Sonnet 63

Sonnet 63

File:Sonnet 63 1609.jpg
Sonnet 63 in the 1609 Quarto.

Against my love shall be, as I am now,
With Time's injurious hand crush'd and o'er-worn;
When hours have drain'd his blood and fill'd his brow
With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn
Hath travell'd on to age's steepy night,
And all those beauties whereof now he's king
Are vanishing or vanish'd out of sight,
Stealing away the treasure of his spring;
For such a time do I now fortify
Against confounding age's cruel knife,
That he shall never cut from memory
My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life:
His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
And they shall live, and he in them still green.

–William Shakespeare

Sonnet 63 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young man. Contrary to most of the other poems in the Fair Youth sequence, in sonnets 63 to 68 there is no explicit addresse, indeed the second person pronoun (you or thou) is not used anywhere in sonnets 63 to 68.

Synopsis

This sonnet, addressed to the same young man as the previous 62 sonnets, deals with the inevitability of aging and death. Shakespeare laments the fact that his subject's beauty will not last forever, but unlike Sonnet 2, in which immortality is found through procreation, the resolution found here is in the immortality granted by the writing of the poem ("these black lines").

Since there is no specific addresse (no you or thou) one may perhaps more accurately say that the poem celebrates the Fair Youth than that it is specifically addressed to him.

Analysis

Like Sonnet 2, this poem makes use of cutting and crushing imagery to depict the effects of time in creating wrinkles on the face. The prevailing metaphors in this sonnet compare youthful beauty to riches, similar to Sonnet 4, and old age and death to night, similar to Sonnet 12.

The attention to the subject's mortality, returned to in this sonnet, remains the focus for the next two sonnets, and Sonnet 65 contains much the same resolution as this one does.