Theme: Time
Content: Time ravages everything, even things far stronger than the subject's beauty, but there is hope that it will live on in the author's verse. Evidently inspired by Horace's Ode 3.30 as detailed below.
Since brass,
nor stone,
nor earth, nor
boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'ersways their power,
How with this rage
shall beauty hold a
plea,
Whose action
is no stronger
than a flower?
- Brass alliterates into stone, which alliterates into earth.
- As in Sonnet 64, rage contains the problem that has caused that emotion: age.
- In this quatrain, beauty holds a plea and strength is no stronger than a flower.
- Assonance of ac threads throughout the sonnet.
O how shall summer's honey breath hold
out
Against the wrackful
siege of battering days
When rocks
impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong,
but time decays?
- Assonance of ac sound continues with wrackful, rocks, decays, alack, back, miracle, black and ink.
- In this quatrain summer's honey breath tries to hold out and gates of steel are not strong enough to combat time.
O fearful meditation! Where, alack,
Shall time's best jewel from time's chest lie
hid?
Or what strong
hand can hold his
swift foot back,
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
- In this quatrain a strong hand is needed to hold back time's foot on its march.
- Two questions now in this quatrain, as opposed to one per quatrain previously.
O none, unless this miracle
have might:
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
- In the couplet, the sonnet has literally lost its strong hold.
- "Time" is reversed phonetically in might and defeated by the verse.
- The prospect of the subject's beauty living on in the black ink of the author's verse is now classified as a miracle.
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