A Meditation on Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnets<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n There is a difference between poetic vision and ordinary vision.\u00a0 Ordinary vision sees the world in its transient aspect, while poetic vision sees the eternal embodied in or shining through the transient.\u00a0 Poetic vision goes under many names, yet it is an actual seeing, though of another kind and discontinuous with ordinary vision.\u00a0 It is for this reason that it requires a special use of language, so that something of that poetic vision is conveyed through the saying itself and the listener is drawn into a mode of reflection consonant with poetic vision.<\/p>\n I have chosen three Sonnets of Shakespeare to illustrate this poetic vision:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 101<\/p>\n O truant Muse what shall be thy amends, <\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 113<\/p>\n Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind, <\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0116<\/p>\n Let me not to the marriage of true minds <\/p>\n The first of these sonnets chides the Muse for being silent, the second describes the transformation of vision brought about by the sight of beauty, and the third describes the immortality of love.\u00a0 This is a helpful sequence.\u00a0 If the poet is to speak as a poet, then his speaking itself must come from the immortal realm he will speak of.\u00a0 The poetic vision cannot be translated into ordinary vision, and so the Muse is called upon to speak through the poet.\u00a0 This is the work and meaning of the Muses, to convey something of the immortal realm in a manner belonging to that realm.\u00a0 To call upon the Muse is at once a call to see and to say.\u00a0 But also, to see requires a response in saying, since saying, in the form of praise, causes beauty to remain visible and endure beyond its mortal appearance.<\/p>\n This may seem an exalted way of reading the Sonnet.\u00a0 In a sense this is so.\u00a0 It is a universal feature of love to utter itself in praise of the beloved.\u00a0 Love, by nature, demands to be declared.\u00a0 Love is communion between lover and beloved, and so it cannot remain itself by being dumb.\u00a0 Praise, as a mode of human speech, is already and always a form of exalted speaking, even in ordinary things.\u00a0 To praise something has no practical purpose but is an end in itself.\u00a0 It is inseparable from apprehension of the good or the beautiful.\u00a0 It is the response that the good or the beautiful causes, and wherever these are seen they are always remarked in this way or else are not seen.<\/p>\n To know that the good is good or the beautiful is beautiful is also to acknowledge them, so knowing and acknowledging belong together since acknowledgement is assent to the known.\u00a0 Without this assent knowing does not come into reflection.\u00a0 And if the nature of the good or beautiful do not come into reflection, that nature remains unknown.\u00a0 Beauty can be known only in terms of itself because it has no comparison or analogy.\u00a0 Like all ultimate things, it is singular and measurable only by itself.\u00a0 Hence beauty has no dependencies.\u00a0 It \u201cneeds no praise\u201d, yet without praise it remains unseen.\u00a0 Praise, then, is the order of speaking evoked by the beautiful itself.\u00a0 It is what the beholder says to beauty in the presence of beauty, and so it is the birth of the Muse, for the Muse depends on truth and beauty and comes into being by virtue of them alone.\u00a0 Therefore if the Muse is silent before truth shining forth in beauty, \u201cin beauty dyed\u201d, it is negligent of truth itself.\u00a0 If the Muse is silent before truth, then the vision of truth passes away.<\/p>\n It is no excuse that there are no adequate ways of representing truth or beauty.\u00a0 Even though \u201ctruth needs no colour\u201d since entire in itself, and even though beauty needs no pencil to give it shape since it is itself the imparter of all shapes. yet they demand praise if they are to endure and be known.\u00a0 That such praise must remain unequal and inadequate, and knowingly so, in itself marks them for what they are in themselves.\u00a0 That which can be adequately drawn belongs to the realm of ordinary vision.\u00a0 That which is \u201cbest\u201d draws itself.\u00a0 Nevertheless, praise is an order of seeing that springs from love.\u00a0 We might even say it is the essential discourse of love.<\/p>\n Love and praise apprehend the true and beautiful, but in a manner of seeing that outruns ordinary perception.\u00a0 This is the theme of Sonnet 113.<\/p>\n Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind,<\/p>\n This line shows how the perception of the beautiful transforms the mind itself.\u00a0 The eye is now \u201cin the mind\u201d in several senses.\u00a0 First, the impress of the beautiful infuses the mind so fully that it would not want to behold anything else.\u00a0 So ordinary perception, through the outer senses, is now a kind of blindness, since what is seen there now \u201cseems seeing\u201d but is not true seeing.\u00a0 Seeing is raised by the beautiful to a new pitch.\u00a0 Secondly, this new seeing belongs to the realm of the beautiful itself, which is not of the outer shapes of things but in the realm of mind itself.\u00a0 Beauty is an intellectual object, not a sensory one, and so it stands in a wholly different relation to perception.\u00a0 The mind is infused by the beautiful and transfigured by it, and its natural relation with it is to desire union with it.\u00a0 This desire for union is love.<\/p>\n The transfigured vision now sees all other things in a new light, and so the shapes of things, which formerly the mind took to be its natural objects, no longer seem substantial in themselves but are shaped \u201cto your feature\u201d.\u00a0 That is to say, all things now bear the feature of the beauty beheld in mind.\u00a0 The outer seeing \u201cno form delivers to the heart\u201d but the form of the beautiful.\u00a0 So it is the heart within the mind that now perceives through the power of love.\u00a0 The beloved is seen now in all things.\u00a0 The Platonic resonance here is obvious.\u00a0 The senses perceive the shapes or shadows of things, while the mind infused with love of the beautiful perceives the essence or \u201cforms\u201d of things.<\/p>\n And this is because the beautiful, through the power of love, is the origin of all things and that which brings them into being.\u00a0 The entire universe is the shining forth of divine beauty through love, the first-born of the gods.\u00a0 As Castiglioni says, \u201cthe fount of Beauty is not the form in which it shines.\u201d\u00a0 It is the mind infused with beauty and fired by love that beholds the distinction between the object and the beauty that informs the object.\u00a0 Formerly, in ordinary vision, it seemed that objects possessed beauty of themselves, each its particular beauty, as with bird or flower, but now the new vision perceives that the beauty in objects comes from beyond them and prior to them, and that it is the same beauty that shines in all since \u201cit shapes them to your feature\u201d.\u00a0 There is, so to speak, nothing more to behold than that beauty as such, and the mind in such vision is \u201cincapable of more, replete with you\u201d.<\/p>\n Beauty is that which satiates the mind, is that which the mind was born to behold, its proper object.\u00a0 Other is less, not simply different.\u00a0 Beauty, for the mind, is not simply another object among objects, but that which gives to every object its form.\u00a0 And so the former mind, which took each bird or flower, mountain or sea, night or day, as true objects in themselves now seems an \u201cuntrue\u201d mind. \u00a0It once \u201cseemed seeing\u201d but now is known to be a kind of blindness.\u00a0 To see, yet not see the beautiful in all things, is not to see at all, or not to see that by virtue of which seeing comes into being.\u00a0 It is the beautiful that causes sight, just as it is knowledge or truth that causes mind.\u00a0 Through the transfigured perception of the beautiful the mind has come home to itself and hence it is replete.\u00a0 And because it has come to itself in the beautiful it addresses itself solely to the beautiful.\u00a0 The beautiful is rightly spoken when spoken to the beautiful itself, as thou.\u00a0 It is told itself.\u00a0 This is \u201cmy most true mind\u201d that makes the former mind \u201cuntrue\u201d, since the mind untransformed by beauty \u201cno form delivers to the heart\u201d but comprehends only the outer shapes and colours of things.\u00a0 The \u201cmost true mind\u201d is universal in relation to the former particular mind and comprehends the universal, and so it alone perceives the same universal feature in all things.<\/p>\n If the mind so transfigured dwells with the universal beauty, so it dwells with the immortal, that which never changes.\u00a0 To dwell and to remain with beauty is brought about by the love that beauty causes in the lover.\u00a0 This is the theme of Sonnet 116.\u00a0 Two lovers become one true mind through love.\u00a0 Love is the principle of unity itself, generating all things, yet holding them all in a unified diversity or harmony.\u00a0 There is no other or lesser principle of unity than love, and again the realm of unity is that of universal mind in which beauty is in communion with itself.\u00a0 Thus there can only be a marriage of \u201ctrue minds\u201d, of minds both transformed by beauty so that they are made one mind.\u00a0 If such a marriage of minds admits difference in, then love departs, since love has only one true object, unity in the beautiful.\u00a0 If love is immortal, then it cannot fall to the mortal, to the changeable.\u00a0 Thus \u201clove is not love which alters when it alteration finds\u201d.\u00a0 The principle of unity cannot be moved from itself, even though all else may move or change.\u00a0 It is \u201can ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken\u201d.<\/p>\n It is often thought that love is changeable or that it comes and goes.\u00a0 But Shakespeare is showing us that it is not love that ever changes, nor can be changed by anything.\u00a0 Time is lord of change, not love, and love is not ruled by time but by itself alone.\u00a0 Love is a law unto itself since it is the first-born of the gods.\u00a0 Love is the constant eye that beholds all change, the \u201cfixed-mark\u201d against which all change is evident, the \u201cstar to every wand\u2019ring bark\u201d.\u00a0 Love is the constant against which time moves, so that time itself navigates by love and so is ultimately ruled by love.\u00a0 And so the hours and weeks of time are brief in the eye of immortal love which holds to itself \u201ceven to the edge of doom\u201d.<\/p>\n Love is therefore the principle of constancy and hence the progenitor of every virtue.\u00a0 Without constancy no virtue is possible.\u00a0 To keep faith, to be honest, to be courageous, loyal, prudent, just or temperate all depend on constancy, both in holding to themselves and in never being deflected from their ends.\u00a0 They hold through time but are never subject to time, since time cannot change their nature.\u00a0 Love is therefore lord of all right action, and though unmoved in itself, is the mover and navigator of all things to their proper ends.<\/p>\n The worth of love is immeasurable and so his worth remains forever unknown because it is inexhaustible.\u00a0 All that ever might be said in praise of love and the beautiful is therefore likewise inexhaustible.\u00a0 Yet every lover, no matter that all can never be said, in praise of love bears witness to this inestimable worth, and that witness, which is the birth of speech itself, is in some sense also immortal.\u00a0 If that witness is false, then it never was, \u201cnor no man ever loved\u201d.\u00a0 This is so because love is witness of itself and no other testimony can be made of it save by itself.\u00a0 The same holds for truth and beauty.\u00a0 They measure all things and may be measured by none but themselves.\u00a0 The lover, whose mind is infused with immortal beauty and transformed by love, may make testimony of these things, and such testimony is the substance and end of poetic vision.\u00a0 So any poet who does not bear witness to immortal beauty, and is not moved to utterance by love, neglects the Muse and does not sing from his true mind.\u00a0 And his hearers will know in their hearts that he never sang that which song was made by love to sing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Beauty Beyond Time: A Meditation on Shakespeare\u2019s Sonnets Joseph Milne There is a difference between poetic vision and ordinary vision.\u00a0 Ordinary vision sees the world in its transient aspect, while poetic vision sees the eternal embodied in or shining through the transient.\u00a0 Poetic vision goes under many names, yet it is an actual seeing, … Continue reading Beauty Beyond Time: A Meditation on Shakespear’s Sonnets<\/span> Joseph Milne<\/h4>\n
\nFor thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed?
\nBoth truth and beauty on my love depends:
\nSo dost thou too, and therein dignified:
\nMake answer Muse, wilt thou not haply say,
\n‘Truth needs no colour with his colour fixed,
\nBeauty no pencil, beauty’s truth to lay:
\nBut best is best, if never intermixed’?
\nBecause he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
\nExcuse not silence so, for’t lies in thee,
\nTo make him much outlive a gilded tomb:
\nAnd to be praised of ages yet to be.
\nThen do thy office Muse, I teach thee how,
\nTo make him seem long hence, as he shows now.<\/p>\n
\nAnd that which governs me to go about,
\nDoth part his function, and is partly blind,
\nSeems seeing, but effectually is out:
\nFor it no form delivers to the heart
\nOf bird, of flower, or shape which it doth latch,
\nOf his quick objects hath the mind no part,
\nNor his own vision holds what it doth catch:
\nFor if it see the rud’st or gentlest sight,
\nThe most sweet favour or deformed’st creature,
\nThe mountain, or the sea, the day, or night:
\nThe crow, or dove, it shapes them to your feature.
\nIncapable of more, replete with you,
\nMy most true mind thus maketh mine untrue.<\/p>\n
\nAdmit impediments, love is not love
\nWhich alters when it alteration finds,
\nOr bends with the remover to remove.
\nO no, it is an ever-fixed mark
\nThat looks on tempests and is never shaken;
\nIt is the star to every wand’ring bark,
\nWhose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
\nLove’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
\nWithin his bending sickle’s compass come,
\nLove alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
\nBut bears it out even to the edge of doom:
\nIf this be error and upon me proved,
\nI never writ, nor no man ever loved.<\/p>\n