Nature and Beauty

Chris, I'm with you, this sonnet is a keeper. This post is in attempt to pull together some of the major themes we've all noted throughout these last few sonnets. Let's see how this goes!

Like Jacob, I was interested in your reading of the choked off words and meter, and how they almost contradict the conclusion that the essence of nature can be preserved. How we get to the preservation in this sonnet is of particular interest to me. I keep coming back to lines 9-14:

Then were not summer's distillation left

A liquid pris'ner pent in walls of glass,

Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,

Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.

But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,

Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

The reference to the "walls of glass" sent me back to Sonnet 3 where the speaker demands that the young man "look in thy glass" and admit that it is now time to extend this beauty to another. By the end of Sonnet 3, the young man is told that if he should "die single" this image -- his own beauty -- dies with him. In other words, the image is trapped here, in the glass, not unlike the "liquid pris'ner" of Sonnet 5. How surprising, then, to learn that the "liquid pris'ner pent in walls of glass" would be preserved and more or less untouched by winter or death. What's the difference between this trapped image and the liquid prisoner?

One possible answer brings me back to one of Jacob's earlier posts in which he posed a question about this nature figure that shows up so prominently in Sonnet 4 and clearly extends into Sonnet 5. I think we begin to see a more defined relationship forming between nature, beauty, and this young man. In Sonnet 4, we learn that "nature's bequest gives nothing but doth lend." Nothing -- including beauty and life itself -- is permanent with this nature, and when she calls for this man's death, any beauty he has not passed on to his own child will die with him. The simple force of this nature figure is reiterated in Sonnet 5 when beauty is completely forgotten, eternally erased, and it is the essence of nature that lives on through the winter and beyond flitting beauty.

A bit of a side note: The Folger edition of the sonnets has an interesting note next to line 10 I thought was worth passing on. They direct the reader to Philip Sidney's Arcadia: "Have you ever seen a pure rosewater kept in a crystal glass, how fine it looks, how sweet it smells, while that beautiful glass imprisons it?"

Jacob, love the Marilynn Robinson quote. I'm a huge fan of her work.