Sonnet 12: “’Gainst Time’s scythe!”

When I do count the clock that tells the time,

And see the brave day sunk in hideous night,

When I behold the violet past prime,

And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;

When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,

Which erst from heat did canopy the herd

And Summer’s green all girded up in sheaves

Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,

Then of thy beauty do I question make

That thou among the wastes of time must go,

Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,

And die as fast as they see others grow;

     And nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defense

     Save breed to brave him, when he takes thee hence.

“…There are distinct echoes of previous sonnets: hideous (Sonnet 5), barren (Sonnet 11), wastes (Sonnets 1 & 9), grow(Sonnet 11). But the tone is the gentlest we have heard…Dramatically, we hear the word ‘I’ for the first time, in line 1. This makes the sonnet personal right at the outset…

“Note how despite the gentle tone, the impending doom is also made more personal in this sonnet. Although W. questions thy beauty, it is not Y.M.’s beauty that must go among the wastes of time, it is Y.M. himself (‘thou…must go’). Similarly, in the couplet, Time’s scythe does not come after beauty, he takes thee hence…

“Things have gotten much more personal in Sonnet 12. W. wants Y.M. to know how he feels, not just what the world might think of him (we had a glimpse of that in Sonnet 10 with change thy thought, that I might change my mind—here it feels much stronger). There was only one little ‘me’ in Sonnet 10; the word ‘I’ appears four times in Sonnet 12. Now we feel that W. wants Y.M. to know that it is he who cares about remembering him after he dies.”

—Shakespeare’s Sonnets Among His Private Friends, p. 39 (publication date Oct. 1, 2021)