Time And Aging In Sonnet 18

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“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” (2. 1-4). Time and therefore aging are a theme in the sonnets. The writer seems to be older, since he talks about the beautiful young man and how fleeting that beauty will be with time, and tries to convince him in the first sonnets to have a child to pass on his beauty. Time is a fierce enemy, since Shakespeare uses war language to convey the perils of aging. He says when forty years have passed; it will be “forty winters” and the season when nature is barren. Shakespeare emits the summers, when the weather is presumably better, and everything is in bloom. The passage of time is akin to winter, not something that can possibly be fun. His next words emphasize this; the …show more content…

The life expectancy was low and death was everywhere. Beauty must have been rare, since growing up and not having scars from, small pox or other childhood diseases must have been the exception. Life was difficult and malnutrition could have contributed to growing up with diseases that disfigured peoples, not to mention accidents. Growing to the old age of forty probably felt like being under siege. The writer, however seems to tell his love or infatuation interest that he is not thinking about what lies ahead of him. Young people do not overly worry about age and death, so Shakespeare is rather brutal in his honesty what time will do eventually to the youth’s beautiful face and therefore his feelings, as well. His reasoning for having a child makes sense in preserving the beauty, if albeit that would be a superficial reason. Nevertheless, he seems to put beauty on the outside akin to inner beauty. Winter, with the dark times it brings, will put lines on the head, which are the darker

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