Sonnet 19

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< Sonnet 19 >

Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
And burn the long-liv'd phoenix, in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet'st,
And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,

To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
O! carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.
Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
–William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's Sonnet 19, sometimes considered the last of the opening group of sonnets, treats the theme of redemption of time through art.

Contents

[edit] Paraphrase

Time that devours all, you can blunt the lion's paws with age and make the earth devour its own children; you can pluck the teeth from the tiger, and you can burn the phoenix in its own blood. You can continue to make happiness and sadness as you proceed, and indeed, do whatever you want to the world. But I forbid you one thing: You may not make wrinkles on the beautiful face of my beloved, for you must leave him as the model of beauty to the people who follow us. Yet even if you do your worst, my beloved shall continue ever-young in my poems.

[edit] Source and analysis

G. Wilson Knight notes and analyzes the way in which "devouring" time is developed by trope in the first 19 poems; Jonathan Hart notes the reliance of Shakespeare's treatment on tropes from Ovid and Edmund Spenser. Like the poems that immediately precede it, the poem offers the immortality of art as a way to escape time and death.

Quarto's "yawes" (3) was amended to "jaws" by Edward Capell and Edmond Malone; this change is now almost universally accepted. George Steevens glosses "in her blood" as "burned alive" by analogy with Coriolanus 4.6.85; Nicolaus Delius has the phrase "while still standing."

Henry Charles Beeching perceives a valediction in the final line, meant to indicate that the opening group of sonnets ends here.

[edit] References

  • Alden, Raymond. The Sonnets of Shakespeare, with Variorum Reading and Commentary. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1916.
  • Baldwin, T. W. On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950.
  • Booth, Stephen. Shakespeare's Sonnets. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
  • Evans, G. Blakemore, and Anthony Hecht, eds. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
  • Hart, Jonathan. "Conflicting Monuments." In the Company of Shakespeare. New York: AUP, 2002.
  • Hubler, Edwin. The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952.

[edit] External links