Free Essays On Shakespeares Sonnet 65 :: Sonnet essays

Analysis of Sonnet 65   Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, only sad mortality oersways their power, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose fill is no salutaryer than a flower? Oh how shall summers honey breath hold aside Against the wrackful siege of battering days, When rocks impregnable are not so sturdy Nor gates of steel so strong but condemnation decays? Oh terrific meditation where, alack, Shall Times better jewel from Times chest lie hid? Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back? Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid? Oh none, unless this miracle have might- That in minacious ink my love may still shine bright.       This sonnet shares virtually(prenominal) similarities in imagery as sonnets 63 and 66, and also to the antecedent of cadence and Rome as seen in Spencers translatory sonnet sequence, _Ruins of Rome by Bellay_. To best understand this sonnet we must realize to what or whom the pronou ns refer to. My explication relies on their in line 2 referring to both time and ruin, a theme sustained from sonnet 64. 1-2 Only depressing mortality can overturn the monocracy of time and ruin, considering that brass, stone, earth or sea cannot prevent it. Thus, death is an pretermit from time and the ruin which it imposes. The second quatrain is reminiscent of the thematic imagery of Romes susception to time in sonnet 9 of _Ruines of Rome_ Why were not these Romane palaces / Made of some matter no lesse fime and strong? . . . All things which beneath the Moone haue being / ar temporall, and subject to decay. Echoing the elements in the first line of the sonnet, Shakespeare is iterating the inability to bend and prevent time. Battering days also shares this imagery as Times injurious hand crushd which, to note further, appears as iniurious time in Spencers work. Knowing this, he appeals to dreadful and injurious knowledge in line 9 where should we fog times most precious jew el our youth from the vault it is held in. the reason I mean the jewel to be a symbol of youth stems from sonnet 63, in which time steals away the treasure of his spring. Spring here, and in many another(prenominal) sonnets of Shakespeare, refers to youth and sexual prime.