Beauty Beyond Time

A Meditation on Shakespeare's Sonnets

Joseph Milne

There is a difference between poetic vision and ordinary vision. Ordinary vision sees the world in its transient aspect, while poetic vision sees the eternal embodied in or shining through the transient. Poetic vision goes under many names, yet it is an actual seeing, though of another kind and discontinuous with ordinary vision. 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.

I have chosen three Sonnets of Shakespeare to illustrate this poetic vision:

101
O truant Muse what shall be thy amends,
For thy neglect of truth in beauty dyed?
Both truth and beauty on my love depends:
So dost thou too, and therein dignified:
Make answer Muse, wilt thou not haply say,
'Truth needs no colour with his colour fixed,
Beauty no pencil, beauty's truth to lay:
But best is best, if never intermixed'?
Because he needs no praise, wilt thou be dumb?
Excuse not silence so, for't lies in thee,
To make him much outlive a gilded tomb:
And to be praised of ages yet to be.
Then do thy office Muse, I teach thee how,
To make him seem long hence, as he shows now.

113
Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind,
And that which governs me to go about,
Doth part his function, and is partly blind,
Seems seeing, but effectually is out:
For it no form delivers to the heart
Of bird, of flower, or shape which it doth latch,
Of his quick objects hath the mind no part,
Nor his own vision holds what it doth catch:
For if it see the rud'st or gentlest sight,
The most sweet favour or deformed'st creature,
The mountain, or the sea, the day, or night:
The crow, or dove, it shapes them to your feature.
Incapable of more, replete with you,
My most true mind thus maketh mine untrue.

116
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments, love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand'ring bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come,
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

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. This is a helpful sequence. If the poet is to speak as a poet, then his speaking itself must come from the immortal realm he will speak of. The poetic vision cannot be translated into ordinary vision, and so the Muse is called upon to speak through the poet. This is the work and meaning of the Muses, to convey something of the immortal realm in a manner belonging to that realm. To call upon the Muse is at once a call to see and to say. 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.

This may seem an exalted way of reading Sonnet 101. In a sense this is so. It is a universal feature of love to utter itself in praise of the beloved. Love, by nature, demands to be declared. Love is communion between lover and beloved, and so it cannot remain itself by being dumb. Praise, as a mode of human speech, is already and always a form of exalted speaking, even in ordinary things. To praise something has no practical purpose but is an end in itself. It is inseparable from apprehension of the good or the beautiful. 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.

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. Without this assent knowing does not come into reflection. And if the nature of the good or beautiful do not come into reflection, that nature remains unknown. Beauty can be known only in terms of itself because it has no comparison or analogy. Like all ultimate things, it is singular and measurable only by itself. Hence beauty has no dependencies. It "needs no praise", yet without praise it remains unseen. Praise, then, is the order of speaking evoked by the beautiful itself. 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. Therefore if the Muse is silent before truth shining forth in beauty, "in beauty dyed", it is negligent of truth itself. If the Muse is silent before truth, then the vision of truth passes away.

It is no excuse that there are no adequate ways of representing truth or beauty. Even though "truth needs no colour" 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. That such praise must remain unequal and inadequate, and knowingly so, in itself marks them for what they are in themselves. That which can be adequately drawn belongs to the realm of ordinary vision. That which is "best" draws itself. Nevertheless, praise is an order of seeing that springs from love. We might even say it is the essential discourse of love.

Love and praise apprehend the true and beautiful, but in a manner of seeing that outruns ordinary perception. This is the theme of Sonnet 113.

Since I left you, mine eye is in my mind,

This line shows how the perception of the beautiful transforms the mind itself. The eye is now "in the mind" in several senses. First, the impress of the beautiful infuses the mind so fully that it would not want to behold anything else. So ordinary perception, through the outer senses, is now a kind of blindness, since what is seen there now "seems seeing" but is not true seeing. Seeing is raised by the beautiful to a new pitch. 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. Beauty is an intellectual object, not a sensory one, and so it stands in a wholly different relation to perception. The mind is infused by the beautiful and transfigured by it, and its natural relation with it is to desire union with it. This desire for union is love.

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 "to your feature". That is to say, all things now bear the feature of the beauty beheld in mind. The outer seeing "no form delivers to the heart" but the form of the beautiful. So it is the heart within the mind that now perceives through the power of love. The beloved is seen now in all things. The Platonic resonance here is obvious. The senses perceive the shapes or shadows of things, while the mind infused with love of the beautiful perceives the essence or "forms" of things.

And this is because the beautiful, through the power of love, is the origin of all things and that which brings them into being. The entire universe is the shining forth of divine beauty through love, the first-born of the gods. As Castiglioni says, "the fount of Beauty is not the form in which it shines." 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. 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 "it shapes them to your feature". There is, so to speak, nothing more to behold than that beauty as such, and the mind in such vision is "incapable of more, replete with you".

Beauty is that which satiates the mind, is that which the mind was born to behold, its proper object. Other is less, not simply different. Beauty, for the mind, is not simply another object among objects, but that which gives to every object its form. 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 "untrue" mind. It once "seemed seeing" but now is known to be a kind of blindness. 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. It is the beautiful that causes sight, just as it is knowledge or truth that causes mind. Through the transfigured perception of the beautiful the mind has come home to itself and hence it is replete. And because it has come to itself in the beautiful it addresses itself solely to the beautiful. The beautiful is rightly spoken when spoken to the beautiful itself, as thou. It is told itself. This is "my most true mind" that makes the former mind "untrue", since the mind untransformed by beauty "no form delivers to the heart" but comprehends only the outer shapes and colours of things. The "most true mind" 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.

If the mind so transfigured dwells with the universal beauty, so it dwells with the immortal, that which never changes. To dwell and to remain with beauty is brought about by the love that beauty causes in the lover. This is the theme of Sonnet 116. Two lovers become one true mind through love. Love is the principle of unity itself, generating all things, yet holding them all in a unified diversity or harmony. 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. Thus there can only be a marriage of "true minds", of minds both transformed by beauty so that they are made one mind. If such a marriage of minds admits difference in, then love departs, since love has only one true object, unity in the beautiful. If love is immortal, then it cannot fall to the mortal, to the changeable. Thus "love is not love which alters when it alteration finds". The principle of unity cannot be moved from itself, even though all else may move or change. It is "an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is never shaken".

It is often thought that love is changeable or that it comes and goes. But Shakespeare is showing us that it is not love that ever changes, nor can be changed by anything. Time is lord of change, not love, and love is not ruled by time but by itself alone. Love is a law unto itself since it is the first-born of the gods. Love is the constant eye that beholds all change, the "fixed-mark" against which all change is evident, the "star to every wand'ring bark". Love is the constant against which time moves, so that time itself navigates by love and so is ultimately ruled by love. And so the hours and weeks of time are brief in the eye of immortal love which holds to itself "even to the edge of doom".

Love is therefore the principle of constancy and hence the progenitor of every virtue. Without constancy no virtue is possible. 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. They hold through time but are never subject to time, since time cannot change their nature. 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.

The worth of love is immeasurable and so his worth remains forever unknown because it is inexhaustible. All that ever might be said in praise of love and the beautiful is therefore likewise inexhaustible. 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. If that witness is false, then it never was, "nor no man ever loved". This is so because love is witness of itself and no other testimony can be made of it save by itself. The same holds for truth and beauty. They measure all things and may be measured by none but themselves. 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. 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. And his hearers will know in their hearts that he never sang that which song was made by love to sing.