the plural 'them' refers grammatically to the plural 'dates,' and that the word usually printed 'born'1 in line 7, had best be printed 'borne' as it is in the Quarto2 (='bourn'). We make our brief dates into a bourn or limit to our desire (cf. 'confined doom,' cvII. 4) instead of recollecting that 'we have heard them told' (=reckoned) 'before.' There is but a colon in the Quarto after Line 8. And the third Quatrain continues to discuss dates (=registers, Line 9, and records, Line 11). In Line 11 Shakespeare denies the absolute truth both of Time's records and the witness of our senses : 'For thy records and what we see doth lie.', The sonnet, in fact, does but develop the attack of the one before it (cxxII.), in which he declares that the memory of his Friend's gift 'shall remain beyond all date even to Eternity; that such a 'record' is better than the 'poor retention' of tablets and that he needs no "" tallies" to "score" his dear love.' s; In cxxiv. Line 1:-'If my dear love were but the child of State'-'State' may contain a secondary allusion (as so often with Shakespeare) to the dignity of the person addressed; but its primary meaning, continuing the sense of the preceding sonnet, and indeed of all the numbers from c., is 'condition' or 'circumstance.' (Cf. 'Interchange of state and state itself confounded to decay,' LXIV.; and 'Love's great case in cvIII.). If his Love were the child of circumstance it might be disinherited by any chance result of Fortune; but on the contrary, 'it was builded far from accident.' And 'accident,' as were 'case' and 'State,' is also a term of metaphysic: his Love belongs to the absolute and unconditioned, to Eternity and not to Time. In developing the idea of mutations in 1 Printed so first by Gildon, and accepted by subsequent editors. fortune, Shakespeare glances aside at some contemporary reverse in politics or art which we cannot decipher. It may have been the closing of the Theatres, the censorship of Plays, the imprisonment of Southampton or of Herbert. No one can tell, nor does it matter, for the main meaning is clear: namely, that this absolute Love is outside the world of politics, which are limited by Time, and count on leases of short numbered hours; but in itself is hugely politic,' is an independent and self-sufficing State. In the couplet : 'To this I witness, call the fools of time Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime' : some find an allusion to the merited execution of Essex, popularly called 'the good Earl.' But the probability is that Shakespeare sympathised with Essex and those of the old nobility who were jealous of the Crown. And, again, it is simpler to take the lines as a fitting close to the metaphysical disquisition, and to see in them a rebuke of those who are so much the slaves of Time and its dates as to imagine that a moment of repentance cancels the essential iniquity of their lives. CXXV. is even more obscure. Yet the sense, to my mind, again seems clearer if we dismiss the theory that Shakespeare is here dwelling exclusively on the dignity of the person he addresses. Most of the sonnets, in the First Series, handle the themes of an Ideal Beauty incarnate in a mortal body, yet saved from decay by the immortality which verse confers; of the need that such verse should truly express the Truth and Beauty of its object; and of Love and Constancy which transcend the limitations of Time. Since cxxv. comes at the end of the peroration to the last twenty-six Sonnets, which are all retrospective, and immediately before the Envoy, it seems to me only reasonable to read it in the light of its immediate predecessors and of the principal themes recurring throughout the whole Series. The search for direct allusions to life in the Sonnets distracts us from the truth, that the selection of their themes was based quite as much upon current philosophy and artistic tradition as upon any actual experience. Something of all is involved, and we should lose sight of none. The poetry of Europe was steeped in Platonism, and, since the Trionf of Petrarch, the 'Triumph of Time' and his ultimate defeat had been a common theme in many forms of art, especially in the Tapestries of Arras introduced into great English houses during the Sixteenth Century:'The wals were round about apparelléd With costly cloths of Arras and of Toure.' Faerie Queen, I. i. 34. We have in Shakespeare wrote out of his own experience, but also under these influences of contemporary Art and Philosophy. And here, pursuing the earlier themes, he asks if it were ought to him, holding his views, to worship the outward show of Beauty with external homage, or, as I interpret Lines 3, 4, to win eternity by the mere form of his verse. This interpretation of 3-4 is borne out by the second quatrain. it, as I submit, a recurrence to his attacks on the styles of poetry which he deprecated in the 'false painting' of LXVII.; the 'false art' of LXVIII.; the compounds strange' of LXXVI. ; the 'strained touches of rhetoric' and 'gross painting' of LXXXII.; the comments of praise richly compiled' of LXXXV. These are the 'compounds sweet' of Line 7, for which dwellers on form and favour pay too much rent. 'That you are you' (LXXXIV.) is all that needs to be said, for (LXXXIII.) :— "There lives more life in one of your fair eyes Than both your poets can in praise devise.' Therefore he tenders his oblation poor but free, Which is not mixed with seconds.' That last word-seconds'-has been a stumbling-block for more than a century, thanks to Steevens. His note runs thus:-'I am just informed by an old lady that seconds is a provincial term for the second kind of flour, which is collected after the smaller bran is sifted. That our author's oblation was pure, unmixed with baser matter, is all that he meant to say.' But may not seconds mean 'assistants' and refer to the collaboration of the Two Poets in LXXXIII. ? It can hardly mean 'baser matter'; since the contrast is between an offering humble, poor, and without art, and some other offering presumably rich and artificial, such as the verse of the Rival Poets criticised in the group concerned with their efforts. As for Line 13, 'Hence thou suborned Informer,' I have argued elsewhere1 that the words in italics with capitals are not accidents of printing. This word of violent apostrophe refers to some person whose identity was obvious to the object of Shakespeare's verse, and if, as I have tried to show, these Sonnets belong to one sequence, it may be compared to the 'frailer spies' of CXXI. XVII IMAGERY.-These poetic themes are figured and displayed throughout the Sonnets by means of an Imagery which, as in Venus and Lucrece, is often so vividly seized and so minutely presented as to engross attention to the prejudice of the theme. Indeed, at some times the poet himself seems rather the quarry than the pursuer of his own images-as it were a magician hounded by spirits of his summoning. Conceits were a fashion, and Shakespeare sometimes followed the fashion; but this characteristic of his lyrical verse is rather a passive consequence of such obsession than the result of any deliberate pursuit of an 1 Note on typography of the Quarto (1609). image until it become a conceit. Put 'his' for her,' and, in Lucrece he, himself, describes the process : 'Much like a press of people at a door, Throng his inventions which shall go before.' And The retina of his mind's eye, like a child's, or that of a man feverish from the excitement of some high day, is as it were a shadow-sheet, on which images received long since revive and grow to the very act and radiancy of life. A true poet, it is tritely said, ever remains a child, but especially in this, that his vision is never dulled. The glass of the windows through which he looks out on the world is never ground of set purpose that his mind may the better attend to business within. to a poet, as to a child, the primal processes of the earth never lose their wonder. So the most of Shakespeare's images are taken from Nature, and then are painted-but the word is too gross to convey the clarity of his art-in so transparent an atmosphere as to seem still a part of Nature, showing her uses of perpetual change. In the Sonnets we watch the ceaseless Passing of the Year: CIV. "Three winters cold Have from the forests shook three summers' pride; Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd. . v. 'Sap check'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone. XII. lofty trees. . . barren of leaves Which erst from heat did canopy the herd. XIII. . . . the stormy gusts of winter's day And barren rage of death's eternal cold.. LXXIII. That time of year thou may'st in me behold |