Theme: Age
Content: How the author's poetry will avenge time by preserving their beauty in his verse. Evidently inspired by Horace's Ode 3.30 as detailed below.
Against
my love shall be as I am now,
With time's injurious
hand crushed and o'erworn;
When hours have drained
his blood and filled his brow
With lines
and wrinkles;
when his youthful morn
- The central theme of age is alluded to from the first word Against.
Hath travelled on to age's
steepy night,
And all those beauties whereof now he's king
Are vanishing,
or vanished out of sight,
Stealing
away the treasure of his spring:
- Line 4 of Q1 runs straight on to line 1 of Q2 without stopping: Time's relentless pace.
- The central theme of age is now explicitly addressed.
For such a time do I now fortify
Against confounding
age's
cruel knife,
That he shall never cut from memory
My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life.
- The author's allusion and explicit thoughts on age are now joined and explicitly stated in the alliterative Against age.
His beauty shall in
these black lines
be seen,
And they shall live, and he in
them still green.
- The principle of the subject being represented literally in this sonnet is affirmed by the repeated use of words that contain the word in.
- The lines on the subject's face of Q1 now morph into the lines of the author's verse which give him new life.
Exegi monumentum aere perennius
Regalique situ pyramidum altius,
Quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens
Possit diruere, aut innumerabilis
Annorum series et fuga temporum.
I have built a monument more lasting than bronze,
Higher than the pyramids on their regal throne,
Which neither the wasting rain, nor the north
wind in its fury
Could ever destroy, nor the innumerable
Sequence of the years and swift time
Horace: Ode 3.30
Critical text © NigelDavies.home@Virgin.net