Sonnet 126: O Thou, My Lovely Boy, Who in Thy Power
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O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power
Dost hold Time's fickle glass, his sickle, hour, Who hast by waning grown and therein showst Thy lover's withering, as thy sweet self growst: If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack, As thou goest onwards still will pluck thee back, She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill May Time disgrace and wretched minute kill. Yet fear her, o thou minion of her pleasure, She may detain but not still keep her treasure: Her audit, though delayed, answered must be, And her quietus is to render thee. ( ) ( ) |
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O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power
Dost hold Time's fickle glass, his sickle, hour, |
O you, my lovely boy, who you seem to have power over time and the things that time works with, or that time itself has power over, whereby these things, contained in the phrase "Time's fickle glass, his sickle, hour" present an interesting and not entirely unimportant first textual issue.
Many editors believe that the line juxtaposes two elements: an hourglass that is fickle either because the grains of sand it contains are forever in motion downwards and so can never be relied on to stand still, or because time itself is fickle as to when it decides to turn the glass over and thus change its course and therefore the course of events it governs, and a sickle hour, meaning the hour of the sickle or the hour with which time ultimately cuts down everything. This also matches up neatly with the traditional representation of Time as an old man, as Old Father Time, sometimes gaunt, bearing a passing resemblance to Death, holding in one hand a scythe and in the other the hour glass. And this does make a great deal of sense. The complication arises from the fact that the Quarto Edition places a comma after 'sickle', which gives Time three separate elements: 1) a glass, which would now most likely be a looking glass or mirror and this could be considered fickle because of the fickleness of vanity as well as the vagaries with which Time affects us and how we both look at and see ourselves, 2) a sickle, for which here as above we may read 'scythe', and 3) an hour, which in this case would then be the hour glass. This discombobulates several editors, because it would appear to require the traditional figure of Time to have three hands, one for the mirror, one for the sickle, and one for the hour glass. But that may be taking things somewhat too literally. Shakespeare as easily, if not indeed more readily, may here be thinking of the hour as an abstract entity of time that is held by Time metaphorically, for which 'he', Time, therefore does not need a spare hand. Punctuation, as well as spelling, in the Quarto Edition is notoriously unreliable, and so the fact alone that there is a comma in the Quarto cannot serve us as a good guide to what Shakespeare wanted. But to my mind, attractive though in its own right it is, turning 'sickle' into an adjective for the 'hour' to arrive at a parallel motion through "Time's fickle glass, his sickle hour" is taking something of a liberty with the line. Generally in Shakespeare, Time with his hour glass is not so much fickle as unimpeachable, whereas outward appearance, fashion, and what people consider to be beautiful is extremely fickle, and so I veer towards retaining the Quarto comma here and allowing for Shakespeare to speak of 1) a fickle glass, be that now a looking glass which forever tells us something different, each time we look in the mirror, or a fickle hour glass after all, 2) of a sickle which in Sonnet 116 is referenced as Time's "bending sickle," and 3) Time's hour, be that now his hour glass or perhaps rather more likely the ever passing hours themselves, of which Time is quite naturally the owner. The opening line, meanwhile, features the only instance in all of these sonnets that William Shakespeare addresses his younger lover as 'my lovely boy'. And this has prompted some interesting reactions from editors and scholars over time. John Benson who in 1640 was the first person to reprint the collection not only took it upon himself to regroup the sonnets, to give some of them his own titles, and to change some though not all of the male pronouns in the Fair Youth section to female ones to make it sound and look like they had been written for and about a woman, but he also left out this as well as seven other sonnets, in all conceivable likelihood because he was clearly unhappy about Shakespeare loving a man whom he now calls his 'lovely boy'. Others who were too embarrassed by the phrase to accept it as addressed to the younger man suggested that Shakespeare may be referring to Cupid here, but that does not make sense on any level; and in isolation the beginning of this poem could just conceivably be addressed to any 'lovely boy' whom Shakespeare cared about, not necessarily a lover, for example a child in the family, or his own son Hamnet. But little Hamnet died aged only 11, and so was exactly not held back by Nature in the way the poem goes on to suggest, and of course the context and the placing of this sonnet so pointedly as the last in the series about a young man effectively rule this out as a possibility, as does the phrase 'thy lover's withering' in the lines that now follow. |
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Who hast by waning grown and therein showst
Thy lover's withering, as thy sweet self growst: |
You, who you have grown up or into your own as time passes, and who in the process of doing so shows up how I, your lover, am getting older and more wrinkled and showing signs of decay, even as you yourself are still coming more into your own...
The most obvious and obviously known object that waxes and wanes is the Moon, and so the 'waning' here may refer to the moons, as in months, as they pass; it may also be referring to the the afore possibly referenced hour glass, in which the sand that runs through it diminishes over time until, in a person's life, there is no more time left, and of course it may simply refer to time itself which, in every person's life is really only ever disappearing until the moment of death. And with "Thy lover's withering" we already get our second textual 'difficulty' or potential ambiguity. Editors here fall into broadly two camps, so to speak: those who think that Shakespeare here with 'thy lover' is referring to himself, and those who think he isn't, that he is referring instead to the young man's lovers generally, in the plural. The reason for this ambiguity stems from the fact that the Quarto Edition does not have an apostrophe in 'lovers', which allows for a whole range of subtly different meanings: a) You show your lovers as they wither – this requires no apostrophe and would certainly then refer to all or some of your lovers; b) You show the withering of your lovers – this requires an apostrophe after the s and would also certainly imply that we are talking about all or several of your lovers who are all, as is then suggested, unlike you, withering away; and c) You show the withering of your lover – this requires an apostrophe before the s and would then refer to the withering specifically of your one lover, or your one lover that matters in this context. which most obviously therefore would be Shakespeare himself. While a) and b) can't be dismissed entirely, it is obviously the case that the typesetter here is not taking his apostrophes too seriously, because he also leaves it out in "Time's fickle glass" just above, and nobody seriously doubts that here Shakespeare is talking about the one personified Time, even though it is not here capitalised, as it is elsewhere, for example in Sonnet 12, where it is capitalised and where, as it happens, a required apostrophe is similarly missing. What gives us our best clue though as to how we should read this is the sonnet's opening and once again context. Shakespeare starts by addressing his young man with "my lovely boy" – with, incidentally, 'Boy' also capitalised in the Quarto – and in doing so he puts himself directly in relation to his young lover from the start: it would be odd to say the least in a rhetorical composition to set out speaking from your perspective to your lovely boy and then refer to these other random lovers, rather than to yourself, without properly introducing them as a theme or topic to talk about as part of your argument. Also, we know that Shakespeare is acutely aware of the age difference between himself and his young man, and that he thinks of himself as old. We don't know when Shakespeare wrote this sonnet, it could well have been written at a much earlier time than its placing in the collection suggests, but he places it – and in fact the placing of this sonnet is in itself a strong argument for Shakespeare himself being the curator of the collection – to conclude his Fair Youth section of the sonnets, after the group that generally now is assumed to have been written around or after 1604, the year in which he turns 40. No matter then who the young man is, Shakespeare is by now to some most likely noticeable extent showing signs of his age or, if you will, of 'withering', just as Sonnet 73 makes so poignantly clear: That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare, ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang. I therefore firmly place myself into the camp most prominently represented by Katherine Duncan-Jones in her Arden edition of the Sonnets and read this as a reference by Shakespeare to himself, while absolutely also allowing for Shakespeare to invite a level of ambiguity deliberately, because if our hunch is correct, for example, that the Rival Poet of Sonnets 78 to 86 may also, as especially Sonnet 86 suggests, have been a lover, then it is entirely conceivable that this young man has had not only Shakespeare, but also at least one other lover who was signally older than he. |
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If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack,
As thou goest onwards still will pluck thee back, |
Even if Nature, who is the supreme ruler over destruction, will hold onto you and keep you back and therefore away from ageing, deterioration, withering as you go forward in time...
Nature is here, like Time, personified and set up to be in a sense Time's adversary: Time forever takes away and therefore forever destroys in its unrelenting march towards death and oblivion, but Nature forever renews, grows, refreshes: the cycles of nature are the only thing that can overcome the entropy of time, at least for the time-being, at least for as long as new life keeps generating itself. The fact that Nature cannot simply hold on to the lovely boy, but has to continually 'pluck' him from the tentacles of Time further suggests a perennial struggle: Time forever keeps tugging at him, as it does on us all, and Nature forever tries to pull him away to keep him a little longer, because for her, as for Shakespeare and through him for us, he is just too lovely to let go of. |
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She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill
May Time disgrace and wretched minute kill. |
And she, Nature, does so, she keeps holding onto you, so that she may outwit Time, so that her ability to do this precise thing, to keep you as young and as beautiful as you are, may disgrace Old Father Time and kill and thereby overcome the minute, the unit by which he forever steals from us and leads us to destruction.
Many editors here emend 'minute' to 'minutes', arguing that grammar requires them to do so, but this is really wholly unwarranted, since the Quarto Edition here does not actually appear to have a printing error at all: it spells the word 'mynuit' which suggests an allusion to the French word minuit, or midnight, which is the end of the day and therefore in the day of a human life the hour of death. Also, clocks in Shakespeare's day did not have a second hand, and so 'minute' as an abstract term to mean the smallest unit of time generally in use as measurable or perceptible mirrors and therefore supports 'hour', also in the singular, above; and as Katherine Duncan-Jones rightly points out, 'wretched minutes' in the plural would then contrast these minutes with joyous or happy ones, thus trivialising a much more viscerally charged point that Shakespeare is making: he surely here is not talking about Nature wanting to overcome merely the 'bad times' but all time. |
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Yet fear her, o thou minion of her pleasure,
She may detain, but not still keep her treasure: |
And yet, in spite of this, although Nature does everything she can to hold you back, fear her, you who are being kept by her as a servant to her pleasure: she may be able to detain you, who are now her treasure, for a while, but she will not in fact be able to keep you forever.
A 'minion' then as now is "a follower or underling of a powerful person, especially a servile or unimportant one," (Oxford Languages) and this comes as a pointed reminder that even this young nobleman, who is clearly of great importance in his society and who, as a favourite of Nature, holds high privileges, is but a plaything in the great scheme of things. 'Still', here as so often, means 'always' or 'forever', though a secondary meaning of 'keep her treasure still', as in unmoved and unaffected by time also comes into play. |
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Her audit, though delayed, answered must be,
And her quietus is to render thee. |
Her bill, or her account, the reckoning she is handed by Time, is something that she can delay, but she still has to answer, as in respond to and pay it, and her settlement or payment is to hand you over to Time and therefore, quite naturally, to decay and death.
Editors are once more in full agreement that the notion of 'death as a payment to time' is a commonplace and therefore readily understood by Shakespeare and his younger lover and any other listener or reader of this sonnet at the time. And we had 'audit' to mean the final statement of an account before, in Sonnet 49: Whenas thy love hath cast his utmost sum, Called to that audit by advised respects; but here it is not love that has reached its 'utmost sum', but Nature's use of you to her purpose of foiling Time. A 'quietus' is the "final settlement (as of a debt)" (Merriam Webster) or also a receipt or a quittance for such a debt, and therefore, by extension, also 'death'. The word makes its only other and most famous appearance in Shakespeare 20 lines into Hamlet's To Be Or Not to Be soliloquy: For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of disprized love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office, and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? (Act III, Scene 1) Hamlet's last words before he dies in Act V, Scene 2 are "the rest is silence," and it is either an exquisite coincidence or a sign of supreme sonneteering by Shakespeare that the rest of this sonnet, the last one addressed to his young man, is, indeed, silence. |
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Much is rightly being made of the two sets of brackets that in the Quarto Edition denote the space where the closing couplet of this poem would be if it were a 'proper' sonnet.
The fact alone that rather than employing Shakespeare's usual scheme which has alternating rhymes progressing through three quatrains followed by a rhyming couplet, this sonnet consists entirely of rhyming couplets makes it technically not a 'real' sonnet. The question that presents itself with these 'missing' or 'omitted' lines then is precisely this: are these lines missing, in other words, were they once written and have got lost, or were they deliberately omitted by Shakespeare himself, and then following on from that, if he did omit them, did he place the brackets in his manuscript, or were they put there by the typesetter to make the poem look more like a sonnet, it being part of this collection. We don't know the answer to this, but what we can say without hesitation is that they invite many possible interpretations, even purely as typographical elements, as has been variously pointed out: they resemble in their appearance a bit the shape of an hour glass; they are reminiscent of the final lines in a set of accounts where within the brackets a negative or owed figure would be written down; they evoke, possibly, the waxing and the waning of the moon. All and any of which may or may not be the intention of Shakespeare, assuming that he put these brackets there himself. And what most strongly supports the suggestion that he did in fact do so, rather than these brackets merely being a typesetter's fancy, is that they certainly, and powerfully, highlight, by enclosing it, an absence: something that should be there, but isn't. And they spell out – more hauntingly perhaps than any words could do – the silence that follows the noise of life, in death. |
Sonnet 126 is the last poem in which William Shakespeare addresses his younger lover and so marks the end of the Fair Youth series in the collection first published in 1609.
The sonnet stands out for its tenderness and the gentle tone with which it reminds the young man that even he – beautiful as he is and ever youthful as he may seem – must ultimately be surrendered by nature to all-consuming time, and for the quiet resignation with which it accepts this as the universal and inescapable truth that is all our fate.
Beyond that, the poem is also formally exceptional: consisting as it does of six rhyming couplets, it isn't strictly speaking a sonnet at all, even though either Shakespeare himself or somebody else has furnished it with two sets of empty brackets where a sonnet's closing couplet would normally be. And so Sonnet 126 is genuinely unique: there is none other like it in Shakespeare's canon.
During an exchange of nearly 200 letters penned between 1878 and 1881, the then already famous painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to the at this stage still fledgling novelist, dramatist, and poet Hall Caine, who, while a generation younger, would, like Rossetti, become a prominent figure in Victorian and Edwardian England:
"There should be an essential reform in the printing of Shakespeare's sonnets. After Sonnet 125 should occur the words End of Part I. The couplet piece, numbered 126, should be called Epilogue to Part I. Then, before 127, should be printed Part II."
And while I would hesitate to impose such section headings as are here proposed on Shakespeare's work, I do concur absolutely that Sonnet 126 forms in essence an epilogue or a coda to the Fair Youth Sonnets.
The relationship – and we have seen over these many, many sonnets that it is an ongoing relationship, at times immediately, passionately lived, at times for reasons we can only guess at stalled or neglected – this long-lasting relationship is now dealt with, the feelings have been expressed, the confessions of wrongdoing or transgression have beem made, and the core of the bond has been reinforced and affirmed: Sonnet 126 does not so much sum it all up or draw any real conclusion, nor does it make any further promises of unending love or of an immortal life preserved in the lines of these poems as other sonnets have done. It mostly just yields to the inescapable, insurmountable reality of existence: everything comes to an end, including and most unavoidably, life itself.
With this sentiment of a finality that can't be argued with, and its formal uniqueness, the sonnet clearly claims its place in the collection: it cannot possibly be an accident that it sits where it does. Whether Shakespeare wrote it at the point where it finds itself in the sequence, or much earlier, or even much later, maybe just as he was about to publish the sonnets, we don't know.
As you will be aware if you've been listening to this podcast: we don't even know whether in fact Shakespeare curated the collection himself and personally prepared it for publication or whether – as some people argue – it was pirated without his permission or input, but the sonnet obviously belongs where it is: at the end of the Fair Youth section. This, as mentioned a moment ago, but as is worth emphasising, does rather support the view held by many scholars that Shakespeare himself structured the collection as it appears in the 1609 Quarto Edition. Either that, or someone with a keen sense for the contents, tone, and flow of these poems did so for him with considerable insight, diligence, and care.
Editors also point to the numerological significance of Sonnet 126: both Katherine Duncan-Jones in her Arden edition and Colin Burrow in the Oxford edition of the Sonnets highlight the fact that 126 is twice 63, 63 being the number of the 'grand climacteric'. You may remember this from our discussion of Sonnet 107, which some people believe may refer not to the death of Queen Elizabeth I, but to her milestone year: "In classical astrology, a person's climacteric years, from the Greek term klimaktērikós whence we get our 'climax', occur every heptad, or every seven years: these are meant to be particularly significant junctures at which important developments occur or life stages are achieved, and the 63rd year, which marks the end of the 9th cycle of seven, and is therefore called the 'grand climacteric', is seen in this context as especially critical."
Whether therefore Shakespeare here deliberately places a reference and, as Katherine Duncan-Jones surmises, this "suggests the completion of two 'grand climacterics', shadowing the deaths of both poet and youth," we cannot say for certain. Sonnet 63, as it happens, does not especially signal its own number and we would to some extent expect it to do so from a poet who did so here. That said, Katherine Duncan-Jones also registers how the number 126 when written as a 12 and a 6 elegantly seems to reference 12 lines in 6 couplets.
We have frequently, as we listened to these sonnets, asked ourselves: what brings this on? Why is Shakespeare writing this now? With Sonnet 126 the question is a tad more differentiated and complex. The philosophical reflection is easy enough to understand and it is one that may come to a poet and lover at any time. But the address 'my lovely boy' as well as the soft voice of the ensuing lines make it sound like the kind of poem one writes to a very young person, even a child. That does not, of course, mean anything much: terms of endearment tend to infantilise, as every pop song that speaks of a 'baby', 'babe', or 'little darling' of any kind attests to.
The sonnets preceding this one chart a trajectory that solidifies the relationship, shores it up, affirms it, rather than sees it end imminently: they do not, in that sense, build up to this. Still, the series then ends, and it ends on this, a poem which is at the same time both utterly fitting and disconcertingly incongruent. If – and it always and forever is an 'if' – this last group of sonnets to, for, and about the young man was, as current scholarly opinion holds, written in the early Jacobean era around 1603, 1604, then, as we saw, Shakespeare is now 40 and his younger lover, depending on who this happens to be, is now in his mid twenties or will very soon turn 30. He is, in other words, no longer a 'lovely boy', he is a fully grown man, possibly one who already has a child as well.
Then again, the poem may have been written much earlier, or it may have been composed especially to mark this caesura in the collection, to actively recall the early days of the relationship when the young man was very young and very young looking.
But anything we might say about the reason or reasons why Shakespeare ends the sequence to his young man here would be speculation. We simply don't know. We only know that he actually ends it: it doesn't just peter out. From Sonnet 109 right through to Sonnet 125, it is shaped to express the substance of the relationship, and it then receives this formally and semantically distinct endnote. Shakespeare, with this poem, releases his young man from his sonnets. Whether he also at the same time releases him from his life, we can't know.
What we can know is that this sonnet, this poem, is a gesture. The fact that it is composed in six rhyming couplets that make up twelve lines is obviously not an accident. And so we can effectively rule out the possibility that there once was a closing couplet that has got lost. Whether or not it was Shakespeare himself who placed the brackets at the very end we similarly don't know. But Colin Burrow refers to them as lunulae, a lunule being a "mark shaped like a half moon" (Oxford Dictionary). The word in that sense is now obsolete, but this is what we still call the white or light-coloured crescent shape unter our fingernails, the word having since evolved to lunula.
Would our poet, William Shakespeare, have known these symbols to be lunulea – from the Latin luna, meaning 'moon' – and enjoyed their relation to the number 12, rendered as six couplets, whereby the number six itself has important meanings: in Christianity it is the Number of Creation, since, according to The Bible, God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, and it is also the Number of Man, because, always still according to the Bible, Man was created by God on the sixth day. It thus represents human imperfection, as opposed to divine perfection, while in Classical and therefore Renaissance thought it is in itself considered a perfect number, because it is the sum of its own divisors: 1 + 2 + 3 (the numbers it can be divided by) added up together yield 6: it is, therefore, a symbol of harmony and completeness.
And these marks, these lunulea themselves, here number four, as many as there are seasons. Would he have been aware of the way in which his rare word quietus links Hamlet, his young, though not as young as he seems, anti-hero who dies on the words "the rest is silence" to this sonnet, the one he ends on a silence? Would the words 'my lovely boy' have reminded him of his own son, named Hamnet, whom he lost at the tender age of eleven in 1596?
The answer to these questions is the echo that reverberates throughout our discussion of these sonnets: we don't know. But composing sonnets, as we have witnessed and relished every week for many moons now, is an art, not just a pastime, and Shakespeare mastered it to the highest level we know of in the English language. So I am inclined to answer them all, tentatively, aware of the 'incertainties' that forever remain and will not ever probably now 'crown themselves assured', with 'yes'. Surely our Will knows what he's doing.
We are – we must acknowledge this – forever in danger of projecting onto him and his words things we want to see and hera and recognise because they matter to us or because we find them fascinating or because they fit our frame of reference or our culture today. But, whatever else we can or can't say about these sonnets: they are carefully constructed. They don't write themselves, they are not a product of accident or happenstance.
And so I am prepared to postulate that the silence here placed at the end is intended, is conscious, is meaningful, and meaningfully marked by authorial brackets, and for all this, all the more eloquent.
The sonnet stands out for its tenderness and the gentle tone with which it reminds the young man that even he – beautiful as he is and ever youthful as he may seem – must ultimately be surrendered by nature to all-consuming time, and for the quiet resignation with which it accepts this as the universal and inescapable truth that is all our fate.
Beyond that, the poem is also formally exceptional: consisting as it does of six rhyming couplets, it isn't strictly speaking a sonnet at all, even though either Shakespeare himself or somebody else has furnished it with two sets of empty brackets where a sonnet's closing couplet would normally be. And so Sonnet 126 is genuinely unique: there is none other like it in Shakespeare's canon.
During an exchange of nearly 200 letters penned between 1878 and 1881, the then already famous painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti wrote to the at this stage still fledgling novelist, dramatist, and poet Hall Caine, who, while a generation younger, would, like Rossetti, become a prominent figure in Victorian and Edwardian England:
"There should be an essential reform in the printing of Shakespeare's sonnets. After Sonnet 125 should occur the words End of Part I. The couplet piece, numbered 126, should be called Epilogue to Part I. Then, before 127, should be printed Part II."
And while I would hesitate to impose such section headings as are here proposed on Shakespeare's work, I do concur absolutely that Sonnet 126 forms in essence an epilogue or a coda to the Fair Youth Sonnets.
The relationship – and we have seen over these many, many sonnets that it is an ongoing relationship, at times immediately, passionately lived, at times for reasons we can only guess at stalled or neglected – this long-lasting relationship is now dealt with, the feelings have been expressed, the confessions of wrongdoing or transgression have beem made, and the core of the bond has been reinforced and affirmed: Sonnet 126 does not so much sum it all up or draw any real conclusion, nor does it make any further promises of unending love or of an immortal life preserved in the lines of these poems as other sonnets have done. It mostly just yields to the inescapable, insurmountable reality of existence: everything comes to an end, including and most unavoidably, life itself.
With this sentiment of a finality that can't be argued with, and its formal uniqueness, the sonnet clearly claims its place in the collection: it cannot possibly be an accident that it sits where it does. Whether Shakespeare wrote it at the point where it finds itself in the sequence, or much earlier, or even much later, maybe just as he was about to publish the sonnets, we don't know.
As you will be aware if you've been listening to this podcast: we don't even know whether in fact Shakespeare curated the collection himself and personally prepared it for publication or whether – as some people argue – it was pirated without his permission or input, but the sonnet obviously belongs where it is: at the end of the Fair Youth section. This, as mentioned a moment ago, but as is worth emphasising, does rather support the view held by many scholars that Shakespeare himself structured the collection as it appears in the 1609 Quarto Edition. Either that, or someone with a keen sense for the contents, tone, and flow of these poems did so for him with considerable insight, diligence, and care.
Editors also point to the numerological significance of Sonnet 126: both Katherine Duncan-Jones in her Arden edition and Colin Burrow in the Oxford edition of the Sonnets highlight the fact that 126 is twice 63, 63 being the number of the 'grand climacteric'. You may remember this from our discussion of Sonnet 107, which some people believe may refer not to the death of Queen Elizabeth I, but to her milestone year: "In classical astrology, a person's climacteric years, from the Greek term klimaktērikós whence we get our 'climax', occur every heptad, or every seven years: these are meant to be particularly significant junctures at which important developments occur or life stages are achieved, and the 63rd year, which marks the end of the 9th cycle of seven, and is therefore called the 'grand climacteric', is seen in this context as especially critical."
Whether therefore Shakespeare here deliberately places a reference and, as Katherine Duncan-Jones surmises, this "suggests the completion of two 'grand climacterics', shadowing the deaths of both poet and youth," we cannot say for certain. Sonnet 63, as it happens, does not especially signal its own number and we would to some extent expect it to do so from a poet who did so here. That said, Katherine Duncan-Jones also registers how the number 126 when written as a 12 and a 6 elegantly seems to reference 12 lines in 6 couplets.
We have frequently, as we listened to these sonnets, asked ourselves: what brings this on? Why is Shakespeare writing this now? With Sonnet 126 the question is a tad more differentiated and complex. The philosophical reflection is easy enough to understand and it is one that may come to a poet and lover at any time. But the address 'my lovely boy' as well as the soft voice of the ensuing lines make it sound like the kind of poem one writes to a very young person, even a child. That does not, of course, mean anything much: terms of endearment tend to infantilise, as every pop song that speaks of a 'baby', 'babe', or 'little darling' of any kind attests to.
The sonnets preceding this one chart a trajectory that solidifies the relationship, shores it up, affirms it, rather than sees it end imminently: they do not, in that sense, build up to this. Still, the series then ends, and it ends on this, a poem which is at the same time both utterly fitting and disconcertingly incongruent. If – and it always and forever is an 'if' – this last group of sonnets to, for, and about the young man was, as current scholarly opinion holds, written in the early Jacobean era around 1603, 1604, then, as we saw, Shakespeare is now 40 and his younger lover, depending on who this happens to be, is now in his mid twenties or will very soon turn 30. He is, in other words, no longer a 'lovely boy', he is a fully grown man, possibly one who already has a child as well.
Then again, the poem may have been written much earlier, or it may have been composed especially to mark this caesura in the collection, to actively recall the early days of the relationship when the young man was very young and very young looking.
But anything we might say about the reason or reasons why Shakespeare ends the sequence to his young man here would be speculation. We simply don't know. We only know that he actually ends it: it doesn't just peter out. From Sonnet 109 right through to Sonnet 125, it is shaped to express the substance of the relationship, and it then receives this formally and semantically distinct endnote. Shakespeare, with this poem, releases his young man from his sonnets. Whether he also at the same time releases him from his life, we can't know.
What we can know is that this sonnet, this poem, is a gesture. The fact that it is composed in six rhyming couplets that make up twelve lines is obviously not an accident. And so we can effectively rule out the possibility that there once was a closing couplet that has got lost. Whether or not it was Shakespeare himself who placed the brackets at the very end we similarly don't know. But Colin Burrow refers to them as lunulae, a lunule being a "mark shaped like a half moon" (Oxford Dictionary). The word in that sense is now obsolete, but this is what we still call the white or light-coloured crescent shape unter our fingernails, the word having since evolved to lunula.
Would our poet, William Shakespeare, have known these symbols to be lunulea – from the Latin luna, meaning 'moon' – and enjoyed their relation to the number 12, rendered as six couplets, whereby the number six itself has important meanings: in Christianity it is the Number of Creation, since, according to The Bible, God created the world in six days and rested on the seventh, and it is also the Number of Man, because, always still according to the Bible, Man was created by God on the sixth day. It thus represents human imperfection, as opposed to divine perfection, while in Classical and therefore Renaissance thought it is in itself considered a perfect number, because it is the sum of its own divisors: 1 + 2 + 3 (the numbers it can be divided by) added up together yield 6: it is, therefore, a symbol of harmony and completeness.
And these marks, these lunulea themselves, here number four, as many as there are seasons. Would he have been aware of the way in which his rare word quietus links Hamlet, his young, though not as young as he seems, anti-hero who dies on the words "the rest is silence" to this sonnet, the one he ends on a silence? Would the words 'my lovely boy' have reminded him of his own son, named Hamnet, whom he lost at the tender age of eleven in 1596?
The answer to these questions is the echo that reverberates throughout our discussion of these sonnets: we don't know. But composing sonnets, as we have witnessed and relished every week for many moons now, is an art, not just a pastime, and Shakespeare mastered it to the highest level we know of in the English language. So I am inclined to answer them all, tentatively, aware of the 'incertainties' that forever remain and will not ever probably now 'crown themselves assured', with 'yes'. Surely our Will knows what he's doing.
We are – we must acknowledge this – forever in danger of projecting onto him and his words things we want to see and hera and recognise because they matter to us or because we find them fascinating or because they fit our frame of reference or our culture today. But, whatever else we can or can't say about these sonnets: they are carefully constructed. They don't write themselves, they are not a product of accident or happenstance.
And so I am prepared to postulate that the silence here placed at the end is intended, is conscious, is meaningful, and meaningfully marked by authorial brackets, and for all this, all the more eloquent.
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If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!