Sonnet 60

Sonnet 60 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It's a member of the Fair Youth sequence, in which the poet expresses his love towards a young beloved.

Sonnet 60 focuses upon the theme of the passing of time. This is one of the major themes of Shakespeare's sonnets, it can be seen in Sonnet 1 as well. Like sonnets 1-126, Sonnet 60 is addressed to "a fair youth" whose identity is debated. In the last two lines (the couplet) the speaker says that his verse will live on and therefore make the beauty of the beloved immortal.

The sonnet compares minutes to waves on a pebbled shore regularly replacing each other. Time is also depicted as a gift giver and also as a gift destroyer.

Sonnet 60 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet. The Shakespearean sonnet contains three quatrains followed by a final rhyming couplet. It follows the form's typical rhyme, abab cdcd efef gg and is written a type of poetic metre called iambic pentameter based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions. The thirteenth line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter:

Helen Vendler calls Sonnet 60 "one of the perfect examples of the 4-4-4-2 Shakespearean sonnet form". According to Vendler, "Each quatrain introduces a new and important modification in concept and tone, while the couplet—here a "reversing" couplet contradicting the body of the sonnet—adds yet a fourth dimension". In other words, Vendler is arguing that each section of the poem offers new insight and content; therefore, there are four distinct parts or "dimensions" of the sonnet—each quatrain is not merely expressing the same idea, while the couplet is not simply summarizing the quatrains.

Sonnet 60 incorporates a large number of trochees, feet with a metrically strong followed by a metrically weak syllabic position (/ ×) in place of an iamb (× /). Vendler writes that the first two lines of the sonnet begin with trochees, which "draw attention to the hastening of the waves, the attacks by eclipses and by Time, and the countervailing praising by verse". According to Robert Arbour, after these initial trochees, Shakespeare ends each of these first two lines with a "calm, iambic meter". Arbour argues that this sensation of waves crashing culminates at the beginning of the third line, in which a spondee, a foot with two stressed syllables, represents this climax. However, Carl Atkins claims that the first two lines are "answered directly by two regular lines". Despite this disagreement, both critics acknowledge that the non-iambic feet simulate the undulating and crashing waves that Shakespeare portrays in the first line of the sonnet. While Vendler emphasizes the meter of the first quatrain, Atkins and Arbour continue this analysis by examining the second quatrain. After the first quatrain, the next trochee occurs in the middle of line 5, the only medial trochee of the sonnet, followed by trochees at the beginning of the sixth and seventh lines. The sixth and seventh lines mirror the first two lines of the sonnet in form, drawing attention to their common theme of birth—the waves near the shore and children grow toward maturity—and death—minutes reach their conclusion as the children's glory is destroyed. The non-linear pattern of the second quatrain also draws attention to the quatrain's "slowness and repeated breaks [which suggest] the labour of human life which Time hinders at every step". This contrasts greatly with the "smoothness of the first quatrain, describing the work of time, in which each line [after the initial trochee] runs to its end like the ripple to which it compares the succession of minutes". Therefore, while these three critics may examine and emphasize different aspects of the meter in the sonnet, all three maintain that the meter helps convey and facilitate the main themes of the sonnet.

This poem has many competing images, including time, conflict, and the sea. In Stephen Booth's thorough criticism of Sonnet 60, he remarks that of the battle that the speaker attempts to wage against time in his effort to be together with the youth. The words chosen by Shakespeare such as toil, transfix, fight, contend, glory, confound, and scythe all hint at a violent conflict to which the speaker finds himself irreversibly attached. The conflict of the speaker relates to how best to solve the problem of time, yet he initially sees no counter to time's devastating attacks.

Lopez dives into more detail about this conflict, focusing on the death and destruction that Sonnet 60 describes The second quatrain explains life's cycle, presenting the journey from birth to death and from sunrise to eclipse or sunset as ways to explicate the feeling of loss after having so much. It culminates in the pessimism that all that was ever had, has been or will be lost. He explains the third quatrain as the degradation of his fascination's beauty, that the weapons that time methodically uses to slowly strip what the speaker values is a crushing blow. The completeness of time's destruction is made clear as if man's beauty and goodness are created only for time to demolish.