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11 The Hills Are Shadows Time the Devourer Shakespeare, the most Ovidian of poets, enjoyed special prominence in the age of evolution, the age of Darwin and Lyell, who studied changes wrought in biology and the earth’s history by time the devourer , the subject of Shakespeare’s most moving sonnets. Honing Ockham’s razor, Darwin used it to dispense with design and submerge the world in a maelstrom of accidental variation and random flux. Any study of Shakespeare ’s influence on the poetics and intellectual milieu of the Victorians raises the ghost of Ovid’s tempus edax. With childlike simplicity Shakespeare protests, “Time will come and take my love away” (sonnet 64, line 12). Time the devourer is the subject of Protagoras’s chilling prophecy in the fifteenth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Like filial ingratitude or the mouth that tears the hand for lifting food to it, Ovid’s Muse is self-devouring. In the end it eats itself up because its hunger is insatiable. Prophets of time’s power to level and destroy, Shakespeare and Ovid, Tennyson and T. H. Huxley all attest to the terrible divinity of Krishna, who announces in words made famous by Robert Oppenheimer: “I am come as Time, the waster of the peoples,/Ready for that hour that ripens to their ruin.” As a sculptor of ruin in Shakespeare’s sonnets, tempus edax is a leveler, not because it devours everything, but because (as the greatest Victorian metaphysician tells us) “time is so far from enduring the test of criticism, that at a touch it falls apart and proclaims itself illusory” (Bradley, 1893, 183). As Augustine said, everyone understands time until asked to explain, then no one can say what it is. Imaged in vast expanses of geological time, “the iniquity of oblivion blindly scatters her poppy,” Sir Thomas Browne says, “and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity” (1967, 282). No alms for oblivion can moderate or tame the powerful undertow of Ovid’s Muse, time the devourer. To counter its terrible beauty, Shakespeare and his Victorian heirs try to grapple with the monster before it wastes their genera- 194 grace & death tions and sweeps them from the stage. Ovid is to Shakespeare what Lyell is to Tennyson: a Muse of mutability. Ovid and Lyell strand each poet “on the shore/Of that wide world” where Keats stands “alone,” brooding on oblivion, till his dream of “Love and Fame to nothingness” does “sink” (“When I Have Fears,” lines 12–14). The Victorian poet’s fear of oblivion is the center of a much larger anxiety about metamorphosis shared by Shakespeare and Ovid, who realize that “the question ubi sunt may turn up in snow or flowers long before it’s realized to be death” (Frye, 2004, 13). In The Tempest, Prospero’s “dark backward and abysm of time” (1.2.50) turns a menacing backside to Miranda’s mind whenever she tries to open channels to her past. Like Tennyson, she experiences an inexpressible yearning for the long ago and done. But as time slowly erodes her earliest memories , they become portions and parcels of “the dreadful past.” The “passion of the past,” an indefinable regret and yearning for things that are no more, is expressed most eloquently in Tennyson’s Virgilian lyric “Tears, Idle Tears,” where the chill that falls across the “happy Autumn-fields” is not far removed from the chill that descends on Tithonus when Aurora bathes him coldly in her deathly but enticing rosy shadows. When Tennyson asks, “Is this the end? Is this the end?” in In Memoriam, an elegy that took seventeen years to complete, his echo of Kent’s ineffectual interruption of Lear’s protracted agony, “Is this the promised end?,” is less an appropriation of Shakespeare than an example of Shakespeare’s taking possession of him. We may say of such lines what T. S. Eliot says of the “Dark house” elegy in In Memoriam: they give us the shudder. As Hopkins says of Wordsworth ’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” the soul has been in a quiver, like a vibrating string, trembling between dread and subdued elation, ever since. $$$ There are few apocalypses in Victorian poetry and fiction, and few in Shakespeare . Tennyson’s monologues end at the penultimate moment, not at the moment their speakers anticipate and expect. When Kent asks about a promised end in King Lear, Edgar speaks only of “an image of that horror.” As...

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