Theme: Time
Content: The subject is now starting to show their age as time's imperceptible but relentless move forward is reflected in a feast of explicit and allusory references to time and the digits on a clock's dial.
To me, fair
friend,
you never can be old;
For as you were
when first your
eye
I eyed,
Such seems your beauty
still.
Three
winters cold
Have from
the forests shook
three
summers' pride;
- The visual nature of the subject's beauty is 3-times emphasised in eye I eyed.
- The Trinity is perhaps alluded to in Three winters and three summers but 3 years was the conventional time-span in poetry that a relationship needed to fully develop.
- Three winters cold Have from the forests shook three summers' pride rather echoes Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May from Sonnet 18 and Upon those boughs which shake against the cold from Sonnet 73.
- Allusion to 1 in first.
- Allusion to 2 in To which, significantly, provides a number-word to open the quatrain.
- Explicit reference to 3 in three.
- Allusion to 4 in For and forests.
- Heavy f alliteration throughout the sonnet augmented by heavy s usage which is printed like an f in the Quarto.
- The timeframe in Q1 is seasons as in Three winters and three summers.
Three beauteous
springs to yellow
autumn turned
In process of
the seasons have I seen,
Three April perfumes
in three hot
Junes burned
Since first I saw
you fresh, which
yet are green.
- Three is explicitly stated here which, again, provides a number-word to open the quatrain.
- Three is hammered out in three successive lines that bridge Q1 and Q2 then resumes in a further line: three repeated throughout 4 lines; the 4 seasons repeated in three lines; three used 5 times in all.
- Pun on eyes in I seen and I saw.
- Allusion to 2 in to.
- Allusion to 1 in first.
- I appears three times in the sonnet.
- The timeframe in Q2 now reduces to months as in Three April and three hot Junes.
Ah yet doth beauty,
like a dial hand,
Steal from
his figure and
no pace perceived;
So your sweet hew,
which methinks still doth stand,
Hath motion, and mine eye
may be deceived.
- No number-word to open this quatrain, nor any explicit or allusory references to any specific numbers within it, which is typically the one where there is a change in direction or thought in the sonnet. Steal from his figure indicates that the figures / numbers have been stolen.
- Yet another reference to hew, as used several times elsewhere in the sonnets (20, 67, 82, 98) and italicised in Sonnet 20 suggesting it had contemporary significance. Possibly a pun on the subject's name (Henry Wriothesley, Shakespeare's patron? William Hughes? Mr. W.H. of the Sonnets Dedication?).
- Further allusion to the numbers theme in figure.
- Repeat of eye emphasising the visual beauty of the subject.
- The timeframe in Q3 now reduces to the microscopic and imperceptible movement of a clock's dial hand.
For fear
of
which, hear this,
thou age unbred:
Ere you were born
was beauty's
summer dead.
- Resumption of the technique of using a number-word opening for the couplet: For for 4, thus providing a progressive 2, 3, 4 pattern to the sonnet's sections representing unstoppable time.
- Triple internal rhyme in fear...hear...Ere.
- The word beauty appears three times in the sonnet.
- The timeframe in the couplet now branches out to a whole lifetime from conception to death (unbred...born...dead) but is paradoxically condensed into just 2 brief lines representing the transient brevity of life.
- dead concludes the sonnet and the subject's beauty and life.
The imagery in this sonnet centred around Three winters cold Have from the forests shook three summers' pride; may have been inspired by part of Horace's Epode XI:...hic tertius December, ex quo destiti
Inachia furere, silvis honorem decutit......This the third December, since I abandoned
seething love for Inachia, which now shakes from the forests all their honour...
Critical text © NigelDavies.home@Virgin.net