GAUNT O, but they say the tongues of dying men
Enforce attention like deep harmony.
When words are scarce they are seldom spent in vain
For they breathe truth that breathe their words in pain;
He that no more must say is listened more
Than they whom youth and ease have taught to gloze;
More are men’s ends marked than their lives before;
The setting sun and music at the close,
As the last taste of sweets, is sweetest last,
Writ in remembrance more than things long past. (2.1.5-14)
Gaunt begins to set up a rich combination of proverbial wisdom and prophetic utterance. They say (who says?) that when men speak at the point of death, people listen; the tongues of dying men enforce attention like deep harmony. The words of the dying are compelling, arresting—not like sweet melody (which would scan just as well) but something more profound, quite literally, deep harmony, the kind of music which has an almost existential resonance. The music of the spheres? (This idea will return, sort of, in Richard’s final speech.) In the scene of their parting, only a few moments of stage time earlier, Bolingbroke had spoken of his own lack of words, and time, to say what he wanted to say to his father Gaunt (and then spoke with great eloquence): here Gaunt embraces the constraints of both time and breath, the labour which utterance costs him, as a guarantor of eloquence and profundity. If you have only scarce words, if you breathe your words in pain, then you breathe truth—and listeners recognize that. (And that aphoristic observation—the proverbial ‘Dying men speak true’ was current at the time—is of course formed as a neat couplet.) And he then restates and develops the idea over four lines, rhymed abab: the person who no more must say, who is uttering their final words, is listened to more seriously and closely than young people, who speak casually, who gloze, are witty and verbose and, perhaps, specious. (A sly irony, stretching the less-is-more commonplace over four lines, as Gaunt compares himself to his nephew the King.) And the commonplaces continue: more are men’s ends marked than their lives before extends it a bit, but very much reflects the concern with making a good death, and the change, post-Reformation, in what that might mean. Early modern drama reflected the fetishization of last words, especially of those about to be executed, found in early modern culture, and it’s sometimes suggested that that’s why poison is so popular in revenge tragedy, because it allows for an extended death scene. (Not relevant to Gaunt, here, but a fun fact.) Also underpinning this speech (and the one which follows) are ideas about age and its insights, ideas which are often discerned (however erroneously) in Shakespeare’s own late work, and associated with simplicity, serenity, culmination. But that lies far ahead. Here Gaunt makes a wonderfully synaesthetic connection between the beauty of the sunset, the conclusion of a piece of music (harmony again, and resolution, implicitly), and the last taste of sweets, the sweetmeats which might conclude a banquet: all of these are given an additional sweetness and poignancy and resonance because they are last things, because they are endings—and, moreover, because they are last things they are more memorable than things long ago.
The language and conceits here—of time, age, music, sunset, lingering sweetness, writing, and memory—are pretty standard, but they’re also familiar from the Sonnets (30, for instance, and especially 73). And although the relationship between speaker and addressee in the Sonnets is different to that between Gaunt and Richard, uncle and nephew, father and son, they share some of the same impulses and images.
