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Sonnet 19 | Introduction

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 19 is about the destructive power of time which consumes everything in its path. Eventually, time will also destroy the poet’s beautiful young friend. However, although the poet can do nothing to prevent this, he defies time by asserting that the friend will live forever through his verse.

The sonnet is one of a collection of 154 sonnets by Shakespeare that were first published in 1609. Probably written in the early to mid-1590s, when the sonnet was a fashionable literary form, these poems are generally regarded as the finest sonnet sequence in the English language. The collection as a whole appears to tell a story of the love of the poet for a young man of great beauty and high rank and the frustration and anguish, as well as the joy, the poet experiences as a consequence of his love. The young man is unnamed, but many scholars believe he may have been Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated his long poem, Venus and Adonis, in 1593.

Other characters who appear in the sonnet sequence are the poet’s mistress, a dark woman who seduces the poet’s friend, and a rival poet, who competes with the poet for the friend’s attention. Attempts to identify the “Dark Lady” have proved fruitless; the “Rival Poet” may have been Shakespeare’s contemporary Christopher Marlowe but this cannot be known for certain.

Perhaps more important than trying to identify any historical characters that Shakespeare may have had in mind is to appreciate the sonnets as sustained meditations on the human emotions and aspirations aroused by intense love. These include the appreciation of beauty and the longing to make it permanent; affirmations of the transcendent power of art; and emotions ranging from elation to jealousy, guilt, forgiveness, sorrow and desire.

Sonnet 19 Summary

Lines 1-2
The entire sonnet is in the form of an apostrophe to Time, which is capitalized to establish it as an immensely powerful, all-consuming force. (An apostrophe is a direct address to an inanimate entity, such as a force of nature, or to an absent person.) Time eats up (“devours”) everything. In line one, the poet chooses an animal of great power, the lion, in order to highlight the fact that Time eventually reduces even the strongest, the fiercest, the kingliest of creatures to powerlessness. This is conveyed in the image of the lion’s sharp claws becoming blunt: Time will take away his ability to hunt and therefore to survive. In line two, the theme of the destructive nature of Time is expanded; it now applies not only to one specific creature but to everything in nature. The poet, still speaking directly to Time, instructs it to compel the earth to take back into herself everything that she has produced (“her own sweet brood”) however beautiful and delightful (“sweet”) those products may be. In these two lines, for reasons that he will later explain, it is as if the poet is egging Time on to perform the work that he knows Time will do anyway, without any encouragement from him.

Lines 3-4
In line 3, the poet further builds on the idea expressed in the first two lines. He selects another powerful wild creature, the tiger, and urges Time to pull out its teeth, thereby reducing to impotence the creature that most embodies the raw power and energy of the life force. In line 4 the poet shifts his thought from the natural world to the mythological realm. Referring to the phoenix, a mythical bird, he urges Time to burn her alive (“in her blood” means while the blood still courses through her veins). The phoenix is referred to as “long-lived” because it was said to live about five hundred years. In these first four lines then, neither immense power, embodied in lion and tiger, nor mythical longevity, are any match for time.... » Complete Sonnet 19 Summary