Shakespeare
uses the word 'time' seventy-eight times in the sonnets 1-126. As we go through
the sonnets it seems to us that the narrator is hauntingly preoccupied with the
passing of time and everything that it entails, including mortality, memory,
inevitability, and change. He is distressed over such things that he has no
control over time ,but still he tries to conquer the time.At times it seems
that the speaker is fighting a futile battle against time itself.
Time personified
Shakespeare
often personifies time.It is said that Time is the fourth character in his
sonnets.But the Time is the great villain in Shakespeare’s
sonnets-drama.Shakespeare describes time as a "bloody tyrant" (Sonnet
16), "devouring" and "swift-footed" (Sonnet 19). Time is
making Shakespeare old and near "hideous night" (Sonnet 12) or death.
And time will eventually rob the beauty of the young man. This treatment of
time is prevalent throughout the sonnets, and it takes many different forms,
sometimes referring to the destructive power of time in general, other times
focusing on the effects of time on a specific character in the sonnets such as
the narrator or the fair lord.
In the first seventeen sonnets which are called
the procreation sonnets Skakespeare makes an earnest plea to the fair lord,
begging him to find a woman to bear his child so that his beauty might be
preserved for posterity. In these 17 sonnets the treatment of time is almost.
Through the imagery of military, winter, and the Sun the speaker tries to give
the picture of the ravages of time. In sonnet 2, the poet writes, "When
forty winters shall beseige thy brow / And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's
field ... Time is the great enemy, besieging the youth's brow, digging trenches
— wrinkles — in his face, and ravaging his good looks. In the sonnet 5 he
repeates the same theme and says that hours are tyrants that oppress him
because he cannot escape time's grasp. Time might "frame / The lovely gaze
where every eye doth dwell," meaning that everyone notices the youth's beauty,
but time's "never-resting" progress ensures that this beauty will
eventually fade.
