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Sonnet 65 Essay examples

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Sonnet 65 Sonnet 65 by Shakespeare argues that beauty and youth are illusions as they inevitably fade with the effects of time. The reader is pulled into the age old battle between humanity's desire for immortality and inevitable physical decay. Shakespeare suggests that it is only ideas captured by `black ink' (verses) that have any hope of transcending the test of time. The metaphoric loss of a legal battle by `beauty' against the `rage' of time in the first quatrain is intertwined with images of nature, to reinforce the idea that evading decay is hopeless. Time's metaphoric `battering' of the fortress of youth in the second quatrain warns that not even humanity's strongest attempts at self preservation can prevent mortality. The use …show more content…

His clever wordplay on `action', using the legal and physical sense of the word (Mahood 1968: 105), simultaneously supports the court battle metaphor and stresses the uselessness of the attempt to dissuade time. This clever use of metaphor and personification highlights the greater meaning, that our ploys to stay young are no more effective than a flower attempting to stop the advancement of time. The second quatrain holds an extended metaphor of a military battle between youth's strength and time's power of decay. Shakespeare uses `...summers hunny breath...' as a metaphor for youth and beauty. By giving `breath' to summer, it is personified into an image of a soft and lovely person- an epitome of youth. A breath is intermittent and only stays for a whim of time. This is important as it displays how the strength of youth is an illusion in the context of time. This holds particular relevance to the image of youth within a fortress trying to `...hold out' against a `siege' by the battering ram of an army (time) in lines five and six. The deliberate reference to such sturdy materials as `rocks impregnable' and `gates of steele', is used to reinforce the irony that they too will succumb to time. In essence showing that time, like an army, can crush love and youth as

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