that his love is, in the end, easily converted, or, in the
language of the market, easily exchanged?
See also SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM; SHAKESPEARE’S SON-
NETS (OVERVIEW).
FURTHER READING
Starkey, David. Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne. New
York: Harper Perennial, 2000.
Julie A. Chappell
Shakespeare’s sonnets: Sonnet 126 (“O thou,
my lovely boy, who in thy power”) WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE (1599) Sonnet 144 opens with a
famous declaration: “Two loves I have, of comfort and
despair”; one love is “a man right fair” (l. 3), to whom
the fi rst 126 of the sonnets are directed, and the other
“a woman color’d ill” (l. 4), sometimes referred to as
the DARK LADY, to whom sonnets 127 through 152 are
addressed. Sonnet 126 is the last sonnet to the fair
young man, and it is unusual in many ways.
Unlike the majority of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’s SON-
NETs, Sonnet 126 does not follow what has come to be
called the Shakespearean form (see ENGLISH SONNET).
Instead, it has only 12 lines: The rhyme scheme is aab-
bccddeeff; the narrative is presented in COUPLETs; and
what should be the fi nal couplet, lines 13 and 14, is, in
the original 1609 edition of the sonnets, represented
by two sets of empty parentheses spaced as if to mark
missing lines. At least in poetic terms, the relationship
with the LOVELY BOY does not end well.
The opening lines of Sonnet 126 recall the fi rst 17
sonnets, sometimes referred to as the procreation set,
in which the narrator urges the beautiful young man to
marry so that he can leave a copy of himself to the
world before time destroys his beauty. Now, however,
the young man seems to be in control of time rather
than at time’s mercy. Using the intimate pronoun thou,
the narrator reminds his “lovely boy” that the young
man holds in his power “Time’s fi ckle glass, his sickle
hour” (ll. 1–2). Time’s “glass” refers to the hourglass
that an allegorical fi gure of Time would hold, but glass
also means looking glass, or mirror. Many of the son-
nets mention that the young man’s beauty does not
seem to fade over time. The “sickle hour” refers to the
hour of death, when Time will mow the young man
down with his scythe.
The second couplet introduces a paradox: The young
man has “by waning grown” (l. 3). To wane usually
means to lose size and strength, but the young man
seems to have become more beautiful as he ages; as the
poet promised in Sonnet 18, his eternal summer really
has not faded. His lovers have not been so fortunate. In
direct address, the speaker reminds the young man of
this harsh truth: By not seeming to grow older, “[thou]
showest / Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow’st”
(ll. 3–4). Throughout the sonnets, the word sweet is fre-
quently and sometimes ironically applied to the young
man: His “sweet love” saves the poet from despair in
Sonnet 29; his transgression against the poet makes
him a “sweet thief” in Sonnet 35; his “sweet hue” is
untouched by time in Sonnet 104. The words sweet self
also appear not only in the fi nal sonnet addressed to the
young man, but also in the fi rst one (Sonnet 1, l. 8),
and by reusing the phrase, Shakespeare links the begin-
ning of the relationship to its end.
The next pair of couplets forms a unit in which the
narrator asserts that Nature is preventing the young
man from aging in order to show off the skill she
employed in making him in the fi rst place. Nature is
declared the “sovereign mistress over wrack” (l. 5), a
reminder that all natural beings eventually die and
decay. As Time passes, the young man is plucked back
by Nature in order that she may show her superiority
to Time. Proud of her work in creating the young man,
Nature disgraces Time and kills the “wretched [min-
utes]” (l. 8) before they can destroy his beauty.
There follows a shift in the sonnet’s tone. As in the
fi rst 17 poems in the sequence, the speaker issues a
warning to the young man: This cannot last forever. He
must fear Nature; he is merely her “minion”—an infe-
rior servant or a male prostitute—and exists at and for
“her pleasure” (l. 9). When she is fi nished with him,
Time will claim him. Nature may “detain” him—a legal
term meaning she can hold him temporarily—but the
older, wiser speaker knows that Nature cannot “keep
her treasure” (l. 10); the young man will eventually
become an old man and die. Nature’s “audit,” another
legal or commercial term meaning a review of accounts,
a way of establishing what one owes to whom, has
been postponed in the young man’s case, but Nature
“answered must be” (l. 11). Her “quietus,” another390 SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS: SONNET 126