Weep to Have

I feel poetry but lack the power to make my words profoundly beautiful like my thoughts. This month while reading Jane Eyre, I found that Jane felt the same about her artistic ability. When Mr. Rochester asked her about some of her paintings, she said, "I was tormented by the contrast between my idea and my handiwork: in each case I had imagined something which I was quite powerless to realise." Sometimes a particular poem strikes me because it captures my feelings in a way I am "powerless to realise." This week I encountered Shakespeare's Sonnet 64 and feel new awe at his power.

Impermanence and inevitable loss are his themes. He begins:

          When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
          The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
          When sometimes lofty towers I see down-razed
          And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

Amid monuments to the dead, the poet laments time and weather's slow destruction of our attempts to remember them.

The next four lines show the effect of the tides:

          When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
          Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
          And the firm soil win of the watery main,
          Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;

I feel a faster progress of decay and visualize a child's disappointment at the loss of his "kingdom of the shore," a sand castle.

Viewing ruin all around him, he thinks:

          When I have seen such interchange of state,
          Or state it self counfounded to decay,
          Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate
          That Time will come and take my love away.

Because nothing is permanent, we will inevitably lose even those we love. His concluding couplet mourns the having because of the fear of losing:

          This thought is as a death which cannot choose
          But weep to have, that which it fears to lose.

I feel this as I witness and participate in my children's inexorable march to adulthood. I know my goal as a parent is to eliminate my position so that one day they will all leave my home, but I still dread it. When my mother visited a couple of years ago, she swept my floor after lunch one day, and I complained, "My floor has to be swept after every meal."
  
She replied, "My floor stays clean, but my house is empty."

I "weep to have" because I fear for the empty house, the loneliness I know I will some day feel. One day at church I sat between my eldest daughter, Karina, and my youngest, Helena, the beginning and end of my cycle of motherhood. I remember Karina as the baby in my arms, but she stands taller than I am and will leave for college in only three years. I try to grasp that remaining time but the "firm soil" increases "store with loss" and runs right between my fingers.

Some day I will ask myself where the years went, but I will know that I lived them. I am grateful that in the midst of a busy life I can spend each day with these children, to help them, know them, relate to them. The days and stages of their childhood dissolve like sugar into the syrup of my life, sweetening it but in an elusive way I find difficult to distinguish and savor. One day I will have the time and solitude to savor it and the sweetness of my memories will remain.

Sonnet 64

When I have seen by time’s fell hand defaced

The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;

When sometimes lofty towers I see down razed,

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage:

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain

Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,

And the firm soil win of the watery main,

Increasing store with loss, and loss with store:

When I have seen such interchange of state,

Or state itself confounded to decay;

Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate—

That Time will come and take my love away.

This thought is as a death, which cannot choose

But weep to have that which it fears to lose.