The third quatrain shifts into legal terms. To the
“sensual fault” of the young man, the speaker “bring[s]
in sense” (l. 9), a punning phrase that may refer to
incense, the holy smoke sometimes used to expiate
sins. The phrase also illustrates how the carefully con-
trolled sonnet form helps make sense of the young
man’s senseless betrayal of the speaker. It may also
mean the speaker is now incensed—in a rage—about
the trespass he has just authorized. The sonnet repre-
sents a terrible paradox for the speaker: He should be
the adverse party or complainant in an action against
the transgressor, but by generously offering forgive-
ness in the fi rst quatrain, he has instead become the
young man’s “advocate” (l. 10). This, the speaker real-
izes, perhaps to his shame, means that he is commenc-
ing a “lawful plea” against himself and has gone to
court as both the prosecutor and defense attorney.
Like the natural images that move from thorns to can-
ker, the legal image becomes much larger in the fi nal
line of the third quatrain as the speaker’s confl icting
emotions, his “love and hate,” blossom into “civil war”
(l. 12). The war is “civil” in several senses: It is con-
ducted in legal terms, it is internal (within the speaker;
within the relationship), it is conducted in civilized
terms (the elegant rhetoric of the sonnet), and it is
self-destructive.
The legal language continues in the sonnet’s COU-
PLET: The civil war between the speaker’s love and hate
has made him an “accessory,” a coconspirator in the
trespass rather than its victim, and this, sadly, is a posi-
tion that his love for the young man makes necessary:
He “needs must be” an accomplice “To that sweet thief
which sourly robs from me.” The label “sweet thief”
links the beloved to the “sweetest bud” in which the
“loathsome canker” lives, and shows the speaker’s
awareness that the young man is treacherous company.
In an unusual use of punctuation in the 1609 edition
of the poems, the fi nal line of Sonnet 35 ends with a
comma rather than a period. This allows Sonnet 36 to
continue the story of the young man’s transgression
and its aftermath, and to deliver a verdict on the “sweet
thief.”
See also SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS (OVERVIEW).
Catherine Loomis
Shakespeare’s sonnets: Sonnet 60 (“Like as the
waves make towards the pebbled shore”) WIL-
LIAM SHAKESPEARE (1599) Though Sonnet 60 is
written in the SONNET format of three QUATRAINs and a
COUPLET traditionally associated with WILLIAM SHAKE-
SPEARE, this poem has its roots in book 15 of OVID’s
Metamorphoses. Tradition places this sonnet in a group
of “immortality” sonnets that runs from Sonnet 54 to
Sonnet 65. The person addressed in Sonnet 60 is tradi-
tionally considered to be a young man, known as the
LOVELY BOY.
The poem begins with the unidentifi ed speaker
making an analogy between the undulation of waves
and people’s movement through time. The speaker
observes that just as the ocean’s waves move toward
the pebble-covered shore, the minutes of our lives
hurry toward their end (functioning, for example, like
the sands of time slipping through the hourglass). Each
wave changes places with the wave that goes before it,
all of them struggling to press forward, one after the
other, in order to reach the shore. Similarly, the bright
light of birth, and all of its inherent possibilities, gives
way to maturity, which eclipses the bright light of pos-
sibilities, allowing time, which is so generous to us in
our youth, to take back its gifts. Time, the eternal
reaper, removes the bloom of youth and digs furrows
into beauty’s brow, feeding on what is rare in “nature’s
truth” (l. 11), leaving nothing standing for time’s scythe
to mow down. The couplet concludes the poem by
suggesting a solution to the problem of resisting
throughout the future: This verse will still stand, prais-
ing the beloved’s worth even through the havoc that
has been caused by the ravages of time, thereby resist-
ing time’s movement with its stasis.
Critics often address the tentativeness of the prom-
ise of immortality as it appears in this sonnet. The pos-
sibility of defying death is less secure here than in
previous poems in the sequence, such as in Sonnet 19.
In the process of developing the idea of immortality,
the CONCEIT has become almost an afterthought to the
statement the poet has been making throughout the
sequence about just how universal the progress of time
really is. All of humanity starts from the same place
and progresses through the same stages to reach the372 SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS: SONNET 60