Sonnet notes 18

Sonnet 60, line 4: “In sequent toil all forward do contend”

Stephen Booth (Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 239, see Reading List) notes the similarity of the first quatrain of Sonnet 60 to Ovid’s Metamorphoses (lines 200-203 in Golding’s translation, p. 552 in Booth). But Ovid emphasizes the continuity of waves and time, the constant renewal (“Even so the times by kind/ Do fly and follow both at once and evermore renew” [lines 203-4, spelling modernized]). Shakespeare, on the other hand, emphasizes the end, the struggle. While our minutes hasten to their end, the waves in sequent toil all forward do contend, crashing against the pebbled shore. Those pebbles remind me of the rocks they used to be and the sand they will eventually become. Like Time, the waves wreak destruction. And they are relentless, Each changing place which that which goes before. Booth argues that this does not describe the action of waves, but he confuses the verb changes with exchanges. The waves do not exchange places, but they do change places with the one ahead. And they keep coming. I can’t shake the image of Sisyphus, pushing his rock up the mountain, toiling all forward, only to have it fall back so that he must start again. And there’s no one to sing his praises. In Sonnet 60, the only words the poet gives the Young Man are in the last line: Praising thy worth. Is it just because I have read these sonnets through so many times that I read a hint of the warning of Sonnet 126 in this sonnet? What will the Young Man have in times to hope without the poet? What would he be worth without his verses? Is Sonnet 60 the first warning that Nature’s Audit (though delay’d) answer’d must be,/ And her Quietus is to render thee? Or am I just imagining things?