines the allegory rung from this familiar country scene? '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'.
None of these words depress. Quite the opposite. They show nobility in the movement of the spheres whether these be our's or of eternity. Everyone of us has our own small world which circles inside the others. See a wild orchid now, in the hedge. Does it cry because it lasts but a week? It makes that perfect journey in some joy.
So is the best of human life remembered in Sonnet 104:'To me fair friend, you never can be old, For first you were when first your eye I eyed, Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold have from the forests shook three summers' pride. Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned. In a process of the seasons have I seen Three April perfumes in three hot June days burned, Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green'.
I suppose in Shakespeare's day the years ravaged human beauty more quickly than today, what with poor diet, little medicine, lack of sanitation, poor housing and the rest. So it is hardly surprising that Sonnet 2 tells of women: 'When forty winters shall besiege thy brow, And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field, Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now, Will be a tatter'd weed, of small worth held....'
Today women of forty are coming into prime, I think. Their beauty sound, their poise complete, the experience of their time now pleasant both to hear and see. Their eyes see your's and do not evade in arrogance or the poverty of their youthful clannish cliques.
Women of forty and on smile in recognition of what life is and how it may be shared. Those that have survived those forty winters well, have magic grace for those they meet who may so need to dwell. Towards the end, the Sonnets show that bitter, irrational passion that many men hold for their perceived lack of achievement and missed chance in love which they are liable to plant upon their partners as their fault.
Sonnet 144 bares the almost schizophrenic madness of bi-polarity as the female side of the personality is hunted by the male: 'Two loves I have of comfort and despair, Which like two spirits do suggest me still. The better angel is a man right fair, the worser spirit a woman coloured ill. To win me soon to Hell, my female evil tempteth my better angel from my side and would corrupt my saint to be a devil wooing his purity with her foul pride...' Did Shakespeare sometimes protest too much?
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Weather for Chichester
Monday 13 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: 3 C to 7 C
Wind Speed: 22 mph
Wind direction: North west
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Cloudy
Temperature: 6 C to 8 C
Wind Speed: 21 mph
Wind direction: North west
