Sonnet 64

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;

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;

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.

This thought is as a death, which cannot choose

But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

The theme of the 64th sonnet is mortality, entropy, decay. The context is set by no fewer than ten lines of examples from the natural and political worlds. Everything falls away, into rot and ruin and desuetude and age.

Time's cruel hand is responsible for the disfigurements of age, when the richness of youth is obliterated in gradual wearing-out. Once-tall towers crumble away, supposedly durable brass is consumed by deadly tarnishing, and the ocean erodes the land, or else it drains away to dry land. These 'interchange[s] of state' all have the cumulative effect of loss, and are compounded by the fact that each state itself may as well be subject to decay as to entropic transformation (where 'state' has the supplementary meaning of the political state in which, like Hamlet, we can suspect something may be rotten).

The evidence of ruin is all around, so much so that the condition seems to seed the mental activity of rumination, where only the corruptible twin arches of an intercedent 'm' disguise the presence of more ruination. And what he ru(m)inates is love, which can't be any more immune to decay than anything else is. Whether the immediate cause be mortal illness or some other rival, Time will inevitably take the boy away.

A synthesis of ruining and ruminating produces the melancholy conclusion of the couplet: 'This thought is as a death'. Having the lover inevitably raises the possibility of one day losing him, so that joy always contains the seeds of a potential helpless sorrow. The thought has a deathly foreboding, but is also in itself the means of envisioning such a death.

One of the two partners in a relationship is always more fatalistic than the other. He foresees the end in every disagreement, in every disaffection, in every alienation of sympathy. To the common wisdom, he is the partner who 'thinks too much'. Shakespeare's lover is fully aware of the corrosive nature of such excess of thinking. The too-much-examined love is not worth living. But the implication is that all thinking about love is dangerous, as though love were at its most efficacious when simply inhabited like a building, or travelled through like air or water. To look objectively at it is to become aware of its mortality, where, for all its towering stature or brass-bound robustness now, it is as susceptible to the predation of Time as towers or brass.

In the 20th century, Coward ends a lyric of self-accusing fatalism thus:

I am no good at love

I betray it with little sins

For I feel the misery of the end

In the moment that it begins

And the bitterness of the last good-bye

Is the bitterness that wins.

In previous stanzas, he gets the tone of the love-affair wrong, or else poisons the atmosphere with unfounded jealousies. But it is here in the final lines that the most odious crime of the thinking lover emerges. He sees love's end at its very beginning, and the final moment of separation will be the prevailing mood of his memory of it. Nothing is stronger than loss, and nothing is more inevitable. The thought is not just of death, but is in itself a death.

How to love, and not think about it?