“Little Flowers”: that’s how we translate the “Fioretti di San Francesco,” the beloved collection of stories about St. Francis of Assisi, whose Feast is on October 4th. We may also learn a great deal about St. Francis from his “Canticle of the Creatures,” a psalmic hymn in the Umbrian dialect that’s the first great non-Latin Italian poem. In it, St. Francis praises God for the sun and the moon and the stars, for wind, water, fire and earth. Significantly, St. Francis refers to each as “frate” or “sora,” brother or sister, for human beings are creatures of God just like the rest of creation. We are siblings to all creation, which allows us to perceive likeness between ourselves and other created things.
A collapsing temple
In William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 73,” this perception of likeness is paramount. The speaker of the poem grows old. The “thou” in the poem, to whom he speaks, is a friend. While “thou” may sound highfalutin to contemporary ears, it’s the familiar second-person pronoun; “You” is the formal second-person pronoun. (“Thou” is like “tu” in Spanish or French, while “you” is like the Spanish “usted” or French “vous.”)
The speaker’s friend perceives in the speaker the diminishments of age. In the first four lines, the speaker describes himself as being like “That time of year” when the leaves are gone, or almost all gone, and the songbirds have migrated south and left their choir lofts in the trees behind. Shakespeare’s language recalls the first letter to the Corinthians, in which St. Paul writes that the “body is a temple of the Holy Spirit.” Here, the temple of the speaker’s body is collapsing. Its choir loft is “ruined,” and the choir has fled.
In the second quatrain, the speaker describes his life as being now like a “twilight,” that last faint brightness in the west after the sun sets. His day is all but done. Soon, sleep — “Death’s second self” — will “seal up” all things in “rest,” as the dead are sealed up in tombs. In the third quatrain, the speaker describes his life as being like the glowing embers of a dying fire, a fire that will soon be smothered in its own ashes.
A stronger love
Note Shakespeare’s ordering: The images diminish in scope from a “time of year” to a single “twilight” to a single small “fire.” We see the year’s light fade, a day’s light fade and a firelight fade. Life grows smaller and smaller.
Yet the speaker’s physical diminishment makes his friend’s love, not weaker, but “more strong.” Perceiving how swift is time’s passage and how brief our time here helps us recognize how precious a gift being is — and how much more precious its Giver. Our lives flourish and fall, fragile and brief as little flowers. As St. Peter writes, “The grass withers, / and the flower falls, / but the word of the Lord endures forever” (1 Pt 1:24-25). Let us, recalling this, love more strongly God and one another as our Lord commands so that, through our little lives, he may be magnified.
Sonnet 73
By William Shakespeare
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.
