Sonnet 19

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Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws, And make the earth devour her own sweet brood; Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws, And burn the long-liv'd phoenix, in her blood; Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet'st, And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time, To the wide world and all her fading sweets; But I forbid thee one most heinous crime: O! carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow, Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen; Him in thy course untainted do allow For beauty's pattern to succeeding men. Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong, My love shall in my verse ever live young.
–William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare's Sonnet 19, sometimes considered the last of the opening group of sonnets, treats the theme of redemption of time through art.

Source and analysis

G. Wilson Knight notes and analyzes the way in which "devouring" time is developed by trope in the first 19 poems; Jonathan Hart notes the reliance of Shakespeare's treatment on tropes from Ovid and Edmund Spenser. Like the poems that immediately precede it, the poem offers the immortality of art as a way to escape time and death.

Quarto's "yawes" (3) was amended to "jaws" by Edward Capell and Edmond Malone; this change is now almost universally accepted. George Steevens glosses "in her blood" as "burned alive" by analogy with Coriolanus 4.6.85; Nicolaus Delius has the phrase "while still standing."

Henry Charles Beeching perceives a valediction in the final line, meant to indicate that the opening group of sonnets ends here.

Interpretations

• David Harewood, for the 2002 compilation album, When Love Speaks (EMI Classics)

References

• Alden, Raymond (1916). The Sonnets of Shakespeare, with Variorum Reading and Commentary. Houghton-Mifflin, Boston.
• Baldwin, T. W. (1950). On the Literary Genetics of Shakspeare's Sonnets. University of Illinois Press, Urbana.
• Booth, Stephen (1977). Shakespeare's Sonnets. Yale University Press, New Haven.
• Dowden, Edward (1881). Shakespeare's Sonnets. London.
• Evans, G. Blakemore, Anthony Hecht, (1996). Shakespeare's Sonnets. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Hart, Jonathan (2002). "Conflicting Monuments." In the Company of Shakespeare. AUP, New York.
• Hubler, Edwin (1952). The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Princeton University Press, Princeton.
• Schoenfeldt, Michael (2007). The Sonnets: The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry. Patrick Cheney, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Tyler, Thomas (1989). Shakespeare’s Sonnets. London D. Nutt.
• Vendler, Helen (1997). The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

External links

• Paraphrase and analysis (Shakespeare-online)
• Analysis