Sonnet 65

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?

O how shall summer's honey breath hold out

Against the wrackful siege of batt'ring days,

When rocks impregnable are not so stout,

Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?

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?

O none, unless this miracle have might,

That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Since there is nothing on earth that isn't subject to the sway of mortality, including the most elemental forces, youthful beauty in its fragility is hardly likely to endure. The idyllic summer days of happiness are likewise perishable, since time decays everything. In this sense, everything is in the possession of Time, including the lover's handsomeness, which has no more chance of hiding from its depredations than do rocks or steel. Nothing can stop Time's fleet-footed hurry, nor prevent it from reclaiming its own... unless the act of capturing the boy's beauty in written words has a chance of cheating it of the complete victory.

The controlling metaphors of sonnet 65 are first legal, and then military. In the opening four lines, beauty is under the 'sway', or legal jurisdiction, of mortality, so that it has no chance of 'holding a plea' in Time's court, and its judicial action is no stronger than either the flower, or indeed the poem's distinctly feeble fourth line.

Then suddenly we leave the courtroom for a scene of siege, where the passing days are battering rams that will break down beauty as easily as (surely more easily than) they do natural fortifications or steel gates. As in the 64th sonnet, to which the present one can be read as a companion piece, the realisation itself is fatal. 'This thought is as a death' in 64 becomes here the equally querulous 'O fearful meditation', prior to the poem's most troubling metaphor, the idea that the lover's beauty properly belongs in the sealed chest of Time, as its 'best jewel'. By the twelfth line, it has become once again the trophy, or 'spoil', of that indomitable military campaign that Time conducts, and always wins. Its wasting action is so 'fearful' precisely because it jealously holds on to what it considers its own, with the express purpose of ruining it. Time's chest might as well be the dog's manger of classical fable.

The only wager against this fate is the poet's self-reflection at the close, that in the very act of recording the boy's beauty for posterity, of writing it down 'in black ink', it may paradoxically continue to scintillate as brightly as it does at the moment the sonnet is written. If there is any way of joining the war against Time, it lies in the possible afterlife of the literary work, for all that such a thought wryly strikes the poet as hoping for a miracle.

Art is the last resort by which the perishable may be preserved against the onslaught of the days and years, and even that seems a matter of crossed fingers. The pathos of sonnets 64 and 65, their curdled fatalism, derives from the poet's inability to treasure what beauty there is while it exists, rather than looking onward to its inevitable decay, and so already surrendering the precious jewel to Time's own treasure-chest.