[William Shakespeare]
„No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change:
Thy pyramids built up with newer might
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;
They are but dressings of a former sight.
Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire
What thou dost foist upon us that is old;
And rather make them born to our desire
Than think that we before have heard them told.
Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wondering at the present nor the past,
For thy records and what we see doth lie,
Made more or less by thy continual haste.
This I do vow and this shall ever be;
I will be true despite thy scythe and thee.„
As the sequence of sonnets dedicated to the youth draws to a close, the poet finally and crucially insists that his love is not of a mortal composition. It is not anything that is subject to time’s destruction or to the fickle wheel of fortune. In these three last sonnets he affirms his truth and constancy, with a love which will outlive the pyramids, and the whims of political change, and all external forms of favour and preferment. No matter that all his past experience has shown him that the object of love may not be worth the devotion he lavishes upon it. It is the love that counts. It is the ability to make the sacrifice of oneself. It is the strength of will that makes something out of nothing, and produces from a trivial and transitory romance something which lasts as long as time itself lasts – it is that which must be extolled and hymned, for if that cannot be saved from the general destruction, then nothing else is worth talking about. The rest is silence, as Hamlet said, and this love must be treated in such a way, as a silent mystery, for there is no other fitting end to it.
