Patterns of Consolation in Shakespeare's Sonnets 1-126 | Conclusion
Conclusion
In the very earliest sonnets, before the development of a specific love attachment, the speaker portrays the youth's beauty as an individual instance of beauty in general, and the subsequence returns to that perspective in its final poem (126). In this last poem, however, the lover accepts conditions of mutability that he has earlier been at such pains to deny. His warnings of inevitable death recall sonnets 1-17, which instructed the youth to battle time by procreating and proposed ways by which the poet could immortalize the young man. But here the speaker makes no such proposals; this twelve-line poem lacks the final two lines where, in the sonnet, the speaker often constructs his consolations. By the end of this subsequence, mutability has proved to be the speaker's ally rather than a foe to be defeated. Instead of seeking consolations for the destruction of beauty, the final three couplets simply warn the young man of nature's inevitable defeat at...
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