Areopagus Volume XXIX

Seven short lessons every someday.

Welcome one and all to the twenty ninth volume of Areopagus - and the last of 2022! Another year soon shall pass and the world shall grow another year older. On the inevitability and power of time there are few better voices, as with so much else, than that of William Shakespeare:

Sonnet 19

​Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion’s paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger’s jaws,
And burn the long-liv’d phœnix in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,
And do whate’er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
O, carve not with thy hours my love’s fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty’s pattern to succeeding men.
Yet do thy worst, old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.

Shakespeare wished for his love to live forever young in his verse. We might say the same thin…