“ SO L O N G L I V E S T H I S ” : T U R N I N G T O P O E T R Y I N S H A K E S P E A R E ’ S S O N N E T S DAVID R. SH O RE University of Ottawa JLhe decisive event in the Poet’s war with time in Shakespeare’s Sonnets is his discovery in Sonnet 18 that his most powerful weapon is poetry itself: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.1 The exhilarating note of confidence in the enduring value of poetic creation recurs throughout the sonnets devoted to the Youth as, indeed, it recurs throughout Elizabethan poetry ever since the 1579 publication of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender: Loe I have made a Calender for every yeare, That steele in strength, and time in durance shall outweare. (Epilogue)2 Yet however central to late Elizabethan poetic practice was the belief in the poet as one who transcends in his art the limits of the merely brazen world of Nature — “the poets only deliver a golden” 3 — the grounds of that belief were always an individual possession, to be won anew and in the process repeatedly to be redefined by each poet’s personal struggle to free language from the burden of mortality. To understand what Shakespeare made of the legacy of poetic faith he shared with Spenser and Sidney we need to under stand just what is involved in his own familiar but seldom closely examined assertion, “So long lives this. . ..” What is it that lives? How does it do so? And how does it give “life to thee” ? The obvious answer to the first question is that what lives is the poem itself — Ars longa, vita brevis. But Sonnet 18 is more than a proleptic celebration of its own survival. Compare its praise of the Youth’s transcendent beauty with, for example, the authorial (and textual) self-centredness of Drayton’s well-known claim to poetic immortality: How many paltry, foolish, painted things, That now in Coaches trouble ev’ry Street, Shall be forgotten, whom no Poet sings, E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C anada, x iv , i , March 1988 Ere they be well wrap’d in their winding Sheet? Where I to thee Eternitie shall give, When nothing else remayneth of these dayes, And Queenes hereafter shall be glad to live Upon the Aimes of thy superfluous prayse; Virgins and Matrons reading these my Rimes, Shall be so much delighted with thy story, That they shall grieve, they liv’d not in these Times, To have seene thee, their Sexes onely glory: So shalt thou flye above the vulgar Throng, Still to survive in my immortall Song.4 Here the focus is not on the beauty of the lady, perfunctorily acknowledged in “their Sexes onely glory,” but on the poet whose art performs the miracle of rescuing her from the vulgar throng “whom no Poet sings.” 5 Shakespeare does, of course, share Drayton’s confidence in his poetry’s survival, the same confidence that Daniel so attractively displays in the prefatory epistle to his 1607 Certaine Small Workes: I know I shalbe read, among the rest So long as men speake english, and so long As verse and vertue shalbe in request Or grace to honest industry belong. (59-62)6 But this confidence is not the thematic focus of Shakespeare’s sonnet, which never asserts, as do Drayton implicitly and Daniel explicitly, its author’s mastery of his art as the basis of the promise of immortality. Whereas Dray ton subordinates the second person, Shakespeare elevates it — “ thy eternal summer shall not fade, / Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st” — and in any reading that respects the integrity of the relationship between couplet and preceding quatrains, the triumph over time in Shakespeare’s couplet is not just a personal evaluation of poetic merit. Nevertheless, while Shakespeare’s sonnet is clearly much more deeply con cerned with the beauty of the Youth...