No one who has read the plays or sonnets of Shakespeare can fail to recognize Shakespeare is a man obsessed by the concept of time. In the sonnets, he is also extremely preoccupied by beauty, but often it is how time impacts the nature of all things beautiful except for art (especially Sonnets!). This analysis will explore various Shakespearean sonnets in order to demonstrate the significance “His Literary Eminence” invests in the concepts of time and love. Each sonnet will be indicated by number. With more than 150 sonnets, we can hardly hope to touch upon all of the ones that lend significance to time and/or beauty, thus we shall look at five in order to see this aspect that runs through many other sonnets.
If we look for the significance of time and beauty in Shakespeare’s sonnets, we do not have to look very long or deep to see its pervasive presence throughout the sonnets. In Shakespeare’s sonnets, time (mortality) if often the reality against which other things are measured or worth. In Sonnet 2, the speaker informs his intended one of how little physical beauty matters in the face of time “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow / And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field, / Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now, / Will be a tattered weed, of small worth held” (Shakespeare S2). The speaker then goes on to warn his intended that if they grow old and remain in search of shallow praise and vanity, they will only be able to answer the question of what happened to their beauty as an old, consumed shell. However, if they spend their lives in more profound and worthy pursuits than vanity or physical beauty, they will not only account for their aged appearance but will have retained beauty “How much more praise deserved they beauty’s use / If thou couldst answer, ‘This fair child of mine / Shall sum my count and make my old excuse.’ / Proving his beauty by succession thine!” (Shakespeare S2)....