Shakespeare, William - Conception of Time

What is the Time in Shakespeare's Sonnets?

Time is an interesting concept to consider in Shakespeare's Sonnets. Normally, it’s presented in a manner that indicates it as the enemy of both the speaker and the people that he addresses his sonnets to.
Time is indeed pictured as some kind of monster or beast that "devours" those around and which takes away their life and energy through the passing of the years. What both the speaker and his beloved are forced to acknowledge for, is that’s no matter how beautiful the beloved is today, tomorrow, he or she will be old thanks to time's sovereignty over the human form, just like as showed in the final couplet of sonnet 12, “and nothing against the time saith can make defense”, a period where Shakespeare express the inability of the man toward the inescapeability of time.

Immortality through the Sonnets

The sonnets, however, through their act of immortalizing the beloved, clearly work to counteract the decaying impact of time and to triumph over its mastery. Even through the use of personification, Shakespeare confronts the natural changes which creates and destroys life. He is sensitive to the frailty of the peak of life, even thanks to his experience of dramatist that made him much acknowledged in complexity of human being and feelings, and he knows how time hastily takes it as soon as it is displayed. He strives through the Sonnets to capture the youth so quickly lost during time. Subverting the conventions of Petrarchan poetry, Shakespeare concerns his subject as an imperfect one, submitted by the conditions around it and by the pasting of the time, and even the metrical structure provides on this: usually the first three quatrains analyzes the qualities of his subject, while the last untrimmed couplet leaves to the reader the impression of something that isn’t static,that isn’t ever durable, but frail, short and mortal, even expressed in sonnet 73, trough the use of metaphors.