“Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow.”
The sonnet ends with a rhyming couplet, which summarises and concludes the message of the previous twelve lines. The penultimate line reiterates what has already been written by telling the reader once again that there is no means of escaping time and that all living things will eventually pass away;
“And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence.”
The last line however, introduces a glimmer of hope to the reader as Shakespeare tells us there is a way to defeat time’s destruction, which is to pass on our beauty by having a child;
“Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.”
Ozymandias is another sonnet that was written in the theme of mutability, but in a different, more specific way than Shakespeare’s sonnet twelve. The poem expresses its moral through a vivid and ironic picture; a shattered stone statue with only the legs and head remaining, standing in the desert. The face is proud and arrogant,
"Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose from
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read"
The first octave is describing what the traveller saw in the desert; the remains of the gigantic statue surrounded by miles of empty desert.
The last sestet tells the reader of the moral behind the sonnet. The first three lines of the sestet contain the words of the King, of whom the statue was built after. The king believed that the statue would stand forever in his place when he died, looking over his kingdom forever.
‘And on the pedestal of the statue, there are these words,
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'"
However, all that surrounds the broken statue is a desert. The sonnet is written to express to the reader that possessions don't mean immortality. This irony is shown in the sonnet because the king believed that his kingdom would remain under his statue's immortal eye, and the statue in fact is destroyed and so is his kingdom, so the statue is merely gazing over lifeless desert.
When Shakespeare wrote Sonnet 12, I think that it was named Sonnet twelve to emphasise the poem's message of time. With there being twelve numbers on a clock face and twelve hours of daylight, I don’t think that the name of the sonnet was merely a coincidence.
The sonnet is written as one sentence and is well structured. The first eight lines describe the effects time has on nature and after the octave, the volta comes. The next quatrain in the poem, summarises the idea that everyone and everything will eventually die. The whole poem leads to the last couplet, and in the last line the reader is told of the only way that time can be defeated. I think that though Shakespeare does give us a solution to the problem of mutability, this solution is only one line out of the fourteen lines of the sonnet. The other thirteen lines of the poem are sombre and morbid, I think this is significant because all though there is a solution, the fact is this cannot overcome death and all living things will eventually die.
For the first three quatrains of the poem, there is punctuation at the end of each line, this symbolises seconds constantly ticking, and time is continuously moving and we have no control over it. However, in the last couplet, there is no punctuation and the line runs straight onto the next; this symbolises that time can be stopped by having children and passing on beauty from generation to generation. This idea is repeated when the last line of the poem is the only line not to be written in Iambic pentameter, and the caesura in the beginning of the line is used to emphasise the only solution;
“Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.”
In Sonnet 12, Shakespeare uses mainly description to express his message, he also emphasises this by using alliteration throughout his poem;
“When I do count the clock that tells the time.”
“ When I behold the violet past prime.”
“ And sable curls, all silver’d o’er with white.”
When Shelley wrote Ozymandias, he wrote the first eight lines as a story and the last six lines as a moral to the story. He deliberately used many caesuras and end stopped lines to give the reader a clear image of the statue and the surroundings that the sonnet is based upon;
“ Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command.”
The sonnet is written so that the reader can easily picture the image of the statue in the empty desert, and can see the irony of the inscription. Shelley uses this irony when he describes the destroyed remains of the statue as being “colossal”.
Both of these sonnets are written about how everything changes with time, but have been written to give the reader two very different messages.
Shakespeare is telling the reader that the beauty we see around us will not last, and that as every second pasts beauty is being lost and eventually the beauty will be gone completely.
Shelley is telling the reader that it is not possible to try and defeat time, even with non-living possessions.
Though the poems are written with very similar moralities behind them, they are written in completely different styles.
