Sonnet 100: Where Art Thou, Muse, That Thou Forgetst so Long
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Where art thou, Muse, that thou forgetst so long
To speak of that which gives thee all thy might? Spendst thou thy fury on some worthless song, Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light? Return, forgetful Muse, and straight redeem In gentle numbers time so idly spent, Sing to the ear that doth thy lays esteem And gives thy pen both skill and argument. Rise, resty Muse, my love's sweet face survey, If Time have any wrinkle graven there; If any, be a satire to decay, And make Time's spoils despised everywhere. Give my love fame faster than Time wastes life, So thou prevenest his scythe and crooked knife. |
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Where art thou, Muse, that thou forgetst so long
To speak of that which gives thee all thy might? |
The poem, like the next one in the series, Sonnet 101, addresses the Muse as the personification – or deification – of inspiration, whereby Shakespeare does not name one of the Greek classical Muses directly, but talks to them as a figurative representation of the abstract concept:
Where are you, and perhaps more to the point and more colloquially, what are you up to, Muse or inspiration, that for such a long time you forget to speak of the thing that gives you all your power? "That which gives thee all thy might" is not further specified in this line, but it is clear from the context the sonnet finds itself in, and spelt out a bit further down, that it is 'my love', who is by now well established as the source of all of Shakespeare's inspiration, if nothing else then certainly for these sonnets. Sonnet 76 made this most clear: O know, sweet love, I always write of you And you and love are still my argument And there will be another poem in the collection soon, Sonnet 105, which will make exactly the same point. |
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Spendst thou thy fury on some worthless song,
Darkening thy power to lend base subjects light? |
Are you spending your creative energy on some worthless poem or indeed song, thus sullying and also wasting your talent on some trivial matter?
'Fury' here is not – as we would understand it and as Shakespeare as well often uses it – a rage or violent anger, but the furor poeticus, which normally gets translates as 'poetic madness' or 'divine frenzy', or also 'poetic frenzy'. None of these terms quite do the idea justice: in the classical Greek tradition the poet goes into a state of elevated ecstasy where he – or at the time less often she – can draw on the inspiration from the Muses and thus access a power that lies way beyond their own. They get, as we might say, into 'the zone' of artistic endeavour where things flow and come to them. Shakespeare here as every so often blurs the boundary between the Muse and the poet, which is not at all unusual for the time. On other occasions, he refers to a poet himself as the muse, and sometimes he refers to his own ability or even output as his muse, and sometimes he does so also, as we still do today, when speaking of the source of inspiration, in his case the object of his love, the young lover. 'Song' can mean virtually any lyrical piece of writing: our distinction between a poem that is set to music and sung and one that is 'merely' recited, in classical as in Renaissance composition, is not really maintained. And 'darkening' has a nice double edge to it. It means on the one hand, as above, 'sullying' and therefore 'cheapening', but at a time when virtually any source of light other than the sun and perhaps indirectly the moon entails the burning up of material, giving light to something also uses up that light, as in a candle, or a torch, or an oil-fuelled lamp, for example, and so as the light is expended, the source of power or energy that provides the light fades and is therefore darkened. 'Base', meanwhile, references 'base metals' which are of little worth compared to noble or precious ones, the equivalent of which here would be elevated subjects worthy of the Muse's attention. Such as my young lover. PRONUNCIATION: Note that darkening here has two syllables: dark'ning, and powers one syllable: pow'rs. |
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Return, forgetful Muse, and straight redeem
In gentle numbers time so idly spent, |
Come back, forgetful Muse – you inspiration that has been away and has forgotten to write about my lover – and straight away make up for the time you have spent so wastefully and lazily, by producing noble verses.
The idea of 'redeeming' time by spending it wisely and purposely goes back to The Bible, where in the Book of Ephesians, Chapter 5, Verses 15 and 16, we find: See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, Redeeming the time, because the days are evil. It would go too far for me now to elaborate much on why "the days are evil" in the letter to the Ephesians, suffice it to say that it has to to with 'whore mongering', 'covetousness', 'jesting', and 'idolatry'. 'Numbers' here again are verses. We have encountered this use of the word before, most recently in Sonnet 79, where Shakespeare feels that his place in the young man's favour is being usurped by somebody else and notes: Whilst I alone did call upon thy aid My verse alone had all thy gentle grace, But now my gracious numbers are decayed And my sick Muse doth give another place. Here, and not in any obvious way related to that occasion where he talks about his Muse, Shakespeare tells his Muse to return and to allow him to write 'gentle' numbers, meaning verses that are noble, as befitting a gentleman or gentility, to distinguish them from any base or common verses he and his Muse may have been wasting their time on as suggested just a moment ago. And 'idly' is another word that can have two meanings, both of which are probably intended here: it can mean, as we would mostly read it today, 'lazily' – the Muse in that sense has been spending her time doing nothing or not enough – but it can also mean 'wastefully' or 'in a profligate manner', which in view of the question contained in the previous two lines really does make more sense. That question is phrased rhetorically, since, as far as Shakespeare is concerned, certainly with regard to the matter in hand, time spent on anything other than his young lover is essentially wasted. |
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Sing to the ear that doth thy lays esteem
And gives thy pen both skill and argument. |
Sing your song of inspiration to the ear that values your songs and that then furnishes your pen with both the ability to write and also with the actual content of the verse, that ear of course being mine.
In other words, you, my Muse, come to me and talk or sing to me so that I can then carry out the inspiration that you give me and put it into a proper rhetorical argument. Interesting in this construction is that Shakespeare here 'gives' the pen, specifically his pen, since he's the writer, to his Muse: the two – poet and Muse – are obviously entwined, one depending on the other, but this line makes it clearer than any other so far that the Muse needs the poet as much as the poet needs the Muse. This also lends the midriff of the poem a confident core: it is my skill – my artistry, my ability – that makes the poetry in the end, this is what I bring to the table. You will come across editors who gloss 'argument' as 'subject matter', and in other instances, for example recently in Sonnets 76 and 79, but also in Sonnet 38, the term is used in that way, as when Shakespeare tells his young man in Sonnet 76: O know, sweet love, I always write of you, And you and love are still my argument. Here, however, 'argument' does not actually mean the subject matter, but the laying out of the point being made about the subject matter in a proper and well crafted way. The subject matter is the young man, and it is not 'my ear' that lends the Muse the young man: the young man is there in his own right, what the 'ear', through the brain it is attached to, obviously, and then the hand that guides the pen, provides the Muse with is the poetic execution of the argument that is being made about the subject matter. |
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Rise, resty Muse, my love's sweet face survey,
If Time have any wrinkle graven there: |
Get up, lazy or unresponsive Muse, and examine the face of my sweet lover to see if Time may have carved any wrinkles there in that face, Time here again, as so often, being personified.
'Resty', as well as 'sluggish' or 'disposed to rest' and therefore, as we might say, 'lazy' can also mean 'restive', which in turn can be understood either as 'unable to keep still', but also, of a horse, specifically, 'stubbornly standing still or moving backwards', the latter of which would also make sense in this context. 'Graven' from the verb 'to grave' is similar to our 'engrave', it means to inscribe or here, more liberally, to draw. In Sonnet 19 the same idea appears, when Shakespeare talks to 'old Time' himself: Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleetst, And do whatever thou wilt, swift-footed Time, To the wide world and all her fading sweets, But I forbid thee one most heinous crime: O carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow, Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen. |
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If any, be a satire to decay
And make Time's spoils despised everywhere. |
If you do find any wrinkles having been graven or carved there on my love's face by Time, then, Muse, take on the role of a satirist who mocks this decay with your writing and make the destructive force of time – its wanton act of despoiling everything – despised everywhere by everyone who then reads this.
'Satire', editors point out, while here clearly intended to reference satirical writing or commentary on the implacability of time, also evokes the mythical creatures known as satyrs. A satyr is a wood-dwelling nature spirit which in Greek mythology is imagined as a man with a horse's ears and tail – not unlike Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in fact, when he is given an ass's head by the mischievous Puck, plus, quite unlike Bottom, a permanent large erection – but to us the figure is more familiar from Roman mythology via the Renaissance, where he is drawn as a fawn, with a male torso, but goat's legs and hooves, as well as horns on his head and a tail, but no erection in sight. Nonetheless, in either case, the satyr is generally associated with the hedonistic pleasures of, quite specifically, wine, women, and song as well as dance, and to what extent William Shakespeare here is shooting for this connotation we can't know, but nothing suggests obviously that it takes centre stage of his mind at this point. And 'Time's spoils' really needs to be understood as the act of spoiling that Time engages in, not the spoils of time, because the spoils of time are everything in the universe, and so it doesn't make any sense for Shakespeare to tell his Muse to make all of the known universe despised everywhere by everyone, that would surely be a nihilistic step too far. PRONUNCIATION: Note that despised here has three syllables: despisèd. |
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Give my love fame faster than Time wastes life
So thou prevenest his scythe and crooked knife. |
Give my love fame, as in allow me through the inspiration you lend me and the poems that I will then produce to speak of him and to tell everyone how wonderful he is, faster than Time can waste life by making us all and therefore also him grow old and wrinkled, so that in this way you forestall or thwart Time's knife which cuts everything down eventually.
The notion of Time being equipped with a scythe or a crooked knife and behaving like the grim reaper is of course not new, and it is somewhat interesting to note that Shakespeare here deploys a tautology. John Kerrigan in the New Penguin edition rather charitably calls this a hendiadys, but strictly speaking it isn't, since in a hendiadys we would expect one of the two terms to be able to qualify the other, such as in 'comfortable and snug' which could also be rendered as 'comfortably snug'. This doesn't really apply here, unless we allow for 'scythe' to act as an adjective that could then be turned into an adverb as a 'scythelike' or 'scythely' so it becomes a 'scythely crooked' knife. Colin Burrow, meanwhile, in the Oxford edition points out that 'crooked' suggests a degree of malice that Time imbues his knife with, which also, from Shakespeare's point of view, isn't new to us, we have heard him talk to and about time as a malign adversary before. And editors disagree over whether it should be 'prevenest' from 'to prevene', meaning 'to forestall', 'to thwart', 'to prevent', or 'preventst' from 'to prevent', meaning to prevent. The Quarto Edition has preuenst, which does allow for either, but my approach is to only tamper with the source we have if it is absolutely necessary, and since it isn't absolutely necessary to change this, I here therefore stick with the modernised spelling of 'prevenest', whereby we can be almost certain that in Shakespeare's day this would in fact have been pronounced prevenst, which is almost indistinguishable from preventst, so both these editorial choices can here really be considered quite as valid, and also, it should be said, quite as slightly inadequate as each other: it really should just be prevenst. |
Sonnet 100 is the first in a group of four sonnets that speak of a hiatus in Shakespeare's poetry writing to his young lover. In the collection first published in 1609, this follows Sonnets 97 and 98, which both highlight an absence from the young man that has felt to Shakespeare like winter, with Sonnet 99 acting as something of a bridge between the two themes. Whether, therefore, the silence on Shakespeare's part coincides with this absence, we cannot say with certainty, but it would appear plausible to say the least.
The immediate question that comes to mind when hearing this sonnet is of course: why did our poet go quiet? The sonnets that follow, especially Sonnets 102 and 103 will provide some explanation, which, if we allow ourselves to anticipate these a bit on this occasion, will amount to him effectively saying, there can be too much of a good thing and I don't want to devalue my love by talking about it too much in Sonnet 102, and you are so perfect that nothing I could say about you can do you justice anyway which is why I sometimes go quiet, in Sonnet 103. They are then, one might argue, and as we shall see when we actually get to them, fairly feeble excuses.
This is intriguing. Assuming for the time being that the silence does coincide with the absence mentioned in Sonnets 97 and 98, Shakespeare would most likely have any number of reasons for not producing poems to his young lover: the equivalent in our language and culture might be: I've been busy. With work, with travel, with touring. Trouble at t'mill, family matters, who knows?
What adds to the faint sense of bemusement we may experience when reading or hearing this sonnet is its near-wryness. It is not quite ironic, this poem, and certainly not overtly sarcastic, but it feels distant, aloof, a bit disengaged, and oddly perfunctory. It feels – and bear in mind we have no idea how it actually came about – like what one might say when one has been asked by the person one loves: how come you haven't written? Where are my poems? What's going on? The tone of this sonnet suggests it is either a direct or indirect response to some such prod of unmet expectation.
It comes along in an elegant-enough composition, with its clear three-part structure of incremental urgency – Where are you, Muse? Return, forgetful Muse; Rise, resty Muse! – but with it Shakespeare doesn't actually do or achieve what he entreats the Muse to help him do: it does not give his love any fame at all, it mentions him, calls his face sweet and wonders if he's beginning to show signs of age.
And in this may lie a clue, a nugget of a truth that is beginning to make itself felt more acutely, as of about now: time, with its scythely crooked knife, if you allow me to toy with Shakespeare's phrasing here, is evidently at work, and something in Shakespeare is changing. Has been for a while. And in a sense, is it any wonder:
First we have the Rival Poet sequence. It may or may not be placed in the collection exactly where it belongs in the chronology of composition, but it clearly and obviously speaks of a shift in the relationship, whereby another poet is making his presence felt and Shakespeare is compelled to both defend his poetry against that other man's output, and also to communicate to his young lover his own anguish over the loss of his favoured position.
Next we get Sonnet 87 saying "Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing," to be followed by three sonnets that together with Sonnet 87 tell the young man that he is perfectly within his rights to leave Shakespeare and that he, Shakespeare, will in fact defend this right and absolve him of any wrongdoing should he choose to exercise it.
Then, with Sonnet 91 Shakespeare begins an extraordinary fightback in which he both reiterates his love for and commitment to the young man, while also reminding the young man of his commitment to Shakespeare and building up to the sharpest, most cutting, and most emphatic criticism of his young lover yet in Sonnet 95, before mellowing a little again in Sonnet 96 and imploring his man not to go astray.
And then we have the absence of Sonnets 97 and 98, the complex oddity and densely layered symbolism of Sonnet 99 with its references to either the Rival Poet or a rival poet and to the affair Shakespeare's lover conducted with Shakespeare's own mistress; and now the silence. Broken, tellingly, by talk of the silence and reintroducing, for the first time in some time, Time.
Time, it should be said, is never far away from Shakespeare's mind in these sonnets. But if we plot the instances that he mentions it to mean the passing of time, as opposed to the instance when something occurs, then there are clear clusters: The Procreation Sonnets talk of time 13 times in 17 poems. Then it gets a mention every so often until Sonnet 49 with four instances, and then only occasionally until Sonnet 60, which doesn't name time but talks of minutes, right through to 65 which one might almost call the Time sequence, where the concept dominates, and then sporadically and without too much emphasis on the effects and ravages of time until now.
Now the theme of time as that which takes away from everything is back and it returns in a group of sonnets that, for want of a better word and at the risk of sounding just a little harsh, comes across as rather formulaic. And without any clear or convincing explanation otherwise, the most obvious reason for this that suggests itself is that the turmoil, upset, and obvious hurt caused by these recent events has cooled our poet's passion.
And, in all seriousness, who can blame him?
If we take these sonnets – as I am convinced we must – not as isolated exercises of clever writing but as an expression, processing, and communication of and tied into real life events, then it seems our Will has been through the mill a bit. And we can only imagine – or probably we really can't quite imagine – what the young lover is saying to Will in all this.
And if on top of all that we lay the burden, or is it, over the longer term maybe not so much of a burden but a release, of time, then it isn't insane to suggest that while Will has grown a little older and maybe even a bit wiser, and in the process of these passing months and by now years also quite a good deal more successful and therefore possibly more confident, more independent-minded, more himself, his young lover has perhaps indeed acquired the odd wrinkle and transformed himself from a youth into a young man. Around the age of 20, 21 two three years can make a big difference. And if we factor in the realities of late Elizabethan England, two three years in a young man's life are long. If your average life expectancy – as we saw and discussed – is 30 years or so, two three years make a difference.
And what we are building up to now is a sonnet that tells us in as much clarity as from a poet anyone could reasonably expect, that the relationship has by then lasted three years. The sonnet that does so is Sonnet 104, and it starts with the line: "To me, fair friend, you never can be old." And why would you say that to someone if they had not visibly, noticeably perhaps not aged so much as simply grown up?
If a poet – let alone a poet of such abundant wealth of words as William Shakespeare – feels the need to explain a silence, we cannot reasonably assume that the cause of this is mundane. That he was busy responding to requests for explanations of the puns in his plays or taking on childminding duties at home while Anne was down with a headache. We have to, as our default or primary assumption, allow for either grave external matters preventing him from writing, in which case there is no reason why he shouldn't tell his young man and us what they are, or that his heart just hasn't been in it. And this is more or less exactly what he does tell his young man and us: I just haven't felt it. I haven't had the inspiration. And that marks a change from where we were before. The change is not sudden, it has been foreshadowed, it has been ushered in since Sonnet 78, but here now it is real and felt. And expressed.
It is not this the end: the relationship isn't over and the love isn't dead, but it has evolved, shall we say, and maybe calmed and eased and mellowed: the embers, perhaps, now, more than the flame.
The immediate question that comes to mind when hearing this sonnet is of course: why did our poet go quiet? The sonnets that follow, especially Sonnets 102 and 103 will provide some explanation, which, if we allow ourselves to anticipate these a bit on this occasion, will amount to him effectively saying, there can be too much of a good thing and I don't want to devalue my love by talking about it too much in Sonnet 102, and you are so perfect that nothing I could say about you can do you justice anyway which is why I sometimes go quiet, in Sonnet 103. They are then, one might argue, and as we shall see when we actually get to them, fairly feeble excuses.
This is intriguing. Assuming for the time being that the silence does coincide with the absence mentioned in Sonnets 97 and 98, Shakespeare would most likely have any number of reasons for not producing poems to his young lover: the equivalent in our language and culture might be: I've been busy. With work, with travel, with touring. Trouble at t'mill, family matters, who knows?
What adds to the faint sense of bemusement we may experience when reading or hearing this sonnet is its near-wryness. It is not quite ironic, this poem, and certainly not overtly sarcastic, but it feels distant, aloof, a bit disengaged, and oddly perfunctory. It feels – and bear in mind we have no idea how it actually came about – like what one might say when one has been asked by the person one loves: how come you haven't written? Where are my poems? What's going on? The tone of this sonnet suggests it is either a direct or indirect response to some such prod of unmet expectation.
It comes along in an elegant-enough composition, with its clear three-part structure of incremental urgency – Where are you, Muse? Return, forgetful Muse; Rise, resty Muse! – but with it Shakespeare doesn't actually do or achieve what he entreats the Muse to help him do: it does not give his love any fame at all, it mentions him, calls his face sweet and wonders if he's beginning to show signs of age.
And in this may lie a clue, a nugget of a truth that is beginning to make itself felt more acutely, as of about now: time, with its scythely crooked knife, if you allow me to toy with Shakespeare's phrasing here, is evidently at work, and something in Shakespeare is changing. Has been for a while. And in a sense, is it any wonder:
First we have the Rival Poet sequence. It may or may not be placed in the collection exactly where it belongs in the chronology of composition, but it clearly and obviously speaks of a shift in the relationship, whereby another poet is making his presence felt and Shakespeare is compelled to both defend his poetry against that other man's output, and also to communicate to his young lover his own anguish over the loss of his favoured position.
Next we get Sonnet 87 saying "Farewell, thou art too dear for my possessing," to be followed by three sonnets that together with Sonnet 87 tell the young man that he is perfectly within his rights to leave Shakespeare and that he, Shakespeare, will in fact defend this right and absolve him of any wrongdoing should he choose to exercise it.
Then, with Sonnet 91 Shakespeare begins an extraordinary fightback in which he both reiterates his love for and commitment to the young man, while also reminding the young man of his commitment to Shakespeare and building up to the sharpest, most cutting, and most emphatic criticism of his young lover yet in Sonnet 95, before mellowing a little again in Sonnet 96 and imploring his man not to go astray.
And then we have the absence of Sonnets 97 and 98, the complex oddity and densely layered symbolism of Sonnet 99 with its references to either the Rival Poet or a rival poet and to the affair Shakespeare's lover conducted with Shakespeare's own mistress; and now the silence. Broken, tellingly, by talk of the silence and reintroducing, for the first time in some time, Time.
Time, it should be said, is never far away from Shakespeare's mind in these sonnets. But if we plot the instances that he mentions it to mean the passing of time, as opposed to the instance when something occurs, then there are clear clusters: The Procreation Sonnets talk of time 13 times in 17 poems. Then it gets a mention every so often until Sonnet 49 with four instances, and then only occasionally until Sonnet 60, which doesn't name time but talks of minutes, right through to 65 which one might almost call the Time sequence, where the concept dominates, and then sporadically and without too much emphasis on the effects and ravages of time until now.
Now the theme of time as that which takes away from everything is back and it returns in a group of sonnets that, for want of a better word and at the risk of sounding just a little harsh, comes across as rather formulaic. And without any clear or convincing explanation otherwise, the most obvious reason for this that suggests itself is that the turmoil, upset, and obvious hurt caused by these recent events has cooled our poet's passion.
And, in all seriousness, who can blame him?
If we take these sonnets – as I am convinced we must – not as isolated exercises of clever writing but as an expression, processing, and communication of and tied into real life events, then it seems our Will has been through the mill a bit. And we can only imagine – or probably we really can't quite imagine – what the young lover is saying to Will in all this.
And if on top of all that we lay the burden, or is it, over the longer term maybe not so much of a burden but a release, of time, then it isn't insane to suggest that while Will has grown a little older and maybe even a bit wiser, and in the process of these passing months and by now years also quite a good deal more successful and therefore possibly more confident, more independent-minded, more himself, his young lover has perhaps indeed acquired the odd wrinkle and transformed himself from a youth into a young man. Around the age of 20, 21 two three years can make a big difference. And if we factor in the realities of late Elizabethan England, two three years in a young man's life are long. If your average life expectancy – as we saw and discussed – is 30 years or so, two three years make a difference.
And what we are building up to now is a sonnet that tells us in as much clarity as from a poet anyone could reasonably expect, that the relationship has by then lasted three years. The sonnet that does so is Sonnet 104, and it starts with the line: "To me, fair friend, you never can be old." And why would you say that to someone if they had not visibly, noticeably perhaps not aged so much as simply grown up?
If a poet – let alone a poet of such abundant wealth of words as William Shakespeare – feels the need to explain a silence, we cannot reasonably assume that the cause of this is mundane. That he was busy responding to requests for explanations of the puns in his plays or taking on childminding duties at home while Anne was down with a headache. We have to, as our default or primary assumption, allow for either grave external matters preventing him from writing, in which case there is no reason why he shouldn't tell his young man and us what they are, or that his heart just hasn't been in it. And this is more or less exactly what he does tell his young man and us: I just haven't felt it. I haven't had the inspiration. And that marks a change from where we were before. The change is not sudden, it has been foreshadowed, it has been ushered in since Sonnet 78, but here now it is real and felt. And expressed.
It is not this the end: the relationship isn't over and the love isn't dead, but it has evolved, shall we say, and maybe calmed and eased and mellowed: the embers, perhaps, now, more than the flame.
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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!