My experiences of Shakespeare are threefold and minimal: Maggie O’Farrell’s Shakespeare-inspired novel Hamnet, which I read in March of last year; not attending the yearly Veritas Shakespeare plays, but knowing people in them; and memorizing one Shakespeare sonnet.
I don’t remember whether I read any Shakespeare in high school so I can’t add a number four to my list. I know my English teacher Mrs. Elvington would not like to know that I’m blanking on whether she taught us Shakespeare, but I think she would like other things about me now, so concern abated.
I have been running the lines of my memorized sonnet, Sonnet 73, on all my morning walks and runs lately, partly because it’s fall and these lines declare nature’s move from fall to winter, and partly because I’m working on my goodbyes as mentioned in my previous post. My second favorite writer, Alexander McCall Smith, introduced me to Sonnet 73 a few years back when I came across the following scene in his novel A Promise of Ankles (#14 in The 44 Scotland Street series):
“Actually,” said Angus, “I tend to think of one of Shakespeare’s sonnets when this sort of thing crops up. Sonnet Seventy-Three.”
“Refresh my memory,” Domenica said…
“I used to know the whole thing off by heart,” Angus said. “No longer, I’m afraid. But it’s one of the most beautiful of the sonnets, at least I think it is. It starts off:
That time of year thou mayest in me behold / When yellow leaves or none or few, do hang / Upon those boughs which shake against the cold / Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang…”
Domenica closed her eyes, as if in rapture. “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang… How could that line ever be bettered - by anything?”
“It couldn’t,” said Angus.
[Please note: A writer who lets his character say, “How could something ever be bettered…?” is the writer for me.] This discussion between characters with whom I’m so familiar of a sonnet with which I’m so unfamiliar got my attention. I looked up Sonnet 73 and committed it to memory without delay because it’s the only way I know to make the words mine. Also, I want to be ready in the hope that someday I’ll find myself in a real-life conversation like Angus and Domenica were having. Here’s the sonnet in full:
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
-Shakespeare, Sonnet 73
The last two lines are the ones by which I get taken every time. As I think about leaving the lake as our primary residence, my senses are heightened as never before to take in every sight, sound, and smell. The grapevine, for weeks now, has been smelling almost sickly-sweet with ripe muscadines, so I sniff deeply when I walk outside because I want that smell to last forever in my mind. I never paid much attention to the empty chicken coop since we lost our chickens last year, but now I’m looking in that direction more often when I walk up or down our driveway. The Japanese maple is oh-so-burgundy and the sun oh-so-warm. The deer must know something because they keep coming into our yard and letting me stand and stare at them from inside the front door. I walk my walking routes and run my running routes, and though I have all the houses, yards, and dogs memorized, I aim to see more each time.
I’m trying to have an imagination that I can love another place as much as I love the lake. I’m proud of myself that I’m going to try. Kindly, God made sure to put a fig tree and a grapevine in our new backyard so that I’d know I don’t have to be afraid to move. Deer, I expect not to see. But nearness to friends and neighbors and schools and stores will count for a lot. I want to love all my places and all my people well because everything is temporary and I’m going to have to leave it all, eventually.
No one, not even Shakespeare or Alexander McCall Smith, writes of these things better than Wendell Berry. In Berry’s novel The Memory of Old Jack, there’s a very moving scene at the end of the story in which Wheeler Catlett is remembering his departed friend Old Jack Beechum. Wheeler enters a no-longer-used harness room and is looking around at old things, things that are “the evidence of Old Jack’s time.” One of the things Wheeler sees is a poster on the wall with dates and figures that are various records Old Jack had kept.
And now let me let Berry finish this off for the both of us:
Wheeler remembers the successor to that wall, the little notebook that Old Jack carried in the bib of his overalls during his life…He laughs. And then, without realizing that he is about to do it, he cries.
Standing there has become pointless, pointlessly painful. Making up his mind to go, he carefully takes the old poster loose from the wall. He intends, as he removes the nails, to make a keepsake of it. But once he has taken it down and is holding it in his hands, its meaning seems already to have diminished. In a kind of guilt, in the sort of haste with which one would stop the bleeding of a living thing, he nails it back where it was.
“No,” he thinks, “we’ll take no trophies, no souvenirs. Let it fall like a leaf.”
I won’t take any of this with me, but I’ll love it as well as I can while I’m here and then I’ll let it fall like a leaf.
