particular beauty

How much more praise deserv’d thy beauties use,
If thou couldst answere this faire child of mine
Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse
Prooving his beautie by succession thine.

Like you guys, I was also intrigued by the way beauty featured here. At first, I thought the notion of claiming ownership over an offspring's beauty was ridiculous (This is my beauty. There are many like it, but this one is mine...), because does your beauty really belong to you in the first place? But then I realized you could read this as a celebration of particularity and difference. It challenges some platonic notion of beauty where there's one basic form of beauty that everything is an imperfect manifestation of. So if beauty isn't some absent form, it's a material virtue that has real being.

Also, I think there's a nice meditation on how we relate to time hidden in these lines. It starts with the violent image of time digging trenches into a forehead. Time can be experienced as a dangerous adversary, forcing us into submission. And the sonnet ends with another violent act of time, the chilling of blood, but now the violent act is reversed through the relation to the child. The lone subject experiences time as an enemy, but the community experiences time as the animating force responsible for there being something rather than nothing. And if we think about the whole thing as being addressed to an aging youth, from an elder, it becomes a sort of invitation into this communal life the elder has found some sort of redemption in.

Could someone say a little more about what these Sonnets were exactly? Were they ever preformed in some way? Or were they just published? And if so, who was buying them? Did people read them to one another in their parlor or something?

Finally, do we think this kind of celebration of procreation would ever emerge from our contemporary culture? What was different about Shakespeare's time that lead him to celebrate birth as he did? Here's a snippit from a great essay by David Bentley Hart:

But really, anywhere throughout the autumnal world of old and dying Christendom, there are instants (however fleeting) when one cannot help but feel (however imprecisely) that something vital has perished, a cultural confidence or a spiritual aspiration, and it is obviously something inseparable from the faith that shaped and animated European civilization for nearly two millennia. Hence the almost prophetic "fittingness" of that rail station: once religious imagination and yearning have departed from a culture, the lowest, grimmest, most tedious level of material existence becomes not just one of reality's unpleasant aspects, but in some sense the limit that marks out the "truth" of things.

This is an inexcusably impressionistic way of thinking, I know, but it seems to me at least to suggest a larger cause for the remarkable willful infertility of the native European peoples: not simply general affluence, high taxes, sybaritism, working women, or historical exhaustion, but a vast metaphysical boredom. This is not to say that the American birthrate overall is particularly robust, hovering as it is just at or below "replacement level," but it has not sunk to the European continental average of only 1.4 children per woman (so reports the UN), let alone to that of such extreme individual cases as Spain (1.07), Germany (1.3), or Italy (1.2). Britain, at almost 1.7 children per woman, is positively philoprogenitive by European standards. And the most important reason for the greater--though not spectacular--fecundity of the United States appears to be the relatively high rate of birth among its most religious families (the godless being also usually the most likely to be childless).

It is fairly obvious that there is some direct, indissoluble bond between faith and the will to a future, or between the desire for a future and the imagination of eternity. And I think this is why post-Christian Europe seems to lack not only the moral and imaginative resources for sustaining its civilization, but even any good reason for continuing to reproduce. There are of course those few idealists who harbor some kind of unnatural attachment to that misbegotten abomination, the European Union--that grand project for forging an identity for post-Christian civilization out of the meager provisions of heroic humanism or liberal utopianism or ethical sincerity--but, apart from a bureaucratic superstate, providently and tenderly totalitarian, one cannot say what there is to expect from that quarter: certainly nothing on the order of some great cultural renewal that might inspire a new zeal for having children...

Amber, would you mind taking the reigns next week? I'm a bit overwhelmed at the moment (starting a new job and trying to do some fellowship applications). I could lead if I had to, but I'm afraid I'd be a bit rushed. After September 10 I should have more time to think and be a better participant in the discussion.