Michelangelo Pistoletto, Etruscan Holding Up A Mirror (1976)
“For one of the most natural of works for living things. . . is to make another like itself—an animal an animal, a plant a plant—so as to partake so far as it is able in the eternal and divine. All things reach for this. . .” – De Anima, Book 2, 415 b
Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest,
Now is the time that face should form another,
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
But if thou live rememb’red not to be,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.
The mirror is this sonnet’s central metaphor. Immediately, in a way reminiscent of Velasquez’ painting “Las Meninas,” we are struck and jarred by the multiplication of reflections. This whole poem is about “doubling,” about reflections as versions or images of their original forms. But this poem is also about seeing through copies to the original, about moving from image to reality; it is about seeing through, as well as seeing double.
“Look in thy glass and tell the face thou veiwest, / Now is the time that face should form another . . .”
From the first, we should note that Shakespeare is employing both alliteration with the emphasis on the smooth “f” noises of “face,” “form,” and “fresh,” as well as consonance (the sibilants in “glass,” “face,” “viewest.”) In fact, glancing over the whole poem, we see that there is almost none of the deliberately uneven surface of sonnet 2, with the possible exception of the phrase “despite of wrinkles” in the sestet’s fourth line.
We should also note that the first line of the sonnet is a command. Shakespeare could have written something like the following: “When thou look’st in the glass, and thy face veiwest. . .” What is gained by speaking in the imperative case?
Three answers spring to mind.
First, the speaker is renewing his argument; the fair youth should marry and have children. To support his argument rhetorically, he gestures, as it were, toward the mirror. But the mirror becomes more than mere window dressing for the poem’s larger argument. It becomes as the late Catholic writer Thomas Howard would have put it, “a case in point.” We will address what the case itself is momentarily.
The second reason for Shakespeare’s imperative is that he is trying to summon up a picture before his audience. His Prologue in Henry V does the same, summoning up our imaginary forces to swell the epic proportions of the play. Likewise, Prospero, acting as the Tempest’s epilogue, entreats the audience to dissolve the illusion of the fantastic plot, begging only for prayers as he (and his author) move closer to death. In a similar way, Shakespeare is asking the fair youth (and his reader) to see or imagine his own face in a mirror.
The third reason is that Shakespeare speaks directly to the reader, as well as the fair youth. By doing so, he asks us to contemplate ourselves, and to see both our present beauty and our imminent mortality. This is why we and the fair youth must both “look” in the mirror, and then “tell” ourselves to get on with the business of life, and its renewal. (Which involves looking elsewhere than ourselves.)
The speaker does not rebuke, but encourages and explores the reflexivity of the fair youth. His mirror-gazing is initially a turning towards himself, indeed of only seeing himself in the outer world. Though the speaker commands the fair youth to “tell the face thou veiwest, / Now is the time that face should form another . . .” a moment’s consideration will remind us that if the fair youth is already looking into the mirror, then his face already forms another in the mirror’s reflection. The syntax is confusing since the sentence could be construed to mean either “tell yourself to make a reproduction of yourself” or “tell your reflection to make another reflection of itself.” One thinks of mirrors reflecting mirrors ad infinitum. So we are left with what we might call the “Las Meninas” issue; why does Shakespeare do it this way? He could have said, in paraphrase, “as you make another face when you look into your mirror, so you should make another copy of your face by having a child.” But he doesn’t.
Part of the answer is in lines nine and ten: “Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee / Calls back the lovely April of her prime;” When he says “tell the face thou viewest,” or refers to it as “that face” rather than “thy face” he is dislocating the face, as it were, from its owner. One imagines the face and just the face floating in a mirror. This is because, as it turns out, the fair youth’s face is not merely his own; rather, he is an image of his mother. His form has been received from hers, indeed his form is her form. As Aristotle put it in his De Anima: “Since, then, [a being with a soul] is unable to share in the eternal and divine by way of continuity, because perishable things do not admit of persisting as the same thing and one in number, each thing shares in the way in which it is able to partake one more, another less). So [a being with a soul] persists not as the same thing but as one like itself, not one in number but one in form.” (italics mine.) Aristotle is saying that mortal beings have their portion of immortality analogously, by way of reproduction. One lives on, in a way, through one’s children. Hence we have an explanation of the third and fourth lines:
Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
The word “repair” means, at root, not simply to “fix” but to “provide/bring forth again” from the Latin “paro, parare.” There is a sense in which the word “renew” is redundant here, but only just. “Renew” stems from the Old English nīewe, means at it’s deepest known etymological root, “now.” So “renew” is a different word from “repaire,” since “repair” gives us a sense of burgeoning new life, whereas “renew” gives us a sense of presentness, and brings in the question of time. Time is often lurkin in the background of Shakespeare’s work, and this sonnet is a kind of small dialogue between the past, present, and future, and the poem’s speaker is concerned to bring both the past and future into the present; or rather, to show us what T.S. Eliot called “the intersection of the timeless with time.” However, should repair and renewal not take place, then the fair youth “dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.”
The plain sense of this phrase is that “you will trick the world out of what is its due, and take the blessing of children away from a mother.” But there is more at stake in this line. How can it be that one man’s failure to reproduce could rob the world? We are already familiar with the hyperbole of Sonnet I, in which the fair youth is deemed “the world’s fresh ornament.” Clearly, beneath the hyperbole, Shakespeare is using the figure of the fair youth to say something universal about the beauty, power, and glory of youth in general. Anyone who has passed beyond the stage of youth realizes this power, often with a kind of maudlin regret for days gone by. But there is no question that it is something more clearly apprehended by those who have left their own youth behind.
But the word “beguile,” while it does mean “to trick,” stems also from the Old French “guile,” a relative of the word “wile,” as in the sentence “the wily coyote.” This word ultimately finds its meaning from a Proto-Indo-European words meaning “to bend.” Perhaps this stems in turn from our metaphorical association of untrustworthy folk with things that twist and turn, like snakes, or trails where we cannot clearly see where the path leads us. But is it too much of a stretch to suggest that the fair youth will also be “bending” the world, altering the course of nature, warping the wheel of existence, by failing to take part in it? Certainly, this interpretation is borne out by the tenor of the sonnet, though it is not a meaning Shakespeare probably had in mind. One thinks of C.S. Lewis’ name for Satan in his Space Trilogy: “The Bent One.” To trifle with the gift of creation, to fail to pass it on, to disdain to nourish its continued existence, to kill it; this is Satanic. This interpretive move also lends depth and color to the word “unbless.” To unbless is in a sense to curse, although Shakespeare’s emphasis is on the negative, the emptiness that comes from inaction. “Unbless” is a hollow, an empty word, echoing the empty womb the fair youth refuses to fill with children. Cursing itself is a very specific accusation to lay at the door of the fair youth. Cursing is typically a kind of magic, or sometimes a kind of prayer or prophecy. The Old Testament contains many curses, typically directed at the unrighteous who will not heed the voice of God. The Weird Sisters in Macbeth do not curse, but do use half-truths and prophecies to manipulate Macbeth towards his doom. Cursing is also typically directed at the fruits of an individual’s life; the objects of his desire, his offspring, his harvest, his everlasting salvation. Thus, Shakespeare implies the possibility of a “curse” to underline the moral stakes of the fair youth’s choice, laying before him a clear choice between good and evil.
The rhyme words of the quatrain neatly convey its message in telegraphed form:
The ”viewest/renewest” pairing recalls the significance of the mirror, while the more straightforward “another/mother” rhyme points us towards the final quatrain, while making us think explicitly of sex, fertility, and reproduction.
Jamie Wyeth, Spring Plowing (1969)
The next quatrain continues the argument, in the form of two rhetorical questions:
For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
Or who is he so fond will be the tomb
Of his self-love, to stop posterity?
Shakespeare also introduces an agricultural metaphor, one that is as old as Western literature. But it is noteworthy that he abandons his central image of mirrors for a whole quatrain, only to pick it up again afterwards. In the meantime, two different but related metaphors are used: Agriculture as sex, and sexual abstinence as a tomb. “Uneared” means “unploughed.” Woman as field / man as ploughman is an old metaphor; but there is a kind of pun on “husbandry,” which usually refers to farming but can also mean “the work characteristic of a husband;” in this case, sex. This use of the image of agriculture is timeless, but it does not per se develop the meaning of the thing it is allied to, viz a viz the sexual act. Both are cases in point of organic fertility. They are simply different cases in point. In a way, such a metaphor approaches the realm of euphemism. But the image has value nevertheless, especially in conjunction with the image of the tomb. Tombs imply burial, as does farming. Both involve putting something beneath the earth. But the effects are opposite: one buries a corpse without expecting a new man to rise out of the earth this side of Armageddon. Also, notice that the farmer or husbandman plants by the sweat of his brow; his work upon the materials of the world, his immersion in the cycle of nature and stream of existence creates new life. But the image of the tomb as Shakespeare uses it is the very picture of inaction: it is the tomb of his self-love. Per se, it is solipsistic, totally interior, and inactive.
These two metaphors are put as rhetorical questions so that Shakespeare can show us a conuciton of opposites: “where is she so fair” is a parallel but different question to “who is he so fond.” (i.e. foolish.) Note that the two are not directly related in terms of their imagery, (in fact they depict opposites) but are utterly locked together by the rhyme scheme:
womb/tomb
husbandry/posterity
One might digress at length on the connections and parallels between wombs and tombs. But we should point out that all of us begin inevitably in one enclosure and end in the other. One might also note that the whole point of husbandry is, in a sense posterity. Men toil for the sake of those who come after, as much as themselves.
Likewise, tombs exist because wombs exist. Wombs exist because tombs exist. Posterity is that for the sake of which husbandry exists. But all wombs require to be quickened by husbands, and posterity is that anonymous collection of people who will pray beside one’s tomb. (Likewise, the tomb is clearly also for the sake of posterity, not for the dead.)
We said earlier that Shakespeare had abandoned his central metaphor of a mirror in this quatrain: but has he? We should be able to see now that the metaphor has transformed, rather than disappeared. The poem has absorbed its central metaphor into itself. The womb and tomb, the cornfield and grave-yard are indeed reflections of one another, but seen through a black mirror. Form and meaning are here both differentiated and yet conjoined. And the pleasure of their union is the fruit we gather when we move beyond a merely casual reading.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Bacchante leading a mirror (XVIII cent.)
Now we turn to the final quatrain:
Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee
Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.
Shakespeare now returns to the clarity of the original imagery of mirrors; but again, we should notice his use of the word “glass,” rather than mirror, since a glass can be a mirror as well as a window. In this case, the mother’s reflection is seen in her son, who is her mirror. Yet by the same word, he is a glass, through which we see her. Moreover, the fair youth’s face is not merely a reflection of the mother, but a reflection of her past, of her “prime.” Shakespeare makes this double meaning clearer in the next two lines, when the youth in turn will look into his own past through the “windows” of his progeny into his own “golden time.” Thus we can see that the poem has returned chaistically upon itself. It is as if the contemplation of his own beauty has in this case moved the fair youth to extend it beyond the boundaries of his own being, and the mirror or “glass” is transformed from that which merely reflects oneself into something that permits others to be seen.
It is also important to note again the picture of youth that this sonnet paints for us. The mother’s youth is described as her “prime.” This is surely not merely a reference to her fully developed youth, but also metaphorically to the first hour of the daily office, which in Catholic Christianity begins the liturgical day. Time is of central importance to this sonnet. “Golden time” is an obvious reference to the ancient myth of the Golden Age, which has obviously pre-lapsarian overtones for Shakespeare.
This begs the question: what is the vision of Time Shakespeare puts before us? Surely it is a very fluid vision, in which the past, the present and the future are all commingled, set beside each other rather than at a distance; memorial, remembrance and reflection are the keys to unlocking the question of time in this sonnet. In what one might call a typically English way, the past and future are both incarnate in the present, and vice versa. One resists the urge to quote Little Gidding at length.
Here, at nearly the end of the poem, the coiled, cramping reflexivity of reflection upon reflection is cleared away. Suddenly, instead of being trapped, as it were, in a hall of mirrors, our minds eye opens upon a green expanse. Our sight gains breadth and length, distance and height, and we are no longer caught up in the addressee’s solipsism, but enter anew into the world of things, into the real. And yet in the image of another (the son) we are able to see ourselves at the height of our natural potential. I say “we” and not only the addressee because the reader is swept up into this poem in a way that he is not in the previous poems, and also because what Shakespeare says of the fair youth is (obviously) also true of us. To participate in the cycle of birth, growth, reproduction, decay, and death is to escape from the futility of our own limited being, at least in a certain sense.
But there remains, at last, the couplet:
But if thou live rememb’red not to be,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.
The Three Ages of Man and Death, Hans Baldung
These two lines return us to the more familiar tone of rebuke that we have become accustomed to in the first two sonnets. And yet they are not merely there to wrap up the argument, (although they do that well enough.) Rather, they demand our attention be given to two very important words: “rememb’red” and “image.”
Remembrance is nothing less than the capacity for making the past (and sometimes the future) present. In remembering, we are psychically taking into ourselves the forms of things that were and will be. In the Eucharist especially, at the words of consecration, “do this in the remembrance of me” is uttered. Of course in that context, remembrance is yoked closely to new life, and to the defeat of death. One such example of Shakespeare’s “eucharistic” interpretation of Memory occurs in The Winter’s Tale, in which a statue memorializing the dead king’s unjustly condemned queen “becomes” the queen herself, which in turn leads to renewal of life, love, and forgiveness. In this case, remembrance will be, for the fair youth, a means of life after death. In just the same way, the fair youth’s mother, in him, “calls back” (or “recalls”) the spring of her own life, and lives in him.
We might also fruitfully consider the possible scriptural resonance of the word “image.” The Geneva Bible uses the word in the famous lines from Genesis: “Furthermore God said, Let us make man in our image according to our likeness.” In the Septuagint, the Greek word being translated as “image” is εἰκόνα, from which we derive the word “icon.” That word itself properly refers to "mirror-like representation," referring to what is very close in resemblance (like a "high-definition" projection, as defined by the context), something that “exactly reflects its source (what it directly corresponds to). For example, Christ is the very image (eikṓn, supreme expression) of the Godhead (see 2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15). The word “image” itself comes of course from the Latin “imago,” which language was the basis for the Catholic Vulgate. It is difficult to imagine that Shakespeare could not have understood and considered the sacred echoes this word would entail for his poem, specifically in a poem that is about (pro)creation, generation, and seeing back through oneself to the very causes of one’s being.
The couplet closes the expansive vision opened up to us by the last quatrain; it is reminder of finitude and death, and amidst this poem’s apparent celebration of life, nature, and the goodness of existence, reminds us of the realities that condition and limit that very real goodness. The couplet also reminds us, in a way, of the dignity of our condition; we, as mortal humans, must choose to participate in the Good.