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As autumn deepens and the light fades earlier each day, we begin to measure time in quieter ways. Light & Time brings together two voices - Shakespeare and Vaughan - who, across centuries, reflect on what it means to age, and what lies beyond the boundaries of time itself.
In Sonnet 73, Shakespeare offers one of the most intimate meditations on aging ever written - not in fear, but with acceptance. He imagines himself as a fading fire, a tree stripped of its leaves, a twilight sky at rest. Yet from that awareness grows something stronger: love deepened by the knowledge of its fragility.
Henry Vaughan’s The World, written a generation later, lifts that same reflection into the cosmic. He sees eternity as a “great ring of pure and endless light,” with human life - its passions, wealth, and worry - whirling beneath it like shadows.
Where Shakespeare finds meaning in mortality, Vaughan finds it in what never dies.
Together, they remind us that the light within and the light beyond are not so different - both glimpsed most clearly when the world grows still.
By Phil RoweAs autumn deepens and the light fades earlier each day, we begin to measure time in quieter ways. Light & Time brings together two voices - Shakespeare and Vaughan - who, across centuries, reflect on what it means to age, and what lies beyond the boundaries of time itself.
In Sonnet 73, Shakespeare offers one of the most intimate meditations on aging ever written - not in fear, but with acceptance. He imagines himself as a fading fire, a tree stripped of its leaves, a twilight sky at rest. Yet from that awareness grows something stronger: love deepened by the knowledge of its fragility.
Henry Vaughan’s The World, written a generation later, lifts that same reflection into the cosmic. He sees eternity as a “great ring of pure and endless light,” with human life - its passions, wealth, and worry - whirling beneath it like shadows.
Where Shakespeare finds meaning in mortality, Vaughan finds it in what never dies.
Together, they remind us that the light within and the light beyond are not so different - both glimpsed most clearly when the world grows still.