Sonnet 3: Look in Thy Glass and Tell the Face Thou Viewest
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Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest,
Now is the time that face should form another, Whose fresh repair, if now thou not renewest, Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother. For where is she so fair, whose uneared womb Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry? Or who is he so fond, will be the tomb Of his self-love, to stop posterity? Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee Calls back the lovely April of her prime, So thou, through windows of thine age shalt see, Despite of wrinkles, this, thy golden time. But if thou live remembered not to be, Die single, and thine image dies with thee. |
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Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest,
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Look into the mirror – "thy glass" – and tell your face – "the face thou viewest"...
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Now is the time that face should form another,
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...now is the time that you – "that face, that's you – should make a new face, meaning create a another person...
Interesting detail here: in the Quarto Edition, which you may remember is the first published edition of these Sonnets, 'another' is spelt in two words, 'an other', which may be a coincidence, it may even be a mistake. But it could also be deliberate. It could be that Shakespeare is saying not only, now is the time for you to form another face, but also an other human being. Which is of course the meaning anyway: the meaning clearly of this line is that now is the time that you, the young man should make another person just like yourself, meaning a child. |
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Whose fresh repair, if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother. |
...of whose young and perfect condition – perfect and young on account of being young, being a child – you will deprive the world if you don't renew yourself in this way, and you will make some potential mother of your child unhappy.
So the idea is that the world is really entitled to your offspring: "Thou dost beguile the world" means you deprive the world of something that is really owed to the world, as I, the poet, Shakespeare, have said as early as in the first sonnet. And – interesting point, of course, this – you will "unbless some mother:" there is a mother out there whom you will make unhappy by depriving her of the privilege, if you like, of having your child. This dense couple of lines is a wonderfully Shakespearean example of packing a lot into few words, which is after all what poetry is. The sentence structure is in itself an artifice that to us may at first seem a bit challenging, but he does this a lot: take some words as read and jump from one grammatical element to another. In this instance, he first of all drops the 'Of' which we would expect. We would expect the sentence to go 'Of whose fresh repair, if now though not renewest | Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother' – he drops the 'Of' and takes that as read. And he also melds the two objects: the 'fresh repair' through 'whose' is linked to 'another', which is the new face, the child, but "if now thou not renewest" really refers to the young man himself: he renews himself by producing a child: If now thou not renewest – yourself – you beguile the world of the fresh repair of your child. You see why I say this is quite dense. And it sounds more complicated than it is. And the reason I am pointing this out to you in this detail is so that you get an idea of just how multi-layered this language really is and how skilfully crafted a sonnet like this is: this isn't just writing, it's really an act of composition. |
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For where is she so fair, whose uneared womb
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Where is the woman – this potential mother – who is so beautiful that her womb, which is as yet "uneared," meaning 'unploughed' or not yet tilled, in other words virginal...
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Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry,
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...would reject you as the man giving her a child.
There is some quite suggestive imagery there: the tilling of the earth is effectively likened to the sexual act, to a man giving a woman a child. And the assumption absolutely is that there is no woman in the world so beautiful that she would reject this particular young man, of whom we still don't know who he is, as her husband. And it is interesting to note from a contemporary perspective is that Shakespeare really focuses entirely on the planting of a seed to grow an heir, rather than, say, on being a 'good husband' or 'living partner' as we would think of today for a potential future wife. You get the perspective here, a bit, which is very much in keeping with the culture at the time, that producing an heir, getting married, these were quite transactional things. It wasn't really a case so much of romance than of fulfilling almost a familial duty, which is exactly what this young man is strongly being encouraged to do at this juncture. |
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Or who is he so fond, will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity. |
Or who is the man who would be so foolish – 'fond' here meaning 'foolish', as often it does in Shakespeare – that he will turn himself into the tomb of his self-love, either with the direct purpose or in any case with the effect of ending his line of succession.
And all of these first seventeen sonnets are precisely about that, about a young man being urged to continue his line of succession. |
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Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime; |
You are your mother's mirror, meaning also of course your mother's mirror image.
We had 'glass' before in the very first line – "Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest" – and now the mother looks into her mirror, and her mirror is you: she sees herself in you. And as she does so, she calls back, she recalls and remembers the lovely April of her prime, her own youth, her own springtime. April is a proverbial, classical metaphor for youth, for your springtime, the springtime in your life. This is one of the most significant couple of lines we have encountered so far, and we will shortly see why. |
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So thou, through windows of thine age shalt see
Despite of wrinkles this, thy golden time. |
And much as your mother looks at you today, in her advanced years, and remembers her youth, so you, when you are old, will be able to look through "windows of thine age" – through the eyes of your advanced age at that time – upon your child or children and remember your golden time, which is today.
'Windows' as a metaphor for 'eyes' is not a concept that is alien to us: we still say that the eyes are 'the windows to your soul', for example. |
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But if thou live, remembered not to be
Die single, and thine image dies with thee. |
But if you live in a way that creates no memory of you – the memory always being the child or children here, of course – then live as a single man and die as a single man, and that means that your image, your beauty, will be lost forever.
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Sonnet 3 is incredibly exciting, because here we learn something really specific, very fascinating and new.
The overall message is not new: the sonnet finds a new, a third way to tell the young man that it is time for him to produce a son and it does this by invoking the image of the mirror: look into the mirror and tell yourself it's time to have children so that these children who become a mirror to you will then allow you to remember your own youth through looking at them. So far, so straightforward.
What tells us something relevant and pertinent are the first two lines of the third quatrain.
And I don't think we've introduced 'quatrains' before, so in brackets here: a quatrain is simply a set of four lines. And almost all of these sonnets consist of three quatrains and a concluding couplet. And there's normally a structure to these sonnets, in that normally an argument is built over the three quatrains, and then in the final couplet it is normally resolved or a conclusion is drawn. I say 'normally' because there are exceptions and there is even, very mysteriously and intriguingly, a sonnet which we will encounter quite far down the line, Sonnet 126, where the concluding couplet simply is missing. And it's not just missing, it's deliberately missing. But we will get to that, this is a complete deviation from our Sonnet 3 here. In Sonnet 3, the third quatrain says:
Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime
Now, William Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language that has ever lived, as far as we know, to date, and had he wanted to say to the young man that he resembles his father, he really could have done so. Many young men resemble their father, and in fact, I, the poet predict that your, the young man's, son will look like you. He will serve as your mirror. So had Shakespeare wanted to say that the young man resembles his father, he would have found a way to do so. He could have written quite simply:
Thou art thy father's glass, and he in thee
Calls back the lovely April of his prime,
though granted the word 'lovely' in there would have been a little bit unusual in the context of a man and father at the time. But Shakespeare would have found another adjective that scans, and if anything this also quite effectively rules out the chance of this just being a misprint or transcription error: clearly Shakespeare has decided to write "Thou art thy mother's glass" – you look like your mother, you serve as a mirror to your mother; and it is only possible to serve as a mirror to somebody if you bear a resemblance to them, if you look like them. How else could you be a mirror to them?
William Shakespeare is pointing out the fact that whoever this young man is, he bears a resemblance to his mother. This is a highly unusual and specific thing to do, especially in a patriarchal society like Shakespeare's. The 'normal' or 'expected' thing would be for the poet to say how much the young man resembles his father, how much he reflects the qualities and how ultimately he inherits the qualities of his father. And this invites, in fact it begs the question: why? Why would the poet choose to do this? Why would I say to a young man, you look just like your mother, she is the one who sees herself reflected in you.
The obvious answers that offer themselves are:
a) The young man really has an unusually striking resemblance to his mother which is so eye-catching that I, the poet, find it more noteworthy than any resemblance he might bear to his father; or
b) The young man doesn't have a father whom I could appropriately refer to; or
c) Quite conceivably both: quite possibly the young man bears a striking resemblance to his mother and also does not have his father anymore.
Sonnet 3 does not tell us why I, the poet, have written "Thou art thy mother's glass," rather than, say, 'Thou art thy father's glass', and any conclusion we might draw from this sonnet alone would almost certainly be premature. But it's a fascinating snippet of evidence that we can put to one side and say: let's hold on to this and see if there is anything else in these sonnets that adds to it and may help us form a clearer picture. And as you can maybe guess, there will be...
The overall message is not new: the sonnet finds a new, a third way to tell the young man that it is time for him to produce a son and it does this by invoking the image of the mirror: look into the mirror and tell yourself it's time to have children so that these children who become a mirror to you will then allow you to remember your own youth through looking at them. So far, so straightforward.
What tells us something relevant and pertinent are the first two lines of the third quatrain.
And I don't think we've introduced 'quatrains' before, so in brackets here: a quatrain is simply a set of four lines. And almost all of these sonnets consist of three quatrains and a concluding couplet. And there's normally a structure to these sonnets, in that normally an argument is built over the three quatrains, and then in the final couplet it is normally resolved or a conclusion is drawn. I say 'normally' because there are exceptions and there is even, very mysteriously and intriguingly, a sonnet which we will encounter quite far down the line, Sonnet 126, where the concluding couplet simply is missing. And it's not just missing, it's deliberately missing. But we will get to that, this is a complete deviation from our Sonnet 3 here. In Sonnet 3, the third quatrain says:
Thou art thy mother's glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime
Now, William Shakespeare is the greatest writer in the English language that has ever lived, as far as we know, to date, and had he wanted to say to the young man that he resembles his father, he really could have done so. Many young men resemble their father, and in fact, I, the poet predict that your, the young man's, son will look like you. He will serve as your mirror. So had Shakespeare wanted to say that the young man resembles his father, he would have found a way to do so. He could have written quite simply:
Thou art thy father's glass, and he in thee
Calls back the lovely April of his prime,
though granted the word 'lovely' in there would have been a little bit unusual in the context of a man and father at the time. But Shakespeare would have found another adjective that scans, and if anything this also quite effectively rules out the chance of this just being a misprint or transcription error: clearly Shakespeare has decided to write "Thou art thy mother's glass" – you look like your mother, you serve as a mirror to your mother; and it is only possible to serve as a mirror to somebody if you bear a resemblance to them, if you look like them. How else could you be a mirror to them?
William Shakespeare is pointing out the fact that whoever this young man is, he bears a resemblance to his mother. This is a highly unusual and specific thing to do, especially in a patriarchal society like Shakespeare's. The 'normal' or 'expected' thing would be for the poet to say how much the young man resembles his father, how much he reflects the qualities and how ultimately he inherits the qualities of his father. And this invites, in fact it begs the question: why? Why would the poet choose to do this? Why would I say to a young man, you look just like your mother, she is the one who sees herself reflected in you.
The obvious answers that offer themselves are:
a) The young man really has an unusually striking resemblance to his mother which is so eye-catching that I, the poet, find it more noteworthy than any resemblance he might bear to his father; or
b) The young man doesn't have a father whom I could appropriately refer to; or
c) Quite conceivably both: quite possibly the young man bears a striking resemblance to his mother and also does not have his father anymore.
Sonnet 3 does not tell us why I, the poet, have written "Thou art thy mother's glass," rather than, say, 'Thou art thy father's glass', and any conclusion we might draw from this sonnet alone would almost certainly be premature. But it's a fascinating snippet of evidence that we can put to one side and say: let's hold on to this and see if there is anything else in these sonnets that adds to it and may help us form a clearer picture. And as you can maybe guess, there will be...
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If you spot a mistake or if you have any comments or suggestions, please use the contact page to get in touch.
To be kept informed of developments, please subscribe to the email list.
If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!