Sonnet 106: When in the Chronicle of Wasted Time
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When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rhyme In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights, Then in the blazon of sweet beauty's best, Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, I see their antique pen would have expressed Even such a beauty as you master now. So all their praises are but prophesies Of this, our time, all you prefiguring, And for they looked but with divining eyes, They had not skill enough your worth to sing, For we which now behold these present days Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise. |
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When in the chronicle of wasted time
I see descriptions of the fairest wights, |
When in the books that talk about the past I read descriptions of the most beautiful people...
The 'chronicle of wasted time' is the written record of history, be that factual, as we would first and foremost understand the term 'chronicle', or fictional, or indeed mythical or poetical, whereby 'wasted' primarily means that the time is 'spent' or has 'passed', but a sense of having been spent in a profligate or passed in a destructive manner does shine through, and knowing Shakespeare's take on time elsewhere in these sonnets, where repeatedly he describes the ruinous, eroding forces of time, this absolutely makes sense. 'Wights', meanwhile, are simply persons, but the word was already archaic in Shakespeare's time and so this is a particularly appropriate term to refer to persons of the past. |
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And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights, |
...and in these books I further see how the beauty of these people of the past is making this old rhyme itself beautiful, while it is being deployed in the praise of ladies who have long since died and of lovely knights.
'Lovely', even at the time, is an unusual adjective to use for knights. A more common way of describing a knight would be as 'valiant', 'brave', 'strong', even 'glorious' or any number of epithets evoking traditionally male qualities of a fighter and defender on horseback. Shakespeare uses the word seven times in the sonnets: First in Sonnet 3 to tell the young man how he reminds his mother of her youth: "and she in thee | Calls back the lovely April of her prime," and then in Sonnet 5 where he speaks of "the lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell," conflating the young man's beautiful face with the loving gaze he receives from people generally. Next and most famously in Sonnet 18 where he tells him, "Thou art more lovely and more temperate" than a summer's day, and then again in Sonnet 54, where he directly calls him a "beauteous and lovely youth." In Sonnet 79 he speaks of "thy lovely argument," also indirectly referring to the young man himself, and in Sonnet 95 things take a bad turn when he admonishes him: "How sweet and lovely dost thou make the shame" that he finds is sullying the young man's name. Finally, in Sonnet 126, the last of the series to be addressed to the young man, he will simply call him "my lovely boy." All of which just goes to show that Shakespeare is fully aware of the meaning and connotation of the word 'lovely' and thus draws a comparison here between his young lover and the lovely knights of the past, also thereby indicating that he is in fact addressing his sonnet to the young man.. |
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Then in the blazon of sweet beauty's best,
Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, |
Then in this catalogue of descriptions of the best that beauty has to offer in terms of physical features, whereby for 'brow' here, as in Sonnet 19 we may read 'forehead' or 'face' generally...
The word 'blazon' in heraldry – a theme introduced just a moment ago with the 'lovely knights' – refers to the "correct description of armorial bearings" (Oxford Languages) and it is also an archaic term for 'coat of arms', thus further emphasising its rootedness in the past. |
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I see their antique pen would have expressed
Even such a beauty as you master now. |
...reading all this, I can see – as in realise or understand – that their old pen – old because it is in the old times – would have liked or wished to express exactly such a beauty as you now possess.
'Antique' simply means old, though with an emphasis on history and antiquity, and 'would' here probably and primarily has the Early Modern English meaning of 'wanted' or 'wished'. We see this often in Shakespeare, in this collection for example in Sonnet 46: "Mine eye my heart thy picture's sight would bar," or prominently also in the magnificent rant of Sonnet 66: "Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, | Save that to die, I leave my love alone." What also makes sense though and may be intended as an equal or secondary or indeed even as the primary meaning is our sense of 'would', to suggest that they would have done so if they could, but they couldn't because you were not yet there at the time. And the word 'master' to mean possess here suggests a level of superiority on the young man's part: he is not only in possession of his beauty but also in command of the privilege that this beauty and of course his status affords him. PRONUNCIATION: Note that Even here as very often is pronounced as one syllable: e'en, and antique is stressed on the first syllable: antique for prosody. |
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So all their praises are but prophecies
Of this, our time, all you prefiguring, |
And so all the praises of these people of the past are in fact mere prophecies of our time now, and they all 'prefigure' or prophesy you.
But there is an important nuance her: 'prefigure' is a term that is used in the Old Testament to predict the appearance on earth of The Christ, and so this draws a further religious parallel between the young man and God or the Son of God, following hard on the heels of the near blasphemous evocation of the Trinity in Sonnet 105. And on a point of grammar: the 'their' has no antecedent in this sonnet, but we know of course that Shakespeare is referring to the writers or poets of the past. |
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And for they looked but with divining eyes
They had not skill enough your worth to sing, |
And because they only looked at their subjects with the divining eyes of prophets, so to speak, they were not yet able to actually do your worth justice by singing your praises to their full extent.
The Quarto Edition has: They had not still enough your worth to sing which also can make sense. 'Still' can mean 'yet', so the line would then read, 'they did not yet have enough – material, grounds, or indeed practice and therefore skill – to speak of your true worth because they could not yet look at you'. And it can also be read as an old spelling of 'style' in which case the line would read: 'they did not yet have the style to speak of you properly'. None of this though sounds truly satisfactory, and all major editions I have come across in print and online emend this to 'skill', which I therefore follow. |
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For we which now behold these present days
Have eyes to wonder but lack tongues to praise. |
Because we who now look at these present days and therefore at the people who live today, and among them most importantly and significantly of course you, my young lover, we have the eyes to wonder in astonishment and awe at your beauty, but we do not have to words to express it either.
In view of the construction of the last quatrain, the 'For' with which this closing couplet is introduced really ought to be an 'And', because what Shakespeare is saying is that we today – meaning of course he and his time – do not possess the words, or the skill to put into words, to adequately praise you, any more than the people of the past, and so this is not a case of causality, but of consecutive observation. But Shakespeare may here be using 'for' to emphasise the contrast between the writers of the past and 'us today': the writers of the past were not able to actually look at his young lover, because he was not alive then, and this is why they could not do him justice, whereas 'we' have the privilege and the pleasure to look at him, and we still can't actually do him justice in words: that's how amazing he is. |
Sonnet 106 sees Shakespeare return to eulogising his young lover in outwardly straightforward terms. Rather than looking ahead to times to come when his poetry will continue to pay tribute to his love long after both he and his lover have gone, as several of the other sonnets have done, he here casts his eye back to the past through the lens of the poets who have talked about the people of their day, and comes to the conclusion that they were doing just as he is doing now: trying to express the epitome of beauty. But since this had not yet been reached, because the young man of his love had not yet been born, they ended up not so much chronicling their age as predicting an age to come with his appearance in this world; and yet of course now that he is here, it is possible for Shakespeare and anyone who shares the privilege of being in his presence to admire him, but Shakespeare and his contemporaries still find it impossible to do him justice with their words.
Editors universally as far as I can tell point to a parallel between this sonnet and a sonnet by Shakespeare's direct contemporary, Samuel Daniel. Daniel was born in 1562, two years before Shakespeare, and died in 1619, three years after Shakespeare, and in his lifetime he was considered one of the pre-eminent poets of the day. He was closely connected to Giovanni or John Florio, ten years his senior, who in turn, like Daniel himself, exercised a great influence on Shakespeare, and who also happened to be a tutor to the young Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. And Daniel is also mentioned sometimes as a potential candidate for the Rival Poet who features in Sonnets 78 to 86.
In 1592 – the year that Shakespeare is first mentioned in London by Robert Greene's snarky remark referring to him as an "upstart crow" – Daniel published a sonnet sequence entitled Delia whose Sonnet 46 may well have been known to Shakespeare and directly or indirectly inspired him to write his own poem, published a good 17 years later in his 1609 collection as Sonnet 106.
It goes:
Let others sing of knights and paladins
In aged accents and untimely words;
Paint shadows in imaginary lines
Which well the reach of their high wits records:
But I must sing of thee, and those fair eyes
Authentic shall my verse in time to come,
When yet th' unborn shall say, 'Lo where she lies
Whose beauty made him speak that else was dumb.'
These are the arks, the trophies I erect,
That fortify thy name against old age;
And these thy sacred virtues must protect
Against the dark, and time's consuming rage.
Though th' error of my youth they shall discover,
Suffice they show I liv'd and was thy lover.
What is immediately striking, quite apart from the loose association of 'knights' and 'paladins' – Shakespeare of course does not mention the latter, but refers to 'ladies dead' – is how closely, formally, the Daniel sonnet resembles what we have come to call the Shakespearean sonnet in general: it consists of three distinct and identifiable quatrains of four lines each, positioned in an alternating and unfolding rhyme scheme and yielding into a rhyming closing couplet.
Several other elements that feature here can also be found in Shakespeare's sonnets, as we have seen throughout our examination of them: 'accents' to mean the way people express themselves about something or someone, 'sing' to mean write poetry, 'in time to come' as a phrase, the idea that the poet is 'dumb' but that the object of his love and therefore the subject of his poetry teaches him to speak or, in the above sense, to sing, the idea that the verses the poet writes are the monuments or trophies or here also arks that the poet creates for the person they love, the notion of this poetry 'fortifying' the name or the memory of the loved person 'against old age' or the effects and ravages of time, the idea itself that time 'rages'...
It really is no stretch at all to draw multiple lines of reference and influence from Daniel to Shakespeare, and were it not for the fact that Shakespeare wholly eclipsed Daniel and became by some wide margin the most important, most performed, most cherished, and most studied poet and playwright of the English language, we should today quite possibly be speaking of the Danielian Sonnet, rather than the Shakespearean one. Alas, for Daniel, this was not to be.
One of the many, many reasons we are today so much more interested in Shakespeares' sonnets than Daniel's is that he of course not only appropriates the form but, quite as the term suggests and as a poet seeking and pursuing note must, he makes it his own.
The first and most obvious deviation from the Delia text and from tradition at the time – the time being the heyday of the English sonnet – is the gender of the addressee. This in itself, though, you will find disputed. Some people – and among them people of note – will note that Sonnet 106 does not actually tell us whether it is addressed to a man or a woman and therefore postulate that it may have been written to just about anyone or no-one in particular.
If you have been listening to this podcast you will have heard me say more often than you need to hear that I consider this borderline nonsense. There has, in all the sonnets we have looked at and listened to so far, been no serious suggestion, not even an indication that Shakespeare is talking to or about anyone other than his young man. In several sonnets – the one directly preceding this, Sonnet 105, being a fine example – he makes a point of telling his young man that it is always and only to him that he writes his sonnets, and while this may of course in theory be flattery and a lie, as far as we or anyone can tell, such a supposition is and remains pure theory.
Practice and life as it appears to be lived, be that now ordinary or less ordinary, suggests otherwise: we have, at least thus far no reason to believe that Shakespeare has switched affection and allegiance to someone else and every reason to accept that he hasn't, and so while this is and also remains uncertain, it is so likely as to be extremely probable, and as you will also know I hold that in the absence of certainty, likelihood such as this is our friend. Whereby, I do warrant that very soon Shakespeare will complicate matters by confessing to his young man that he has put himself about a bit too, and of course we have the whole Dark Lady section of the sonnets yet to come. Neither of these two facts though make it any more likely that this sonnet is written to anyone other than his young lover, as we shall see when we get to them.
The other thing you will have heard me say often by now is that logic is not our Will's strongest suit, and this once more is exemplified here. Because the sonnet is, for all its poetic dexterity, a semantic non-sequitur:
Here is the argument Shakespeare makes:
When I read in the old books of times gone by how the most beautiful people and the loveliest noblemen are there described, then I realise that the writers of these books would have expressed such a beauty as you now possess. Whichever reading of the word 'would' we adopt, the principal tenet of this first part of the argumentation remains the same: this is what they either wanted to do but couldn't or would have done had they been able to, but were not.
"So all their praises are but prophecies," Shakespeare next declares "Of this, our time, all you prefiguring." This does not strictly follow,. It is, from what Shakespeare knows and can tell us, entirely possible that these fairest wights and lovely knights of the past were every bit as beautiful as his young man. Because either these descriptions are so evocative, so successful at cataloguing inexpressible beauty that Shakespeare can only marvel at what he reads and is reminded of his young man of whom he thinks or assumes that he is even more beautiful, or at least as beautiful, and wishes he had the same skill to talk about him, or he identifies an intention on the part of these ancient writers that is, however, foiled by the inadequacy of language, much as he finds this to be the case for himself when hoping to praise his young man.
Either way, neither Shakespeare nor we can say anything about the beauty of the people thus eulogised in the past nor about the level to which such eulogising succeeds.
And there may lie a twist to this tale that may or may not be intended by Shakespeare. He may of course simply not care about the constraints of logic, as on previous occasions we received the impression he doesn't. And surely this wouldn't matter greatly, because on this as on previous occasions we certainly get the gist.
Also possible though is that he is aware of, and enjoys, the fact that this lack of stringency allows for a subtler, more differentiated reading of the poem.
After all, the beauty that they 'would have expressed' is such 'as you master now': they saw such beauty as yours and wanted to express it. Which means that such beauty existed even then, even if just in the eye of the beholder. Now, remember Sonnet 104, very recently: "To me fair friend, you never can be old." But to others, as is implied, you can. And remember Sonnet 59:
O that record could with a backward look,
Even of five hundred courses of the sun,
Show me your image in some antique book,
Since mind at first in character was done,
That I might see what the old world could say
To this composed wonder of your frame:
Whether we are mended or where better they,
Or whether revolution be the same.
He concludes that poem with:
O sure I am the wits of former days
To subjects worse have given admiring praise.
And we noted when we discussed this that there may be something of a double edge to this particular conclusion. Still, that was then and this is now, and now Shakespeare observes "their antique pen would have expressed | Even such a beauty as you master now."
All of which would suggest that, yes, to me you are as beautiful as you were on the day we first met, others may have their own view, and the truth is, poets through the ages have fallen in love with, idolised and idealised – remember of course Sonnet 105 just before this one – their beloved and tried but necessarily failed to give full range to their love, and that same thing quite unsurprisingly – everything I have said about the power of my verse notwithstanding – also applies to me.
And under this light, this sonnet too, like Sonnet 105, acquires a tone of self-reflection, self-awareness underneath the surface that belies the superficiality of the standard song of praise to another person in sonnet form.
When we suggested, in our discussion of Sonnet 104, that Shakespeare's young lover may not so much have grown old, perhaps, as simply grown up, then this does permit, and beyond permit attract, a circumspection that entails our poet too and notes: he also has, not perhaps grown up so much as grown wise, wiser at any rate than in the first flush of love and fame or almost fame as it was at the time fairly soon after he arrived in London he had. If that's when he met his young lover. And many indications – though none in this specific sonnet – point to the probability that it was.
And this question, vexed as it is and complex as it remains, of just when exactly what happens in Shakespeare's life that may or may not be represented in one way or another in these sonnets, and which we will delve into in much more granular detail when we come to the end of this Fair Youth segment in the collection, is about to acquire a whole new and additional layer of potential for speculation, conjecture, and supposition with the deeply symbolic and heavily laden with meaning and references Sonnet 107...
Editors universally as far as I can tell point to a parallel between this sonnet and a sonnet by Shakespeare's direct contemporary, Samuel Daniel. Daniel was born in 1562, two years before Shakespeare, and died in 1619, three years after Shakespeare, and in his lifetime he was considered one of the pre-eminent poets of the day. He was closely connected to Giovanni or John Florio, ten years his senior, who in turn, like Daniel himself, exercised a great influence on Shakespeare, and who also happened to be a tutor to the young Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton. And Daniel is also mentioned sometimes as a potential candidate for the Rival Poet who features in Sonnets 78 to 86.
In 1592 – the year that Shakespeare is first mentioned in London by Robert Greene's snarky remark referring to him as an "upstart crow" – Daniel published a sonnet sequence entitled Delia whose Sonnet 46 may well have been known to Shakespeare and directly or indirectly inspired him to write his own poem, published a good 17 years later in his 1609 collection as Sonnet 106.
It goes:
Let others sing of knights and paladins
In aged accents and untimely words;
Paint shadows in imaginary lines
Which well the reach of their high wits records:
But I must sing of thee, and those fair eyes
Authentic shall my verse in time to come,
When yet th' unborn shall say, 'Lo where she lies
Whose beauty made him speak that else was dumb.'
These are the arks, the trophies I erect,
That fortify thy name against old age;
And these thy sacred virtues must protect
Against the dark, and time's consuming rage.
Though th' error of my youth they shall discover,
Suffice they show I liv'd and was thy lover.
What is immediately striking, quite apart from the loose association of 'knights' and 'paladins' – Shakespeare of course does not mention the latter, but refers to 'ladies dead' – is how closely, formally, the Daniel sonnet resembles what we have come to call the Shakespearean sonnet in general: it consists of three distinct and identifiable quatrains of four lines each, positioned in an alternating and unfolding rhyme scheme and yielding into a rhyming closing couplet.
Several other elements that feature here can also be found in Shakespeare's sonnets, as we have seen throughout our examination of them: 'accents' to mean the way people express themselves about something or someone, 'sing' to mean write poetry, 'in time to come' as a phrase, the idea that the poet is 'dumb' but that the object of his love and therefore the subject of his poetry teaches him to speak or, in the above sense, to sing, the idea that the verses the poet writes are the monuments or trophies or here also arks that the poet creates for the person they love, the notion of this poetry 'fortifying' the name or the memory of the loved person 'against old age' or the effects and ravages of time, the idea itself that time 'rages'...
It really is no stretch at all to draw multiple lines of reference and influence from Daniel to Shakespeare, and were it not for the fact that Shakespeare wholly eclipsed Daniel and became by some wide margin the most important, most performed, most cherished, and most studied poet and playwright of the English language, we should today quite possibly be speaking of the Danielian Sonnet, rather than the Shakespearean one. Alas, for Daniel, this was not to be.
One of the many, many reasons we are today so much more interested in Shakespeares' sonnets than Daniel's is that he of course not only appropriates the form but, quite as the term suggests and as a poet seeking and pursuing note must, he makes it his own.
The first and most obvious deviation from the Delia text and from tradition at the time – the time being the heyday of the English sonnet – is the gender of the addressee. This in itself, though, you will find disputed. Some people – and among them people of note – will note that Sonnet 106 does not actually tell us whether it is addressed to a man or a woman and therefore postulate that it may have been written to just about anyone or no-one in particular.
If you have been listening to this podcast you will have heard me say more often than you need to hear that I consider this borderline nonsense. There has, in all the sonnets we have looked at and listened to so far, been no serious suggestion, not even an indication that Shakespeare is talking to or about anyone other than his young man. In several sonnets – the one directly preceding this, Sonnet 105, being a fine example – he makes a point of telling his young man that it is always and only to him that he writes his sonnets, and while this may of course in theory be flattery and a lie, as far as we or anyone can tell, such a supposition is and remains pure theory.
Practice and life as it appears to be lived, be that now ordinary or less ordinary, suggests otherwise: we have, at least thus far no reason to believe that Shakespeare has switched affection and allegiance to someone else and every reason to accept that he hasn't, and so while this is and also remains uncertain, it is so likely as to be extremely probable, and as you will also know I hold that in the absence of certainty, likelihood such as this is our friend. Whereby, I do warrant that very soon Shakespeare will complicate matters by confessing to his young man that he has put himself about a bit too, and of course we have the whole Dark Lady section of the sonnets yet to come. Neither of these two facts though make it any more likely that this sonnet is written to anyone other than his young lover, as we shall see when we get to them.
The other thing you will have heard me say often by now is that logic is not our Will's strongest suit, and this once more is exemplified here. Because the sonnet is, for all its poetic dexterity, a semantic non-sequitur:
Here is the argument Shakespeare makes:
When I read in the old books of times gone by how the most beautiful people and the loveliest noblemen are there described, then I realise that the writers of these books would have expressed such a beauty as you now possess. Whichever reading of the word 'would' we adopt, the principal tenet of this first part of the argumentation remains the same: this is what they either wanted to do but couldn't or would have done had they been able to, but were not.
"So all their praises are but prophecies," Shakespeare next declares "Of this, our time, all you prefiguring." This does not strictly follow,. It is, from what Shakespeare knows and can tell us, entirely possible that these fairest wights and lovely knights of the past were every bit as beautiful as his young man. Because either these descriptions are so evocative, so successful at cataloguing inexpressible beauty that Shakespeare can only marvel at what he reads and is reminded of his young man of whom he thinks or assumes that he is even more beautiful, or at least as beautiful, and wishes he had the same skill to talk about him, or he identifies an intention on the part of these ancient writers that is, however, foiled by the inadequacy of language, much as he finds this to be the case for himself when hoping to praise his young man.
Either way, neither Shakespeare nor we can say anything about the beauty of the people thus eulogised in the past nor about the level to which such eulogising succeeds.
And there may lie a twist to this tale that may or may not be intended by Shakespeare. He may of course simply not care about the constraints of logic, as on previous occasions we received the impression he doesn't. And surely this wouldn't matter greatly, because on this as on previous occasions we certainly get the gist.
Also possible though is that he is aware of, and enjoys, the fact that this lack of stringency allows for a subtler, more differentiated reading of the poem.
After all, the beauty that they 'would have expressed' is such 'as you master now': they saw such beauty as yours and wanted to express it. Which means that such beauty existed even then, even if just in the eye of the beholder. Now, remember Sonnet 104, very recently: "To me fair friend, you never can be old." But to others, as is implied, you can. And remember Sonnet 59:
O that record could with a backward look,
Even of five hundred courses of the sun,
Show me your image in some antique book,
Since mind at first in character was done,
That I might see what the old world could say
To this composed wonder of your frame:
Whether we are mended or where better they,
Or whether revolution be the same.
He concludes that poem with:
O sure I am the wits of former days
To subjects worse have given admiring praise.
And we noted when we discussed this that there may be something of a double edge to this particular conclusion. Still, that was then and this is now, and now Shakespeare observes "their antique pen would have expressed | Even such a beauty as you master now."
All of which would suggest that, yes, to me you are as beautiful as you were on the day we first met, others may have their own view, and the truth is, poets through the ages have fallen in love with, idolised and idealised – remember of course Sonnet 105 just before this one – their beloved and tried but necessarily failed to give full range to their love, and that same thing quite unsurprisingly – everything I have said about the power of my verse notwithstanding – also applies to me.
And under this light, this sonnet too, like Sonnet 105, acquires a tone of self-reflection, self-awareness underneath the surface that belies the superficiality of the standard song of praise to another person in sonnet form.
When we suggested, in our discussion of Sonnet 104, that Shakespeare's young lover may not so much have grown old, perhaps, as simply grown up, then this does permit, and beyond permit attract, a circumspection that entails our poet too and notes: he also has, not perhaps grown up so much as grown wise, wiser at any rate than in the first flush of love and fame or almost fame as it was at the time fairly soon after he arrived in London he had. If that's when he met his young lover. And many indications – though none in this specific sonnet – point to the probability that it was.
And this question, vexed as it is and complex as it remains, of just when exactly what happens in Shakespeare's life that may or may not be represented in one way or another in these sonnets, and which we will delve into in much more granular detail when we come to the end of this Fair Youth segment in the collection, is about to acquire a whole new and additional layer of potential for speculation, conjecture, and supposition with the deeply symbolic and heavily laden with meaning and references Sonnet 107...
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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!