Sonnet 115: Those Lines That I Before Have Writ Do Lie
|
Those lines that I before have writ do lie,
Even those that said I could not love you dearer; Yet then my judgement knew no reason why My most full flame should afterwards burn clearer. But reckoning time, whose millioned accidents Creep in twixt vows, and change decrees of kings, Tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp'st intents, Divert strong minds to th'course of altering things: Alas, why, fearing of time's tyranny, Might I not then say now I love you best, When I was certain ore incertainty, Crowning the present, doubting of the rest? Love is a babe, then might I not say so, To give full growth to that which still doth grow. |
|
|
Those lines that I before have writ do lie,
Even those that said I could not love you dearer; |
Those lines of verse – meaning of course these sonnets – that I have written to you before, specifically the ones which said that I could not love you more dearly, turn out to be telling a lie.
The opening of this sonnet presents no real problem of understanding for us, with one minor exception. We today would ordinarily read the 'even' to signify that all my lines lied and not even "those that said I could not love you dearer" came close to the truth, whereas Shakespeare here in all likelihood uses 'even' as he does every so often to specify that the lines he is referring to are the very ones that told his young lover that there was no way he could love him any more than at that time. We came across this use of 'even' as early as Sonnet 15: When I perceive that men as plants increase, Cheered and checked even by the self-same sky, where similarly 'even' emphasises 'the very self-same' sky, rather than suggesting that men may be 'cheered and checked' by many other things, even the sky as well. And Shakespeare with "Those lines that I before have writ" is of course not referring to any sonnet in particular; he has, in the course of these many, many poems written to, for, and about his young man, expressed many times – either directly or indirectly – that his love for him couldn't possibly be greater because it is as full and fulsome as can be. |
|
Yet then my judgement knew no reason why
My most full flame should afterwards burn clearer. |
But then, when I wrote those lines, I could see no reason why this flame of love that was burning for you in my heart so fully, so completely at the time, should ever be able to burn even brighter, and thus more intensely, more absolutely for you.
This – although it deals with matters of love which could be argued to be inherently unreasonable – stands to reason: if I say to you today that I am completely, totally in love with you, then inherent in such a feeling and such claim is an absolute that cannot be exceeded: at that point I may find it virtually impossible to imagine that I could love you even more: once something is complete, total, it is in that sense perfect and has no potential for improvement or growth and so if that is how I feel at the time, there is no obvious reason why I should consider it a possibility that I am wrong and that the potential for an even greater, even better love, still exists. |
|
But reckoning time, whose millioned accidents
Creep in twixt vows, and change decrees of kings, |
If there is any difficulty for us in getting to grips with this verse, then it starts here: not of understanding the sonnet: its gist remains pretty clear, but of giving a linear translation of these next four lines into contemporary English, because the sentence as it stands doesn't quite stack up grammatically or syntactically.
It starts out sounding like it is going to tell us what 'reckoning time' does to my love for you, but Shakespeare then loses his thread, or so it seems. We would expect something like: But reckoning time – 'reckoning' because it ultimately presents us with its metaphorical bill for everything we are and do, and here further described by the many ways in which its millions of instances have their effect on everything – makes my love for you grow ever and even stronger. This conclusion though never materialises, and so we may in fact have to consider it possible that Shakespeare here himself, as the writer, is 'reckoning with time' – the 'with' then being implied – and building up to what he is going to tell us in the quatrain that follows afterwards. Although the meaning doesn't change much, the sentence can then be rendered as: But instead of adjudging or imagining that I could love you even more in the future, I was taking into account or considering – reckoning with – time, whose millions of accidental or incidental moments, happenings, and events affect everything and may change everything at a stroke, for example by getting between the vows that people make to each other and their ability to keep them – a person may die, or become sick, or be banished for a crime they did or didn't commit, or fall in love with someone else quite unexpectedly – or by causing even the decrees made by kings to be altered – because circumstances change, because a monarch may change his or her mind, because the conviction with which one law is made may well be matched by the determination with which another law by some new force in charge now is written to supersede it... It is probably not entirely accidental that Shakespeare here again references 'kings', having described his own mind as 'being crowned with' his younger lover in the previous sonnet. |
|
Tan sacred beauty, blunt the sharp'st intents,
Divert strong minds to th'course of altering things: |
The list of what 'time's millioned accidents' do continues: they tan – as in darken and toughen like leather – even the most sacred thing, beauty itself; they blunt or soften even the most determined and therefore sharpest intentions or purposes, and they change even the strongest, most resolutely made-up minds to accommodate themselves with evolved or altered circumstances.
The idea, clearly, is that time with its innumerable events large and small works on everything – a theme much explored by these sonnets, as we have seen and discussed at length – and therefore nothing is or remains stable, static, or certain: everything is subject to the effects of time and the effects of time broadly speaking are ones of entropy: beauty fades, things fall apart, people age and die, and so we would have to expect love to disintegrate or evaporate, if love fell victim to the ravages of time in the same way as everything else does. |
|
Alas, why, fearing of time's tyranny,
Might I not then say now I love you best, |
And so why, as I was fearing time's tyranny over everything, might I not then at that time say that now I love you best...
The 'alas' is perhaps a little odd for us here, since to us it is not immediately obvious why saying 'now I love you best' should prompt such an expression of woe, but in a poem that flows as freely through its concepts as this one and structures itself so loosely around the strictures of grammar, we may accept this as a quite general – and generally accepted, as well as by now oft-aired – sorrow over the passing and the passing destructiveness of time itself. |
|
When I was certain ore incertainty,
Crowning the present, doubting of the rest? |
And this was happening at a time when I had certainty over uncertainty, meaning I was sure of the things that I could note in the present, but that are necessarily uncertain in the future; and so, much as in the previous sonnet my mind was 'being crowned with you', giving it the status of a king and therefore lord and master over everything in perfect attainment of the highest state it can have, so I with my love was crowing the then present, exulting it and making it unimprovable, while being forced – as we all are – to doubt the rest of time, meaning to be doubtful of the uncertain, undefined, unknowable future.
'Incertainty' much as in Sonnet 107, simply means 'uncertainty', of course. |
|
Love is a babe, then might I not say so,
To give full growth to that which still doth grow. |
Love, after all, is – in ancient myth and much of Western art and poetry – represented by the love god Cupid, a small boy, and that being the case, might I not then say so, in order that I can give something which still grows – a small child – the scope and expression to grow to its full and fully-fledged dimension, intensity, and power.
The 'then' here has a different function to the 'then' three lines above. There, it principally refers to the time in the past when I wrote those lines which I wrote for you then: Might I not then –at that time – say now – also at that time – I love you best. Even so there too it retains an element also of 'then, in that case', seeing that I had to, as everybody does, fear time's tyranny. This now becomes the primary meaning of 'then': then, that being so, love being a babe, might I not therefore now that I realise this is so, say that it is so, and in doing so give full expression to the scope and the potential love has for growth. |
With Sonnet 115 William Shakespeare turns his attention to the perplexing paradox that a love that is experienced as complete and absolute and therefore perfect, such as his love for his young man, may turn out, over time, to have been but a fledgling infant compared to the even fuller, more profound, more mature love that it has the potential to grow into. In acknowledging that love can evolve and grow over time it sets the premise that love itself is changeable – here for the better, to be more deeply and more sincerely felt than ever before – and it therefore not only concedes, but claims as a lover's right, the necessity, perhaps, to revise statements made about love in the past, and in doing so to effectively give those pronouncements the lie.
Two observations you will almost certainly come across, no matter whose edition of these sonnets you refer to.
First, that John Donne wrote a poem with a very similar theme and 'message', entitled Love's Growth. This was first published posthumously in 1633 – Donne was born eight years after Shakespeare in 1572 and died aged 59 in 1631, so a good 22 years after the publication of Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609 and some fifteen years after Shakespeare's own death in 1616, and while, like many poems at the time, it may have been in circulation a lot earlier than that, the general and reasonable assumption is not that Shakespeare was inspired for his poem by Donne, but that Donne, if anything, took his inspiration from Shakespeare.
The parallels, while therefore not relevant for the genesis of Sonnet 115, are certainly striking and offer an insight, perhaps, if nothing else, into what preoccupied poets' minds more generally in the late 16th / early 17th century:
Here, just for illustration, is the first of Love's Growth's two times two stanzas of six and eight lines respectively:
I scarce believe my love to be so pure
As I had thought it was,
Because it doth endure
Vicissitude, and season, as the grass;
Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore
My love was infinite, if spring make’ it more.
The other thing that editors are wont to point out is that in none of these 154 sonnets collected in the 1609 Quarto Edition does Shakespeare actually explicitly say the words: "I could" or indeed "I cannot love you dearer." This has led some more literal-minded scholars to wonder whether Shakespeare may be referring to some poems of his that to us are now lost. One of these was Charles Knox Pooler who edited the first Arden Edition of the Sonnets, published in 1918, something his successor, Katherine Duncan-Jones, in her 1987 edition considers 'unnecessary', because, as she quite rightly points out, and as we noted earlier, many of these sonnets do in one way or another express that the love Shakespeare feels for his young man is as complete as it can be and therefore could not be made 'dearer', both in terms of the level of affection and in terms of the 'value' this love has for Shakespeare.
This does not mean, however - as editors accept – that there may not have been some other sonnets that never made it into either any of the plays or into the 1609 collection: we must always allow for the possibility that there are some lost works of Shakespeare's which sadly we no longer have access to, but which Shakespeare himself could well have had in mind. Still, Shakespeare's is the largest, most comprehensive, and by far most radical series of sonnets from the era that survives, and nothing in the collection as we know it strongly suggests that there is anything 'missing' from it, with the exception perhaps of the closing couplet that is conspicuously absent from the beautiful and vastly significant Sonnet 126, which of course we will come to in due course.
Also noteworthy about this sonnet is that it is generally considered to be thematically linked to the much more famous Sonnet 116 that follows it. And this is certainly true in so far as both these sonnets deal with the changeability or otherwise of love, specifically 'true' love. Sonnet 116, as you most likely already know and as we are about to see, makes the bold assertion that "love is not love | Which alters when it alteration finds," and that quite to the contrary, it is, so Shakespeare, "an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken," from which alone – and really without wishing to anticipate this poem much further now – it is clear that there he is obviously talking about the fickleness of love, about love removing itself from the loved person when the lover removes themselves from the loved person's heart or their vicinity.
And so these two sonnets are really – I would argue –somewhat less closely, let alone directly, tied than is sometimes purported.
Sonnet 115 is neither difficult, nor in its contents unusual. What is really quite unusual though is its formal deficiency, if we want to think of it as such: the almost freeform, not-quite-yet-but-ahead-of-its-time-reminiscent-of stream of conscious loose end of the middle quatrain, and also its fairly defiant – as opposed to, say, sweetly lyrical – tone.
Once or twice, or maybe thrice and once or twice on top of that during this podcast, we have asked ourselves: what brings this on? What prompts William Shakespeare at this juncture – whatever the precise timing or situational circumstance may be of the composition – to put down these words. And the apparent haste, or at any rate 'disorder' on display here, the near-petulant rhetoric of the mirrored questions – "Might I not then say," "Then might I not say so" – and the assertive stance that speaks not so much of wonder as of a poet's good right, make it seem plausible at least that the sonnet, as others obviously have done, comes in response to something the young man has said or written to Shakespeare, perhaps, at its most basic, something along the lines of: isn't that what you said a thousand times before: that you could not love me any more than you did back then?
Obviously, this is speculation: we have not idea, really, what happened between Shakespeare and his young man, if anything, to provoke this sonnet. What we do know is that the sonnet aligns well with the ones that surround it:
Starting with Sonnet 108, William Shakespeare first of all appears to take stock of the relationship and makes it clear that a) this relationship has been underway for a while now, b) he keeps repeating himself in expressing his love for his young man, c) his young man is no longer all that young, himself, but he still loves him.
Next, with Sonnets 109 and 110, William Shakespeare for the first time directly and openly addresses his own infidelities and makes a point of reassuring his younger lover that he is the only one that counts, that he surpasses all the other lovers Shakespeare has had, and that his, Shakespeare's, roaming now is done, referring to his young man as his "home of love" and as "a god in love, to whom I am confined.'
Sonnet 111 then explains – and seeks to excuse – such transgressions or other factors that have tarnished Shakespeare's reputation by the fact that he has to conduct his life by "public means, which public manners breeds," and entreats his lover to pity him. This is followed immediately by Sonnet 112 which asserts that the young man's love and pity does indeed heal any damage Shakespeare may have suffered from being badmouthed by others and tells the young man that nobody else's opinion now matters to Shakespeare. In fact, we noted, Shakespeare seems to go as far as claiming the young man entirely for himself:
You are so strongly in my purpose bred
That all the world besides me thinks y'are dead.
Sonnets 113 and 114 then talk of how, when away from his lover, Shakespeare's eye feeds his mind only images of the young man and wonders, in a for us ever so slightly obscure way, what the nature is of this deception, deciding that it amounts to a kind of flattery of the mind on the eye's part, and allowing for the eye and the mind to effectively conspire to see the young man in everything Shakespeare looks at.
What all this amounts to is a steady, almost systematic, shoring up of the lover and of Shakespeare himself within this constellation: yes, we've been in this together for some time; yes, you are no longer as young as you were when we first met; true enough, I too – much as you! – have 'gone here and there', but I can and I do assure you that this roaming is now done: you are the only one for me. I have had my own issues to deal with and my reputation has taken some knocks because of my lifestyle, but so long as you stand by me and see the good in me, all is well. And if I told you before I love you and have expressed in many, many a poem that there is no way I could love you more, the truth is, I love you even more now than I did before.
And this is in fact exactly what from a lasting, maturing, settling relationship one would wish for and hope: we've been together for some time, we've had our ups and downs and our external challenges, but after all is said and done: you are the one, and my love for you has only grown, is growing ever stronger still.
And if Shakespeare's mind was "being crowned" with his young man in Sonnet 114, and his certainty of his love for his young man was crowning the present of the past over the uncertainty of the future in this sonnet, then in this present now, our poet is about to crown his love for his young man with a poem that today, couples of all constellations and denominations have their friends, their best men, their bridesmaids, their relatives recite for them at their wedding, more than four hundred years on. Sonnet 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments...
Two observations you will almost certainly come across, no matter whose edition of these sonnets you refer to.
First, that John Donne wrote a poem with a very similar theme and 'message', entitled Love's Growth. This was first published posthumously in 1633 – Donne was born eight years after Shakespeare in 1572 and died aged 59 in 1631, so a good 22 years after the publication of Shakespeare's Sonnets in 1609 and some fifteen years after Shakespeare's own death in 1616, and while, like many poems at the time, it may have been in circulation a lot earlier than that, the general and reasonable assumption is not that Shakespeare was inspired for his poem by Donne, but that Donne, if anything, took his inspiration from Shakespeare.
The parallels, while therefore not relevant for the genesis of Sonnet 115, are certainly striking and offer an insight, perhaps, if nothing else, into what preoccupied poets' minds more generally in the late 16th / early 17th century:
Here, just for illustration, is the first of Love's Growth's two times two stanzas of six and eight lines respectively:
I scarce believe my love to be so pure
As I had thought it was,
Because it doth endure
Vicissitude, and season, as the grass;
Methinks I lied all winter, when I swore
My love was infinite, if spring make’ it more.
The other thing that editors are wont to point out is that in none of these 154 sonnets collected in the 1609 Quarto Edition does Shakespeare actually explicitly say the words: "I could" or indeed "I cannot love you dearer." This has led some more literal-minded scholars to wonder whether Shakespeare may be referring to some poems of his that to us are now lost. One of these was Charles Knox Pooler who edited the first Arden Edition of the Sonnets, published in 1918, something his successor, Katherine Duncan-Jones, in her 1987 edition considers 'unnecessary', because, as she quite rightly points out, and as we noted earlier, many of these sonnets do in one way or another express that the love Shakespeare feels for his young man is as complete as it can be and therefore could not be made 'dearer', both in terms of the level of affection and in terms of the 'value' this love has for Shakespeare.
This does not mean, however - as editors accept – that there may not have been some other sonnets that never made it into either any of the plays or into the 1609 collection: we must always allow for the possibility that there are some lost works of Shakespeare's which sadly we no longer have access to, but which Shakespeare himself could well have had in mind. Still, Shakespeare's is the largest, most comprehensive, and by far most radical series of sonnets from the era that survives, and nothing in the collection as we know it strongly suggests that there is anything 'missing' from it, with the exception perhaps of the closing couplet that is conspicuously absent from the beautiful and vastly significant Sonnet 126, which of course we will come to in due course.
Also noteworthy about this sonnet is that it is generally considered to be thematically linked to the much more famous Sonnet 116 that follows it. And this is certainly true in so far as both these sonnets deal with the changeability or otherwise of love, specifically 'true' love. Sonnet 116, as you most likely already know and as we are about to see, makes the bold assertion that "love is not love | Which alters when it alteration finds," and that quite to the contrary, it is, so Shakespeare, "an ever fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken," from which alone – and really without wishing to anticipate this poem much further now – it is clear that there he is obviously talking about the fickleness of love, about love removing itself from the loved person when the lover removes themselves from the loved person's heart or their vicinity.
And so these two sonnets are really – I would argue –somewhat less closely, let alone directly, tied than is sometimes purported.
Sonnet 115 is neither difficult, nor in its contents unusual. What is really quite unusual though is its formal deficiency, if we want to think of it as such: the almost freeform, not-quite-yet-but-ahead-of-its-time-reminiscent-of stream of conscious loose end of the middle quatrain, and also its fairly defiant – as opposed to, say, sweetly lyrical – tone.
Once or twice, or maybe thrice and once or twice on top of that during this podcast, we have asked ourselves: what brings this on? What prompts William Shakespeare at this juncture – whatever the precise timing or situational circumstance may be of the composition – to put down these words. And the apparent haste, or at any rate 'disorder' on display here, the near-petulant rhetoric of the mirrored questions – "Might I not then say," "Then might I not say so" – and the assertive stance that speaks not so much of wonder as of a poet's good right, make it seem plausible at least that the sonnet, as others obviously have done, comes in response to something the young man has said or written to Shakespeare, perhaps, at its most basic, something along the lines of: isn't that what you said a thousand times before: that you could not love me any more than you did back then?
Obviously, this is speculation: we have not idea, really, what happened between Shakespeare and his young man, if anything, to provoke this sonnet. What we do know is that the sonnet aligns well with the ones that surround it:
Starting with Sonnet 108, William Shakespeare first of all appears to take stock of the relationship and makes it clear that a) this relationship has been underway for a while now, b) he keeps repeating himself in expressing his love for his young man, c) his young man is no longer all that young, himself, but he still loves him.
Next, with Sonnets 109 and 110, William Shakespeare for the first time directly and openly addresses his own infidelities and makes a point of reassuring his younger lover that he is the only one that counts, that he surpasses all the other lovers Shakespeare has had, and that his, Shakespeare's, roaming now is done, referring to his young man as his "home of love" and as "a god in love, to whom I am confined.'
Sonnet 111 then explains – and seeks to excuse – such transgressions or other factors that have tarnished Shakespeare's reputation by the fact that he has to conduct his life by "public means, which public manners breeds," and entreats his lover to pity him. This is followed immediately by Sonnet 112 which asserts that the young man's love and pity does indeed heal any damage Shakespeare may have suffered from being badmouthed by others and tells the young man that nobody else's opinion now matters to Shakespeare. In fact, we noted, Shakespeare seems to go as far as claiming the young man entirely for himself:
You are so strongly in my purpose bred
That all the world besides me thinks y'are dead.
Sonnets 113 and 114 then talk of how, when away from his lover, Shakespeare's eye feeds his mind only images of the young man and wonders, in a for us ever so slightly obscure way, what the nature is of this deception, deciding that it amounts to a kind of flattery of the mind on the eye's part, and allowing for the eye and the mind to effectively conspire to see the young man in everything Shakespeare looks at.
What all this amounts to is a steady, almost systematic, shoring up of the lover and of Shakespeare himself within this constellation: yes, we've been in this together for some time; yes, you are no longer as young as you were when we first met; true enough, I too – much as you! – have 'gone here and there', but I can and I do assure you that this roaming is now done: you are the only one for me. I have had my own issues to deal with and my reputation has taken some knocks because of my lifestyle, but so long as you stand by me and see the good in me, all is well. And if I told you before I love you and have expressed in many, many a poem that there is no way I could love you more, the truth is, I love you even more now than I did before.
And this is in fact exactly what from a lasting, maturing, settling relationship one would wish for and hope: we've been together for some time, we've had our ups and downs and our external challenges, but after all is said and done: you are the one, and my love for you has only grown, is growing ever stronger still.
And if Shakespeare's mind was "being crowned" with his young man in Sonnet 114, and his certainty of his love for his young man was crowning the present of the past over the uncertainty of the future in this sonnet, then in this present now, our poet is about to crown his love for his young man with a poem that today, couples of all constellations and denominations have their friends, their best men, their bridesmaids, their relatives recite for them at their wedding, more than four hundred years on. Sonnet 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments...
This project and its website are a work in progress.
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!
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!