The Place 2 Be: Shakespeare's Sonnets

Critique of Sonnet 64

SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

Theme: Time
Content: The destructive nature of time and its eventual taking of the author's subject.

When I have seen by time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime-lofty towers I see down razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

The clock-face of time is given a tangible, physical attribute of its hand being able to fell and deface earthly architecture.

age is reflected in rage.

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the wat'ry main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;

Nature is now portrayed as being destructive to itself over time, with the ocean and the soil giving and taking in the ebb and flow. This quatrain is evidently inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book 15 on geological changes: "I have seen myself what was once firm land, become the sea. I have seen earth made from the waters, and seashells lie far away from the ocean, and an ancient anchor has been found on a mountaintop. The down rush of waters has made what was once a plain into a valley; and hills, by the deluge have been washed to the sea. Marshy land has drained to parched sand and what was once thirsty ground filled with a marshy pool".

age is again reflected in Advantage.

Possible pun of hour in shore thereby emphasising the theme of time.

When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay,
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate:
That time will come and take my love away.

Government is now portrayed as being destroyed over time (but only in line 10, as line 9's reference to "interchange of state" refers to the preceding description of the battle between the sea and land)..

Ruin, the cost of time, is found within ruminate, showing that time is destructive to the author's thoughts.

This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

Having opened each quatrain with When I have seen, the couplet changes from a visual to a cerebral angle with This thought.

After all the When I have quatrain openings, the author can now really possess something, but it is only to weep to have the thought - he will actually lose the subject.

The ocean now morphs into the author's tears.