NAME: CARMEN NOLLET ALASCIO
ACTIVITY: “SONNET 60”, BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
The present sonnet belongs to the Renaissance poet William Shakespeare’s work, the
greatest of all man of letters in English language. There, the Bard mourns days and
minutes; in short, the inexorable passage of time. In this way, the poem begins with a
simile in which “waves” and “minutes” represent the great ‘temporary’ protagonist in the
text: time, and, what’s more, introduces death by the phrase “the pebbled shore”. Images
come after each other along a, not long but complete, description of the scenery to take
the reader to a desolated place, where human condition tackles what is inevitable; thus,
the author traverse the stages of life from “nativity” to the moment in which the wrinkles
of time that leave a scar on his face – between verses 9 and 12 stands out an antithesis
that demonstrates this argument – but “nothing stands but for his scythe to mow”. His
intention towards poetry isn’t any but the one of immortalising, generally, the written
word, and, specially, his own name. The role played by the matter of time in the
description broached in the poem is, the more, worth mentioning because, besides the fact
that it is a common theme in the lyrical production of the epoch – just like the astrologic
issue during the Elizabethan era –, the use that Shakespeare makes of it is perfectly
balancing and distributed, considering that it shows its effects on the human problems
creating an interstellar atmosphere that submerge the reader in a return trip across time-
space.
Regarding the formal aspects of the text, the rhyme follows a harmonious scheme
that provides the verses with musicality and firmness, typical of the iambic meter: a ‘stand
out’ for the reader’s ears. Also the vocabulary used by Shakespeare is evident towards
the immersive nature of the poem, since words as crawl, confound, transfix, delves, scythe
or mow call up anguish and sorrow; nevertheless, a halo of hope reveals against
everything pejorative that devastates the poetic voice, and is, as we have been saying, the
quality of everlasting in literature, concretely, in William Shakespeare’s: stoic figure who
races against time and an iconic model to the subsequent universal literature.