Shakespeare’s Sonnet 60: Time and Lasting Beauty

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,

So do our minutes hasten to their end;

Each changing place with that which goes before,

In sequent toil all forwards do contend.

Nativity, once in the main of light,

Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d,

Crooked elipses ’gainst his glory fight,

And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.

Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth

And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow,

Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,

And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:

And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,

Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

The speaker spends the majority of the poem using personification to describe time as a force that gives and then takes away. It chooses to destroy all of that which it once created.

Time leads even the best of nature into destruction, corrupting a pure brow with wrinkles.

In the last lines, the speaker says that no matter what time tries to do, his writings are going to survive forever, and therefore, so too will the youth’s beauty.