Mike Carrier
Mr. Holdeman
Shakespeare Course
18 January 2014

Time Will Kill You: An Explication of Sonnet 160

Sonnet 60 is a member of the fair youth sequence in which Shakespeare continues to express his love to an unnamed young man. In the sonnet, Shakespeare appears to be talking directly to his love, as evidenced by his use of the word our in line 2: “our minutes hasten to their end.” The sonnet focuses on the theme of time passing, which is one of the major themes present in many of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The three quatrains in sonnet 60 focus on a different symbol, but they all tie into the sonnets main theme, the passage of time. In the first sonnet, the ocean and its waves are compared to the passage of time. The first two lines use a classic simile to do this:
“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;” (1-2).
Lines 1-4 also employ personifications to talk about how we as humans insist on rushing through our lives when death awaits at the finish, as waves rush to get to the shore where they will disappear: “In sequent toil all forwards do contend” (4). In the second quatrain, Shakespeare describes the progression of human life through time by comparing it to the progression of the sun through the day. In the first line of the quatrain, nativity (birth) is compared to the morning sunrise: “Nativity, once in the main of light,” (5). The second line compares the “crawl to maturity”, or adolescence, to sun at noon when it is at its highest point: “Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,” (6). The second quatrain also has a personification in which “nativity” is said to crawl to maturity. The third quatrain uses agriculture to describe how beauty is destroyed by time. The first line of the quatrain begins to relate beauty to growth and the natural world: “Time doth transfix the flourish set on