A random sonnet for the Bard’s birthday

I prefer Shakespeare the playwright to Shakespeare the poet, but I have a great edition of his sonnets. It has modern translations into Finnish by Kirsti Simonsuuri, with the facsimiles of the 1609 edition and annotations of each sonnet side by side with the originals. For Shakespeare’s 450th birthday, I chose a random sonnet from it. It turned out to be sonnet number 81, which I find it appropriate for the occasion with its sentiment of the poet’s loved one living on in his poems.

Or I shall liue your Epitaph to make,

Or you suruiue when I in earth am rotten,

From hence your memory death cannot take,

Altough in me each part will be forgotten.

Your name from hence immortall life shall haue,

Though I (once gone) to all the world must dye,

The earth can yield me but a common graue,

When you intombed in mens eyes shall lye,

Your monument shall be my gentle verse,

Which eyes not yet created shall ore-read,

And toungs to be, your being shall rehearse,

When all the breathers of this world are dead,

You still shall liue (such virtue hath my Pen)

Where breath most breaths, euen in the mouths of men.

Musings on John Donne’s concept of time

Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,

Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time.

Yesterday marked the death of John Donne (1572-1631), English poet and the Dean of St Paul’s. I have a particular interest in him. I wrote my master’s thesis about him, specifically about his concept of time.

Donne isn’t exactly known as a philosopher of time. I chose him because he was a prolific writer and the abundant material promised me an access to his mind. I wasn’t interested in a philosopher’s formulated concept of time anyway. I wanted to know how an ordinary Elizabethan Englishman understood it. And despite not being a philosopher, Donne’s texts had plenty of references to time – even from a philosophical point of view.

I have been interested in time ever since I started studying history. The early modern concept of time became my focus later on, especially in relation to the emergence of the modern concept of time. But I wasn’t interested in change when I studied Donne; I wanted to know how time was understood at a particular time in history.

Meticulously, I posed questions that seemed relevant back then about subjective and objective time, cyclical and linear time, secular time and timeless eternity. Unsurprisingly, Donne’s thinking didn’t easily yield to my systematic approach. It was linear and cyclical at the same time, as well as secular and sacred. He had a strong sense of decline, that the world was deteriorating towards the inevitable end, which was a fairly common view in Renaissance.

I seem to have concluded in my thesis, having read it for the first time in ages, that for Donne, the concept of time was a theological issue. He mostly wrote about it in his devotional material and he expressed views similar to theological thinkers, especially St Augustine. The bulk of his texts is devotional, however, so the data is slightly biased towards that interpretation.

His emphasis on sacred meant that time was irrelevant compared to the timeless eternity that was to follow. For example, he wrote in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), when he thought he was on his deathbed, that happiness shouldn’t be bound to time:

What poore Elements are our happinesses made of, if Tyme, Tyme which wee can scarce consider to bee any thing, be an essential part of our hapines? […] if this Imaginary halfe-nothing, Tyme, be of the Essence of our Happinesses, how can they bee thought to be? Tyme is not so; not so, considered in any of the parts thereof.

But he had more irreverent ideas too, especially in his poetry where he could bend time to his liking. In Womans Constancy he tells how a woman is unable to be faithful for longer than a fleeting moment:

Now thou hast lov’d me one whole day,

To morrow when thou leav’st, what wilt thou say?

Wilt though then Antedate some new made vow?

Or say that now

We are not just those persons, which we were?

One couldn’t trust anything temporal.

The conclusions of my thesis are temporal too, bound to time. I stand by them, but they offer only a superficial understanding of Donne’s concept of time, and that of the early modern in general.