In William Shakespeare’s sonnets to the young man, the competition between the destructive forces of time and the reparative enterprise of poetry often takes place through a series of incisions, where cuts made by time’s scythe are imitated and materially altered by the work of the lyric pen. To investigate this poetics of laceration in Shakespeare’s collection, this essay brings sonnets 63, 100, and 126 in dialogue with the story of Apelles’s rivalry with Protogenes (recounted by Pliny in Natural History), in which the artists take turns to dissect each other’s thin lines. Focusing on poetic form, it argues that the slight, barely perceptible non-coincidence and semi-autonomy of the incisions inflicted by time and by poetry engender lyric’s participation in time yet simultaneously formulate a resistance to its consuming impulse. The interval between chronological time and dissecting time is the space where lyric dwells.
Danila Sokolov (Wed,) studied this question.