Sonnet 101: O Truant Muse, What Shall Be Thy Amends
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O truant Muse, what shall be thy amends
For thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed? Both truth and beauty on my love depends, So dost thou too, and therein dignified. Make answer, Muse, wilt thou not haply say: 'Truth needs no colour, with his colour fixed, Beauty no pencil, beauty's truth to lay, But best is best if never intermixed'? Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb? Excuse not silence so, for't lies in thee To make him much outlive a gilded tomb And to be praised of ages yet to be. Then do thy office, Muse, I teach thee how, To make him seem long hence as he shows now. |
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O truant Muse, what shall be thy amends
For thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed? |
You, Muse that has been absent from my sonneteering, how will you make amends or compensate for the neglect you have shown towards my lover, here with 'truth' portrayed as the embodiment of a true and faithful character who finds himself 'dyed' in beauty, meaning that he is wholly suffused by and imbued with beauty; that his hue, as Sonnet 20 put it, is such that it "steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth."
This is a theme we have encountered numerous times before: Shakespeare presents his lover, referred to directly only in the next line, as the epitome of a man with sound character – possessing an inner beauty, one might say – that is reflected in his outward, physical beauty, much in line with the classical and Renaissance ideal. The Muse, as the previous sonnet made clear, should have been around to inspire Shakespeare to eulogise him thus in his poems. 'But dyed' here may have a subtly ambiguous connotation. In itself it does not need to be seen as negative or derogatory. As Colin Burrow in the Oxford edition points out, "early modern England prided itself on the durability of its wood-based dyes," but not long ago, in Sonnet 99, Shakespeare admonished the 'forward violet' for having 'dyed' his 'purple pride' too grossly, and we saw there that when 'dye' is used in the sense of make-up or artifice in relation to beauty, Shakespeare really sets not much store by it. |
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Both truth and beauty on my love depends,
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Because my love is the epitome of 'truth' – a virtuous, honest, dependable character – and 'beauty' – his perfect outward appearance – for these two qualities to fully exist in the world they need him: if he weren't there, then they would have nowhere to be, as indeed Sonnet 14 already told him, if, as we continue to assume, it is the same young man, or told somebody else, if it isn't:
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive, And, constant stars, in them I read such art As truth and beauty shall together thrive If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert; Or else of thee this I prognosticate: Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date. In other words: when you die, then your end is also the doom and final date of existence for both truth and beauty. Here too, a very subtle nuance makes itself felt: on the surface, it is clear that Shakespeare is saying, just as in Sonnet 14, that both truth and beauty are inextricably tied to my young lover. But 'my love' can also be read, of course, as my devotion to him, my act or state of loving him, and that relativises entirely the nature of these qualities, because then both truth and beauty become much more a case of being in the eye of the beholder and in the heart of the lover, than 'real' traits that could objectively be verified. Editors incidentally note that the singular form of 'depends' applied here to a plurality of subjects is not unusual for the time. |
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So dost thou too, and therein dignified.
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And much as truth and beauty depend on my love, you too, my Muse, depend on him, because, as Sonnet 100 made clear, we two are reliant on each other: I can only write with your inspiration, but your inspiration can only be expressed by me, and you in turn only have something worth inspiring me to write about because of him. And you are 'dignified', as in made worthy, validated, and indeed elevated, through your dependence on him, simply because he is so roundly wonderful and, as we also continue to assume for want of any reason not to, of such high social status.
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Make answer, Muse, wilt thou not haply say:
'Truth needs no colour, with his colour fixed, |
Give me an answer, Muse; but I can suppose what you are going to say already, because will you not say that truth – again as in virtue, steadfastness, faithfulness – does not need any painting or embellishing or ornamentation because its actual true colour is permanent and sound and lasting.
'Truth needs no colours' is proverbial, whereby in this context 'colour' also has a meaning not only of artificial ornamentation, but also of 'excuses' or 'rhetorical beautification': in other words, a person who has truth in these by now familiar senses will always be one of whom Cindy Lauper might say, in the words of songwriters Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly: "I see your true colours shining through..." Interesting in this construction is that the word 'colour' for which we might also read 'dye', and which in the first quatrain of the sonnet serves to clothe truth, is here used metaphorically to describe the words of the poet: by writing a poem, he 'colours' or 'dyes' the truth or character of which he speaks, and here he anticipates that his Muse will tell him that this is not necessary because true truth only has one such 'colour', namely its own. 'Haply' meanwhile, here again, as in the famous Sonnet 29, means 'perchance', 'accidentally', or here, maybe most appropriately, 'perhaps'. What it does not mean is 'happily'. |
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Beauty no pencil, beauty's truth to lay,
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Similarly, beauty does not need a fine paint brush, such as an artist would use for detail or as someone might use for applying make-up, to lay or layer on and thus express or display its own essence.
The idea – familiar to us from several of these sonnets by now – is that true beauty needs no artifice, no make-up, no thick layering on by means of colour, paint, or dye. We mentioned Shakespeare's disapproving stance towards these types of artificial beauty very recently, with Sonnet 99, where I also referred you to Sonnets 67 & 68 in particular, and also to Sonnets 20 and 21, so if you are interested in this theme, please do listen to the episodes covering those sonnets. |
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But best is best if never intermixed'?
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But the best things in the world are best if they are not tampered with or adulterated or diluted or generally messed with. We still say 'just leave well enough alone', which doesn't quite refer to that which is best in the world, but still expresses that if something is good or good enough then resist the temptation to try and 'make it better' because chances are you're not: you're more than likely making it worse.
'Intermixed' here has this particular meaning, possibly from metallurgy, of 'adulterated' or, specifically, 'alloyed'. |
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Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
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Shakespeare now switches back from the imagined direct speech of what he thinks his Muse might say to him in answer to his question, by asking a new question:
What, because he is so perfect in both his internal character and his external beauty, will you, my Muse, simply stay silent? |
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Excuse not silence so, for't lies in thee
To make him much outlive a gilded tomb And to be praised of ages yet to be. |
Do not make excuses for your silence in this way, because it is up to you, and also in your power, to make him outlive his own death which will see him buried in a gilded or ornate tomb, and to make sure he is going to be praised by generations yet to come.
This line contains no new or surprising information for us, but it does once again confirm what we have long now believed to be the case and mentioned just a moment ago: the young man these poems are addressed to or, as in this case, about, is a person of high social standing: a gilded tomb is not something everyone gets. Granted, this being an indirectly laudatory poem, it might just flatter its subject – and clearly to quite some extent it does – but in the context of everything we've seen and heard so far, we can certainly infer from this reference that the love Shakespeare is talking about has the prospect of being buried one day in a rich family's vault. |
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Then do thy office, Muse, I teach thee the how,
To make him seem long hence as he shows now. |
And so, this being the case, go about it and do your job, Muse. I will teach you how to do so and how you can make him, my lover, seem to be as alive and real and beautiful and sound a human being as he shows himself to be right now.
Meaning, of course, that if you, my Muse, do your job, which is to inspire me, then I, the poet who executes your inspiration, can show you how through my writing you give my lover eternal life, much as predicted so often before, most famously, most memorably in Sonnet 18: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Of particular interest in this closing couplet though, compared to the unwavering certainty of Sonnet 18, is that the verbs Shakespeare deploys here – 'seem' and 'shows' – are really those of appearance only, so as not to say of potential deceit. Which takes us back to the sprinkling of doubt sown in the first quatrain. This now sounds much more like a poet who is making his lover look good long beyond his days, than actually showing him to the world as he really is; a notion that is of course in no small measure informed also by the sonnets that have gone before, which have shown us this young man in a far less favourable light, and this ambiguity will, as it happens, be somewhat reinforced by the sonnet that comes next, when 'seem' and 'show' pick up the thread and spin it further, albeit in a slightly different direction... |
Although at first glance Sonnet 101 can stand on its own, it so closely connects to Sonnet 100 that it really in all likelihood should be considered to form with it a pair within this group of four sonnets that they are both part of.
Like Sonnet 100, it addresses itself to Shakespeare's Muse – his poetic inspiration – in a series of rhetorical questions that seek to encourage her to return to him to write further poetry for and about his young lover. In doing so, it purports to offer a possible explanation for the Muse's absence, but immediately rejects this as unsatisfactory, reminding the Muse of her duty to give the object of his love longevity way beyond his own presence on earth.
With its obvious parallels to, and clear continuation of the theme set up by, the previous poem, Sonnet 101 occupies a curious place in the canon that is shared also with Sonnet 103, which of course is yet to follow. All these sonnets seem to be saying more or less the same thing in slightly different words with marginally varying emphases, and all of them have this in common: they feel, as we observed when discussing Sonnet 100, somewhat detached.
Partly this is in inherent in the rhetorical device of a poet speaking to his own Muse about his lover: it introduces a meta-layer of accountability for his emotions, which immediately has the effect of delegating their communication to an external, abstract though personified agent. But Shakespeare is not so disingenuous as to separate himself entirely from his Muse. Sonnet 100 already made this reasonably clear:
Sing to the ear that doth thy lays esteem
And gives thy pen both skill and argument.
This, we noted there, acknowledges a codependency between the poet and his Muse, which is here underpinned, first with the lover being brought into the equation:
Both truth and beauty on my love depends,
So dost thou too, and therein dignified.
And then with the direct encouragement of the closing couplet:
Then do thy office, Muse, I teach thee how,
To make him seem long hence as he shows now.
This effectively positions Shakespeare the poet as master of his Muse who not only lends her his 'skill and argument' but also teaches her how to do her job.
Much as Sonnet 100, Sonnet 101 itself completely fails to accomplish the task set out, but that can at this point still be explained easily enough: you have 14 lines, with, in this case, 114 words, so the ambition may well not be to perform the task within this poem, or the last one, not least because the recipient of these sonnets at the time would have been fully aware – much as we are now – that they form part of a series.
But when we wondered, with Sonnet 100, what could be the cause of this extended silence on the part of Shakespeare's, we may also by now be curious as to why he returns to his writing about the young man at such a disengaged distance, and of course it makes sense to assume that the two are related. A plausible and simple enough answer we offered for the silence was that something in Shakespeare has changed and that time itself is beginning to show the effect it has on the young man, on Shakespeare himself, and on the dynamics between them, and all of this would also readily account for the almost objective aloofness of this sonnet.
What is most intriguing though is this – and we hinted at it earlier:
With Sonnet 101, William Shakespeare, master not only, as we just saw, of his Muse, but also – as we know from a hundred sonnets by now, quite apart from any plays we may be familiar with – of the pun, the double and triple meaning, the obvious as well as the hidden reference, and the writerly skill for exquisite subtlety, gives us reason to doubt his own sincerity.
We know that not all these sonnets are equally sincere. Some come straight from the heart and couldn't be more directly, more viscerally felt – immediately to mind spring the reflective Sonnet 30, for example: "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought | I summon up remembrance of things past;" the outraged Sonnet 34: "Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day | And make me travel forth without my cloak;" and of course the magnificent rant of Sonnet 66, with its complete absence of any filter: "Tired with al these, for restful death I cry," and then the list of everything that is wrong with the world. Others, like the pair 57 & 58, in which Shakespeare purports to be the young man's 'slave', we know for certain to show rare but blindingly obvious signs of irony, even sarcasm.
And here now, we detect a very delicate flavour of... – we don't quite know what it is. The sonnet is not as sweet as it sounds. But nor is it spicy. It's not bitter, not sour, not hot and not bland. It is just a tad savoury and not at all unpleasant: the taste lingers and we think, oh, where did that come from?
And we know where it comes from, we mentioned it earlier: I will teach you, my own Muse, how to do your job and how to make my lover seem long into the future as he shows now, together, you, Muse, and I can make him appear to future generations as he appears to be now. Now, arguably, this is just a poet choosing more interesting vocabulary than the verb 'is', something we were taught as children, aged ten. And fair enough, we would find a sentence like 'To make him be long hence as he is now' clunky to say the least. But William Shakespeare has a vocabulary based on roughly 15,000 to 20,000 lexemes or distinct lexical meanings, so he could have chosen something else had he wanted to.
Also, the line stands in the context, this we also noted, of an allusion to dyeing and painting, to artifice and pretence. And all of it stands in the context of a young lover of whom we may not know much but we do know this: if this continues to be the same young man – and we still have no good reason to assume anything else – then he is just not "truth in beauty dyed." He is, in Shakespeare's own words, "lascivious," a "thief," albeit a sweet one, he has "large privilege" of which he himself better "take heed," he is the one for whom Shakespeare has to "play the watchman" when he, the young lover is "far off, with others all too near."
Unless we take the hint and recognise: 'truth' doesn't have to mean 'truthfulness, faithfulness, sound character'. Yes, it can, and in Shakespeare often it does. But 'truth' can also mean 'truth'. The true being, the actual character, whatever that is. And it's long been established that this young man's character, whatever it is, is indeed 'dyed' in beauty: Shakespeare thinks so and says so, the world says so, so Shakespeare says, and from what we can tell by what Shakespeare tells us, the young man thinks so rather too.
It's not clear-cut and the ambiguity in the poem persists, and it does so in all likelihood – our good friend – deliberately.
So here then, to conclude for the moment and since they do in this way belong together, the two sonnets back to back:
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.
O truant Muse, what shall be thy amends
For thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed?
Both truth and beauty on my love depends,
So dost thou too, and therein dignified.
Make answer, Muse, wilt thou not haply say:
'Truth needs no colour, with his colour fixed,
Beauty no pencil, beauty's truth to lay,
But best is best if never intermixed'?
Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
Excuse not silence so, for't lies in thee
To make him much outlive a gilded tomb
And to be praised of ages yet to be.
Then do thy office, Muse, I teach thee how,
To make him seem long hence as he shows now.
And what we can take away from this sonnet, in its almost-but-not quite, or in fact almost-not-but-actually required pairing with Sonnet 100 is this oddly intriguing flavour, this sense that we are tasting on our tongue something that isn't quite what it seems, but we often don't immediately have the word for it, this umami...
Like Sonnet 100, it addresses itself to Shakespeare's Muse – his poetic inspiration – in a series of rhetorical questions that seek to encourage her to return to him to write further poetry for and about his young lover. In doing so, it purports to offer a possible explanation for the Muse's absence, but immediately rejects this as unsatisfactory, reminding the Muse of her duty to give the object of his love longevity way beyond his own presence on earth.
With its obvious parallels to, and clear continuation of the theme set up by, the previous poem, Sonnet 101 occupies a curious place in the canon that is shared also with Sonnet 103, which of course is yet to follow. All these sonnets seem to be saying more or less the same thing in slightly different words with marginally varying emphases, and all of them have this in common: they feel, as we observed when discussing Sonnet 100, somewhat detached.
Partly this is in inherent in the rhetorical device of a poet speaking to his own Muse about his lover: it introduces a meta-layer of accountability for his emotions, which immediately has the effect of delegating their communication to an external, abstract though personified agent. But Shakespeare is not so disingenuous as to separate himself entirely from his Muse. Sonnet 100 already made this reasonably clear:
Sing to the ear that doth thy lays esteem
And gives thy pen both skill and argument.
This, we noted there, acknowledges a codependency between the poet and his Muse, which is here underpinned, first with the lover being brought into the equation:
Both truth and beauty on my love depends,
So dost thou too, and therein dignified.
And then with the direct encouragement of the closing couplet:
Then do thy office, Muse, I teach thee how,
To make him seem long hence as he shows now.
This effectively positions Shakespeare the poet as master of his Muse who not only lends her his 'skill and argument' but also teaches her how to do her job.
Much as Sonnet 100, Sonnet 101 itself completely fails to accomplish the task set out, but that can at this point still be explained easily enough: you have 14 lines, with, in this case, 114 words, so the ambition may well not be to perform the task within this poem, or the last one, not least because the recipient of these sonnets at the time would have been fully aware – much as we are now – that they form part of a series.
But when we wondered, with Sonnet 100, what could be the cause of this extended silence on the part of Shakespeare's, we may also by now be curious as to why he returns to his writing about the young man at such a disengaged distance, and of course it makes sense to assume that the two are related. A plausible and simple enough answer we offered for the silence was that something in Shakespeare has changed and that time itself is beginning to show the effect it has on the young man, on Shakespeare himself, and on the dynamics between them, and all of this would also readily account for the almost objective aloofness of this sonnet.
What is most intriguing though is this – and we hinted at it earlier:
With Sonnet 101, William Shakespeare, master not only, as we just saw, of his Muse, but also – as we know from a hundred sonnets by now, quite apart from any plays we may be familiar with – of the pun, the double and triple meaning, the obvious as well as the hidden reference, and the writerly skill for exquisite subtlety, gives us reason to doubt his own sincerity.
We know that not all these sonnets are equally sincere. Some come straight from the heart and couldn't be more directly, more viscerally felt – immediately to mind spring the reflective Sonnet 30, for example: "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought | I summon up remembrance of things past;" the outraged Sonnet 34: "Why didst thou promise such a beauteous day | And make me travel forth without my cloak;" and of course the magnificent rant of Sonnet 66, with its complete absence of any filter: "Tired with al these, for restful death I cry," and then the list of everything that is wrong with the world. Others, like the pair 57 & 58, in which Shakespeare purports to be the young man's 'slave', we know for certain to show rare but blindingly obvious signs of irony, even sarcasm.
And here now, we detect a very delicate flavour of... – we don't quite know what it is. The sonnet is not as sweet as it sounds. But nor is it spicy. It's not bitter, not sour, not hot and not bland. It is just a tad savoury and not at all unpleasant: the taste lingers and we think, oh, where did that come from?
And we know where it comes from, we mentioned it earlier: I will teach you, my own Muse, how to do your job and how to make my lover seem long into the future as he shows now, together, you, Muse, and I can make him appear to future generations as he appears to be now. Now, arguably, this is just a poet choosing more interesting vocabulary than the verb 'is', something we were taught as children, aged ten. And fair enough, we would find a sentence like 'To make him be long hence as he is now' clunky to say the least. But William Shakespeare has a vocabulary based on roughly 15,000 to 20,000 lexemes or distinct lexical meanings, so he could have chosen something else had he wanted to.
Also, the line stands in the context, this we also noted, of an allusion to dyeing and painting, to artifice and pretence. And all of it stands in the context of a young lover of whom we may not know much but we do know this: if this continues to be the same young man – and we still have no good reason to assume anything else – then he is just not "truth in beauty dyed." He is, in Shakespeare's own words, "lascivious," a "thief," albeit a sweet one, he has "large privilege" of which he himself better "take heed," he is the one for whom Shakespeare has to "play the watchman" when he, the young lover is "far off, with others all too near."
Unless we take the hint and recognise: 'truth' doesn't have to mean 'truthfulness, faithfulness, sound character'. Yes, it can, and in Shakespeare often it does. But 'truth' can also mean 'truth'. The true being, the actual character, whatever that is. And it's long been established that this young man's character, whatever it is, is indeed 'dyed' in beauty: Shakespeare thinks so and says so, the world says so, so Shakespeare says, and from what we can tell by what Shakespeare tells us, the young man thinks so rather too.
It's not clear-cut and the ambiguity in the poem persists, and it does so in all likelihood – our good friend – deliberately.
So here then, to conclude for the moment and since they do in this way belong together, the two sonnets back to back:
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.
O truant Muse, what shall be thy amends
For thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed?
Both truth and beauty on my love depends,
So dost thou too, and therein dignified.
Make answer, Muse, wilt thou not haply say:
'Truth needs no colour, with his colour fixed,
Beauty no pencil, beauty's truth to lay,
But best is best if never intermixed'?
Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
Excuse not silence so, for't lies in thee
To make him much outlive a gilded tomb
And to be praised of ages yet to be.
Then do thy office, Muse, I teach thee how,
To make him seem long hence as he shows now.
And what we can take away from this sonnet, in its almost-but-not quite, or in fact almost-not-but-actually required pairing with Sonnet 100 is this oddly intriguing flavour, this sense that we are tasting on our tongue something that isn't quite what it seems, but we often don't immediately have the word for it, this umami...
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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!