Sonnet 126

Sonnet 126 is one of 154 sonnets by William Shakespeare. It is the final member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet shows how Time and Nature coincide.

The sonnet was rendered in prose paraphrase by A. L. Rowse as:

O you, my lovely boy, who hold in your power Time's hour-glass and his sickle—you who wane as you grow older and in that show your friends withering as you yourself grow up: if Nature, sovereign mistress over chaos, as you go onwards will ever pluck you back, she keeps you to demonstrate her power to hold up time. Yet fear her, you who are Nature's darling: she may detain her treasure, but not keep it forever. Her last account, though delayed, must be paid and her discharge is to render you up.

Although known as "Sonnet 126", this poem is not formally a sonnet in the strict sense, and is one of only two poems in the series (the other being Sonnet 99) which do not conform to Shakespeare's typical rhyme scheme. Instead of 14 lines rhyming abab cdcd efef gg, the poem is composed of six couplets (aa bb cc dd ee ff). Like the other sonnets (except Sonnet 145) it is composed in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions. The 5th line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:

The 9th and 10th lines each have a final extrametrical syllable or feminine ending:

It is possible that the first couplet also has feminine endings, though Booth reads "pow'r" and "hour" as monosyllabic. Line 11 has a mid-line reversal ("answer'd"):

The meter demands that line 4's "withering" function as two syllables, and line 6's "goest" as one.

Sonnet 126 has been dubbed the envoi to the "Fair Youth" sonnets. An envoy or envoi, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary is "The action of sending forth a poem; hence, the concluding part of a poetical or prose composition; the author's parting words; a dedication, postscript. Now chiefly the short stanza which concludes a poem written in certain archaic metrical forms."