GAUNT            I thank my liege that in regard of me

He shortens four years of my son’s exile.

But little vantage shall I reap thereby,

For ere the six years that he hath to spend

Can change their moons and bring their times about,

My oil-dried lamp and time-bewasted light

Shall be extinct with age and endless night.

My inch of taper will be burnt and done

And blindfold death not let me see my son. (1.3.216-224)

A complex response from Gaunt to Richard’s magnanimous gesture: of course he is grateful that his son’s sentence of exile has been reduced; he is sensible of the way in which it has been made with regard to him, not Bolingbroke himself. His language is precise and formal, especially in his use of the third person to refer to the king, rather than a direct address. But Gaunt is still realistic, and bitter with it: little vantage shall I reap thereby. It costs the king little, could gain him (perhaps) much praise for his magnanimity, and will probably make no difference at all to Gaunt himself. Gaunt expects to be dead before even six years have passed: he draws a fine contrast between large-scale time, wheeling planets, the shifting phases of the moon and the seasons, and the small, feeble, domestic scale of the time which remains to him: the lamp of his life is oil-dried, almost out of fuel; he is time-wasted, exhausted, almost out of time, with only an inch of his taper, his candle, left to burn. He faces the darkness of more or less imminent death: no light of moon or sun, lamp or candle. Consigned to that darkness by the vivid blindfold death, he will never be able to see his son again.

This is a passage which links neatly and interestingly to the conceits of the sun and the heavens, gold and light which operate in the play. The moon not the sun (inconstant, closer to the mundane), fading lamps and melting candle stubs, not the radiance of golden sunbeam or gleaming gold. Gaunt describes himself as time-bewasted: Richard himself will observe, much later, I wasted time and now doth time waste me… The sonnets lurk here too, in their exploration of time as a devouring, damaging, impersonal, unstoppable force, against which human beings are all too powerless.