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William ShakespeareSonnet 60
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1609A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Impermanence of Human Life
In the second quatrain, Shakespeare speeds up the entire course of a human life to fit in a day. This is to suit his metaphor of life as the rising sun, but the timelapse also shows that life itself is as short as a day. It begins to descend as soon as it peaks, its radiant beauty now marred by “crooked eclipses” (Line 7). The greatest irony of short-lived life is that its peak—youth—is even briefer. In the third quatrain, the poet notes that the lush extravagance of beauty is easily marred by rows of wrinkles planted by time. Time is depicted as a cruel, vampire-like force feeding on beauty and truth. All these examples illustrate the theme of the impermanence of life, especially youth and beauty. The poet is always acutely aware that human minutes are ephemeral and fragile, an idea reinforced through the images of waves breaking on the rocky shore in the first stanza.
Even when the poet describes the glorious parts of life—nativity and youth—the accompanying vocabulary is conflicted, indicating his awareness that the glory is impermanent. For instance, he notes that “nativity, once in the main of light, / crawls to maturity”(Lines 5-6). Infancy, the expanse of light, is already ended, as denoted by “once” (Line 5). It doesn’t race to maturity but “crawls” (Line 6), indicating a slow, struggling process. When maturity is crowned by youth in Line 7, it is immediately forced to fight eclipses. The biblical allusion contained in Lines 7 and 8 reiterates the conceit of life as impermanent and filled with suffering. Like Jesus, crowned with thorns, had to suffer on the cross, here compared to the high point of the sun in the sky, so do humans.
The impermanence of life bothers the speaker so much because (it can be inferred) he has much to lose: his love, the youth and beauty of the love interest, and the time they have together. Nothing in his power can prevent the decay of life and beauty, which is why he flatly declares that “nothing stands but for his scythe to mow” (Line 12). The ending line of the third quatrain indicates that no natural process can stop death and decay, since like waves and plants, all natural things are born to perish. But this also raises hope that art and artifice can do what nature cannot, an idea expanded in the ending couplet of the sonnet.
Art and Immortality
In Sonnet 60, all natural events are described as headed toward an end. Nature contains beauty and motion, but also death, as evident from the movement of the waves in the opening stanza. The waves are in perpetual motion, like minutes, yet all that dynamism ends dashed on the shore. Similar is the fate of the beautiful sunrise. Once the sun was a sea of light, but its destiny is to fight eclipses, and ultimately set. Crops and flowers too bloom and die, harvested by the scythe of death. Death is thus natural and inevitable. The speaker has accepted this inconvertible fact from the very beginning of the sonnet. However, the sonnet’s quest is not only to illustrate this fact but to locate its counterpoint. If the march of nature is inevitable, what other means do humans have to preserve life and beauty?
The ending couplet may present an answer: “And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand, / Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand” (Lines 13-14). Having established time as a brutal foe in previous lines, the speaker now switches allegiance, committing his verse to time itself. He has described his love’s beauty and youth in art, and he hopes his art will stand the test of time. Having been preserved in poetry, beauty and youth shall become immortal. Here, art is presented as the antidote to mortality, and indeed, as contemporary readers revisit this sonnet written in the 16th century, the speaker’s wish appears to have come true. In terms of poetic tension, the hope of art is offered right after the speaker establishes the worst ravages of time. Time “feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth” (Line 11), devouring all that is beautiful and good, and its scythe spares no one, no matter how young or innocent or perfect. At this bleak point, the only hope is artifice; note that “verse” in Line 13 follows the “rarities of nature’s truth” in Line 11, thus connecting beauty, nature, truth, and art. Art is the only place where the beauty and truth of nature can be made immortal.
The Power and Cruelty of Time
Time as a cruel, impersonal force was a common idea in Renaissance and Elizabethan art and literature. Time was interchangeable with death, the latter often personified as the grim reaper armed with a scythe. Many of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, such as Edmund Spenser, dealt with the theme of the cruelty of time in their poetry, and the theme is common across Shakespeare’s own sonnet cycle. In Sonnet 60, time is at first presented as transient and repetitive, each human moment replacing another. The first stanza looks at time at the atomic level, as humans experience it in the passage of minutes. As the sonnet evolves, the relationship between humans and time changes. Now human time refers to the span of one individual life, and time itself telescopes out to a powerful entity larger than minutes, days, and even years.
Time is deliberately personified to represent a concrete adversary rather than an abstract idea, such as in Line 8: “Time that gave doth now his gift confound.” Time’s peculiar cruelty lies in the fact that it takes away what it once gave freely. In Lines 9 and 10, time “transfixes” the beauty it bestowed on youth through piercing youth’s smooth brow with wrinkles. The verb “transfix” in Shakespeare’s time also meant to pierce or lance, hence the image evoked of time is that of a terrible persona who uses his spear to deface beauty. Additionally, these lines contain a biblical allusion, that of soldiers piercing Jesus’s side when he was on the cross.
The idea of time as a weaponed adversary continues in the agricultural imagery of the last quatrain, where time is now the grim reaper, death itself personified. The lance or spear is now a farmer’s curved scythe, mowing down all that lives. Apart from time-imagery and the personification of time, the poet also uses words that indicate struggle to describe a human being’s uneasy relationship with time. In the first quatrain, the movement of the waves and human minutes is depicted as “sequent toil” (Line 4), a phrase evocative of repetitive, unending hard work, a Sisyphean labor. Youth “crawls” (Line 6) to its prime, the verb indicating a slow, laborious motion. The eclipses that mar the sun of youth are “crooked” (Line 7), while time “confound(s)” (Line 8) or confuses, “transfix(es)” or pierces, “delves” (Line 10) or penetrates, and “feeds” (Line 11) or consumes beauty and youth. These verbs and adjectives emphasize that time is constantly waging a battle against humans, and the individual tries to grab from time’s jaws whatever they can.
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