Horace. Similarly, Renaissance “ruins poetry,” by
EDMUND SPENSER and others, provides “mortal rage”
with connotations of civic strife. This less-obvious
meaning foreshadows the political and military meta-
phors that follow.
See also “RUIN, THE”; SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM; SHAKE-
SPEARE’S SONNETS (OVERVIEW).
FURTHER READING
Hieatt, A. Kent. “The Genesis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets:
Spenser’s Ruines of Rome: by Bellay.” PMLA 98, no. 5
(1983): 800–814.
Brett Foster
Shakespeare’s sonnets: Sonnet 65 (“Since
brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless
sea”) WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1599) In Sonnet 65,
the speaker ponders how his beloved can survive the
destructive effects of time, since nothing or no one on
earth can do so. Most of the imagery in this SONNET
derives from nature and natural objects and how they
react to the changes caused by time and aging. This
kind of change is often referred to as mutability, a word
that means “change,” but in literary studies it usually
refers to the destructive changes that are wrought by
time and are inescapable.
The fi rst quatrain begins with the observation that
things we usually think of as very strong—the metal
brass, stones, earth, and the sea—cannot escape the
power of “sad mortality” (l. 2). This last phrase is used
here to indicate the power of mutability and the sad-
ness it causes humans because of its destructive power.
Critic Stephen Booth reminds us that “to hold a plea”
(l. 3) is a legal term meaning to successfully argue an
“action” (l. 4) or a law case. Thus, if all these very
strong things cannot hold out against mortality, then
how can beauty? After all, beauty is “no stronger than a
fl ower” (l. 4).
The second quatrain works in a similar way. The
speaker lists some additional strong things—rocks and
steel gates—that are “decayed” by mutability, referred
to as “the wreckful siege of battering days” (l. 6). If
these things are “not so stout” (l. 7) against the attacks
of time, how can “summer’s honey breath” (l. 5)—a
beautiful but transient time in our life—hold out? In
the third quatrain, we see how these thoughts scare the
speaker. He feels the fear that all humans feel as beings
trapped in time: Everyone grows older because there is
no choice. Close friends, lovers, family members, and
pets will die. Even possessions will decay: fl owers from
a lover, clothes, and so on.
Once he realizes this, the speaker tries to think of a
way that mutability can be defeated, especially in terms
of his lover. The speaker refers to the beloved as “time’s
best jewel” (l. 10), an acknowledgement that the
beloved lives within time and can also be seen as a gift
of time. The speaker, however, does not seem to think
about the possibility of his own decay, only that of the
beloved. In this way, the speaker is like all lovers, car-
ing more about the survival and happiness of the lover
than about himself. In fact, the speaker wishes to fi nd
a place to hide the beloved from “time’s chest” (l. 10).
This could be a treasure chest where time keeps those
especially precious things like its “best jewel,” the
beloved. Or the word chest could refer to a “coffi n,” the
ultimate destiny of all humans.
The speaker also asks two impossible questions
about controlling time, which is now imaged as human.
Who has a hand strong enough to hold back time’s
foot, asks the speaker. The image here is of time run-
ning after the beloved to capture him or her. Or who,
asks the speaker, can “forbid,” or prevent, time from
“spoiling” beauty, as in destruction by an invader.
Again the speaker shows time to be invulnerable to the
puny attempts by a fl ower or a sweet breeze—which
are the only strengths of the speaker or the beloved—
to control it.
Even though the speaker has spent 12 lines describ-
ing a very uneven struggle between himself and his
beloved against the almost supernatural powers of time
or mutability, he shows in the COUPLET that the poet/
writer ultimately has more power than time. The
speaker states that, given time’s power, only a miracle
can overcome it. Yet the miracle he indicates is some-
how smaller than we might expect. The speaker does
not need magical or futuristic weapons to defl ect the
force of time. He only needs a pen and paper. For “in
black ink” (l. 14), the lines describing the beloved that
the poet writes on paper, the love and the beloved (as
well as the poet as lover/writer) may “shine bright” (l.374 SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS: SONNET 65