'All of Time is Cut in Two—Before and After'

Rhina Espaillat writes the sonnet “How Like a Winter . . .” (And After All: Poems, 2018) in response to Shakespeare’s Sonnet 17: 

“So Shakespeare describes absence. Yes—but no,

since every winter ends, gentling to spring’s

tentative yellows, then the green and blue

and bolder tones of flowering summer. So

has this winter passed, as do all things—

except the final absence. Without you,

for instance, all of time is cut in two—

before and after—seasons all the same,

despite the beckoning lushness of the new,

the living, rich in fur and fins and wings,

intent on resurrection. But they go,

our absent loves, and leave us stranded here,

parted from all the changes of the year

as by an endless fall of pallid snow.”

 

Turning gentle into a verb is a nice touch. Shakespeare’s poem, known as the last of the “procreation” sonnets, follows. The speaker fears that if he celebrates the “heavenly touches” of the “Fair Youth,” his comeliness, future readers will assume he is exaggerating or lying:

 

“Who will believe my verse in time to come,

If it were fill’d with your most high deserts?

Though yet Heaven knows it is but as a tomb

Which hides your life and shows not half your parts.

If I could write the beauty of your eyes,

And in fresh numbers number all your graces,

The age to come would say, ‘This poet lies,

Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces.’

So should my papers yellow’d with their age,

Be scorn’d like old men of less truth than tongue,

And your true rights be term’d a poet’s rage

And stretched metre of an antique song:

   But were some child of yours alive that time,

   You should live twice,– in it and in my rhyme.”

 

Every writer asks, Will I be read in the future, after I am gone? How will I be read? Most writing, of course, is quickly forgotten, often during the writer’s lifetime. We remember Shakespeare’s “Fair Youth” though his identity remains uncertain – a nice irony, given Shakespeare’s stated intention. He lives on, but anonymously. The final two lines are stirring: “But were some child of yours alive that time, / You should live twice,– in it and in my rhyme.” All of us hope to live on through our children, if only in memory. Espaillat reminds me of John Shade’s investigation into the afterlife, prompted by the death of his daughter Hazel, in the poem that lends its title to Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire:

 

“I'm reasonably sure that we survive

And that my darling somewhere is alive . . .”

 

As Espaillat puts it, in regard to "the final absence": “But they go, / our absent loves, and leave us stranded here."