The Name of the Rose

“From fairest creatures we desire increase, / That thereby beauties Rose might neuer die, /…But thou contracted to thine owne bright eyes, / Feed'st thy lights flame with self substantiall fewell” (1.1–2, 5–6). ¹ The entire story of Shakespeare's Sonnets—if we can attribute a story to a text whose sense of order and sequence is cast in doubt by the mystery behind its production ² —is told in the first nineteen sonnets. The story concerns a world where desire exists because the natural succession of one generation to the next has ceased to exist; a world where, given that disruption in the natural order of things, poetry is offered as a solution to the ravages of time, filling in the “lines” carved in “my loues faire brow” (19.9–10) with “eternall lines” (18.12) of verse—grafting on to the disrupted lines of filial succession the compensating likenesses and “sweet semblance[s]” (13.4) no longer afforded by offspring. Niggardly prodigal, the young man addressed in these poems withholds himself from propagation, and thus consumes himself to death, destroying himself by failing to produce others like him. In this context, the poet offers metaphors to preserve the beloved's beauty—poetic likenesses which themselves resemble the filial likeness of children. Like lines of heirs, the lines of verse will serve to maintain the young man's identity—his likeness to himself—despite the ravages of time. And yet, in the world these poems portray, poetry is itself also subject to time— to decay, wrinkling and oblivion; in the “age to come,” the poet warns, “So should my papers (yellowed with their age) / Be scorn'd, like old men of lesse truth then tongue” (17.7, 9–10).