The economy of beauty
Usura slayeth the child in the womb / It stayeth the young man’s courting / It hath brought palsey to bed, lyeth / between the young bride and her bridegroom
CONTRA NATURAM
- Ezra Pound, Canto XLV
Photo by Александр Прокофьев: https://www.pexels.com/photo/view-of-ocean-during-golden-hour-561463/
Sonnet IV
Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thy self thy beauty's legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free:
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thy self alone,
Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive:
Then how when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Which, used, lives th' executor to be.
The speaker begins, and addresses the fair youth, upbraiding him for not reproducing, in a way similar to the earlier four sonnets. However, in this poem, a previously submerged metaphor emerges more clearly, and becomes the guiding motif of the sonnet: wealth. This is a motif that in scripture and in sermon, would have been used to discuss salvation. One thinks of the parable of the talents. But this sonnet is about generations to come, (or not to come) and their inheritance.
What is the currency? Beauty. In this sonnet, beauty is a “legacy,” capable of being bequeathed or lent, spent or misspent. If we follow the metaphor a step further, we realize that if beauty is a kind of wealth, then it is also means of exchange; it is something used to attain to some further thing. In this sonnet, as per lines 3, 11-12, and 14, it would seem that the thing beauty enables us to receive is life. Here we are not concerned with a platonic beauty, self-sufficient and good in and of itself. Here, beauty is tied up with the processes of “nature;” and for that reason is a means to an end. Nature has “lent” the youth his beauty; but apparently it is immoral for him to “spend” it on himself by keeping it to himself. Here, the youth is accused of “unthriftiness” precisely because he does not spend what he has been given, nor does he spend it with a woman. Rather, he hoards it, and is thus “unthrifty” in a paradoxical sense.
Yet the speaker’s suggestion is more than simply being paradoxical: it is true unthriftiness, since it is a false economy to hoard that which will do the hoarder no good in the end. He could purchase with his beauty something greater than itself: continued life. (See lines 8 and 11-12.) He is investing his beauty in a stock which will yield no return. But, having discussed the poem’s general theme, let us move to a brief examination of the first stanza.
Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thy self thy beauty's legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free:
The first word, “unthrifty,” sums up in itself the ironic interplay between giving and growth, and between withholding and withering. We think of “thrift” as meaning primarily “restraint in spending.” But Shakespeare’s meaning is more complex, and it is based on the more varied meanings of the Middle English word “thryfte.” Originally from Old Norse, it can also mean “thriving” “growth” or “prosperity.” There are other examples from Shakespeare’s own plays:
Merchant of Venice, Act I Scene I:
Bassanio: […] And many Jasons come in quest of her.
O my Antonio, had I but the means
To hold a rival place with one of them,
I have a mind presages me such thrift,
That I should questionless be fortunate!
Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 2
Hamlet: No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee
Where thrift may follow fawning.
In both cases, we clearly see that Shakespeare primarily means thrift in the more archaic sense. There is nothing penny-pinching about this form of “thrift” because it is not so much “thrift” as “thriving.” Therefore to be unthrifty here is not simply to “spend / Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy” But also to wither, to become stagnant, and to be unable to enact the truth of our natural being.
The first two lines support this interpretation by means of a chiastic alliteration and consonance. “Unthrifty loveliness” contains many of the same sounds as “Upon thyself;” specifically the short “u” sound, the “th,” “f,” “l,” and “o,” and “n,” sounds. The first two lines mirror each other, because to “spend / Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy is in fact to pervert the purpose of that legacy in the first place. In a move we have seen before in my commentary on sonnets 1-3, these lines imitate the youth’s turning inward, and upon himself. In addition, to “spend upon thyself” may refer implicitly to masturbation as a subordinate and secondary meaning. No matter what, his actions are fundamentally opposed to the purposes of nature, who, “being frank . . . lends to those are free.” Here is another parallelism: “frank” (in this context) means “free or unrestricted.” So Nature, being what she is, lends to those who are like her. Nature’s tendency, as discussed in the comment on sonnet 1, is towards increase and profusion. The fair youth acts against Nature’s generosity, and is therefore both miserly and a spendthrift at the same time, since by holding on to what is not his in the first place (because it is lent to him,) he loses the only legitimate claim he had to its possession. This imbalance and division between Nature and the youth’s respective purposes are depicted in the balance that lines 2 and 3 of this stanza take:
Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thy self // thy beauty's legacy? (Self-Expenditure v.s. Legacy)
Nature's bequest gives nothing, // but doth lend, (Gift v.s. Lending)And being frank she lends to those are free:
Of course, the first and fourth lines of stanza are also balanced in a chiasm, in which the youth’s “unthryfte” and wastefulness is contrasted with Nature’s fecund generosity. Just like lines 1-2, lines 3-4 are entwined together with both assonance and consonance.
Notice that Nature does not believe the youth’s beauty to be his own private property; rather, it is a good to be shared with his descendants as their proper inheritance. (As an aside: snobby and superficial romantics may doubt the value of this “vivisection” of Shakespeare’s living verse: but we can only learn fully to appreciate the sonnet’s intuitive natural appeal when we grasp the care and artistry with which they are designed. To be a careful reader is not a sin against literature.)
Stanza two sums up the incongruity of the youth’s position:
Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?
His niggardry is contrasted the largess he has been given structurally in the line, and also because “niggard” and “largess” are preceded by words that are not only alliterative and consonant with eachother, but are in slant rhyme with each other. Lines 5-6 are mimicked by lines 7-8 in their syntactical structure. “Beauteous niggard” is not really a paradoxical title, but “profitless usurer” is. But in what sense is the youth guilty of usury? Surely he is abusing his “largess” by failing to make a gift of it to others. But a usurer lends money and charges interest on the principle. Thus, at first glance, Shakespeare seems to reverse the roles he established in the first stanza, in which Nature did not give, but lent beauty. Yet Nature will require his beauty of him, either as a gift given to another, or will take it from him in death. Therefore Nature is not a userer, since she does not expect anything more from him than what she gave. To solve this puzzle, we have to recall the view taken of usury in Merchant of Venice. In his essay Shakespeare vs. The Puritans: Shylock and Usury, Joseph Pearce notes that
Plato, Aristotle, and Aristophanes all considered the charging of interest to be fundamentally unnatural, and Cato, Seneca, and Plutarch went so far as to condemn usury in terms that compared it to homicide. It is noteworthy in this regard that Antonio condemns usury in terms that resonate with the Aristotelian and Thomistic doctrine that the “breeding” of inanimate objects, such as money, through usury, was an offence against nature (“for when did friendship take a breed of barren metal of his friend?”—1.3.130-31). Similarly, when Antonio asks Shylock whether he considers his gold and silver to be ewes and rams, Shylock replies that he makes his gold and silver “breed as fast” (1.3.92-3).1
For this sin against nature, Dante, following the broad classical and Christian consensus, imagined the sodomites and the usurers occupying the same region of Hell. In sonnet 4, The youth’s self-love amounts to a similar action against nature. He is a metaphorical usurer because, like the usurer, he acts against nature, and by refusing to marry, is like the usurer who attempts to make money breed with itself. He is spending nature’s “bequest” in a barren way, or like one of Dante’s sodomites, who parody the fruition of natural love. But of course, like them, his activity is futile, and unproductive of life. He “cannot live.” He cannot escape death by simply being beautiful but must communicate his beauty to another. This point is further emphasized in the final stanza.
For having traffic with thy self alone,
Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive:
Then how when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
“Traffic” (i.e. trade) is of course not something that can be done alone, if real profit is to be made. Trading with yourself gives the illusion of activity, of increase. This idea of this stanza’s first line is communicated rhetorically and sonically in the next: “Thou of thy self thy sweet self dost deceive” The repetition of “thy” and “self” creates the sensation of business without the fact of achievement; the illusion of motion without the reality of advancement; but disillusionment comes with the final word of the line: “deceive.” Now a careless reader would sweep through such a line and dismiss it as a mere flourish, thinking that it merely means “you’re fooling yourself.” But a close attention to the structure of the sentence reveals something more. Shakespeare writes “Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.” This indicates that the fair youth loses himself, cheats himself of himself, since he is both the currency of traffic and product being trafficked. He disappears, is alienated from himself. What is more, the sonnet’s language tells us that the fair youth’s attitude towards his own nature has become transactional and acquisitive. He has forgotten death, whose reality teaches men to chasten the force of their desires with knowledge that all things pass, and to seek more universal goods. The fair youth’s beauty is precisely such a mortal good. It is meant to purchase new life; not to become the solipsistic object of its owner’s admiration. The sheer vanity of the youth’s attitude is confronted with this rhetorical question:
Then how when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
The character Nature re-appears here, and it is as good a time as any to consider her position throughout the poem. Nature is a lender, who loans us not only goods such as beauty, but the good of life itself. She also recalls those goods, and what is more, asks us to “leave” an “acceptable audit.” Nature therefore in this sonnet has a certain moral force; a legal power to judge what is “acceptable” and what is not. In other words, the speaker is making an appeal to natural law. But what, we might well ask, is nature? Here, and elsewhere in Shakespeare’s body of work, it seems to refer to nature as an object of philosophical knowledge. It is the cause of the created order; as one Shakespeare scholar of the last century put it:
A doctrine of Nature constitutes the core of the view of life held by Shakespeare . . . The doctrine may be epitomized: God is good, and so is Nature, the divine agent, His agent. Man must follow the law of nature, which is the same as the law of reason. This principle postulates the existence of free will, urges the ideal of the golden mean, and involves discipline not for its own sake but the sake of a higher purpose.2
(Although of course this seems to simplify the complexity present in certain of Shakespeare’s plays (e.g. Lear, Macbeth, or Hamlet) this view that maps onto and neatly summarizes my own reading of the poet.) Moreover, this view seems clearly represented by this sonnet. The idea of an “audit” emphasizes our responsibility to act in accordance with some law of nature. In fact, the sequence of sonnets thus far have been rhetorical appeals: appeals that presuppose ideas such as “the existence of free will . . . ideal of the golden mean” and “discipline not only for its own sake but for a higher purpose.”
Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Which, used, lives th' executor to be.
Sonnet 3 rhymed “womb” and “tomb.” It is hard for the reader not hear the ghost of that rhyme overlaying the word “tomb,” used in this, the very next sonnet. If the fair youth’s beauty does not leave him and live in another; first in a wife and then in a child, then he will be by implication a kind of androgynous creature: a failed mother and midwife of his own beauty; his own body, which was its womb, will become its tomb. That it will be his “executor” if “used” wraps up the metaphor from stanza 1 of beauty being a “legacy.” At the same time, beauty will not simply be inherited by another, like a legacy. Rather it will be the “executor” itself; because it will become a person. This develops the metaphor significantly. The “beauty” which was a kind of object, a something throughout this poem has been translated into a subject; a someone with whom the fair youth may have a relationship. Shakespeare began the poem by trying to persuade the youth to preserve something of value: his beauty. He has ended by opening up his audience to the possibility of giving life to another human being; another consciousness, another soul. The poem has moved from self-concern to generosity: and can there be a greater generosity than creation?
1 Pearce, Shakespeare vs. The Puritans: Shylock and Usury, The Imaginative Conservative, April 27th, 2018
2 Knowlton, Edgar C. “Nature and Shakespeare.” PMLA, vol. 51, no. 3, 1936, pp. 719–44. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/458264. Accessed 12 June 2024.
