Love And Value In “That Time Of Year Thou May Essay, Research Paper

Love and Value in “That time of year thou mayst in me behold” In Shakespeare’s “That time of year thou mayst in me behold”, the speaker is actually reconstructing himself to his beloved. Though this is different than the speaker constructing an image of another that is their beloved, the poem still deals with the same issues such as the problem of love and valuing. The speaker’s goal is reconstruct himself in a new way and therefore increase his worth in his beloved’s eyes because if he has no worth he will not be loved. This crisis of value takes the neutral form of the aging of the speaker’s body. By questioning the speaker’s age his beloved doubts there can be love between two people with such a great age difference. The poem is a dramatic reconstruction, similar to a speech but without the name of the speaker because that is not important. By using comparisons to describe himself the speaker attempts to refute the boy’s doubts and create a different and more favorable image of himself. There are four comparisons the speaker makes to himself and although they are mentally different figures they connect and fold on each other to effect a make over of the speaker by himself. The first comparison he makes is to autumn when “yellow leaves. . .shakes against the cold.” The use of yellow connotes aging like pages that yellow with age. The cold symbolizes a terminal state, that he is not denying his age and that death is inevitable. The second comparison is to the lack of choirs and therefore music, referring to Henry VIII’s destruction of the Catholic churches when he created the Anglican church. This also shows his age, that he is not what he once was because he is older.

The third comparison is to day fading into night, “Death’s second self.” He, like the sun being taken away by night fall will also eventually be taken away. The fourth comparison is to fire which in effect destroys the own principle of life, it is created to destroy. This last image is draws all the comparison’s together for the final realization of mortality, the “deathbed”, that the speaker with age will eventually die. By using these four comparisons and also going from a longer period of time to a shorter, a year to a day, the speaker shifts his ground. By revising his own speaking and using this succession of nested analogies he makes himself over. This make over of the self does not refute his beloved’s claim that he is old. Rather he uses his age to increase his value, that because he will “leave ere long” he should be loved more. The couplet at the end takes this idea a step farther and makes it a general statement, that age should not weaken love but make it stronger and that people should value their time together because it will not last forever. He uses discourse to replace his physical body with this confessional body, the poem in an attempt to elevate himself in his beloved’s eyes and in a sense seduce him. The speaker therefore expects that by increasing his value to the beloved he will gain love.