Once the sun rises out of the sea and covers the whole ocean in its light, it slowly crawls through the sky until noon, when it is “crowned,” or at its highest point.īy using the phrase “crawls to maturity,” Shakespeare has embedded several different meanings. Perhaps he is saying that when a person is born, the amount of time they have in their life looks as vast as the ocean. Shakespeare describes Nativity as the “main of light,” which refers to an expanse of sunlight that illuminates the whole ocean.Īlthough linked in an ocean metaphor, this contrasts with the ever-moving waves of time in the previous quatrain. The second quatrain tells the story of human life by comparing it to the sun’s journey through the sky during the span of a day. The effect is rhythmic and repetitive, which examples the repetitive and ever-moving nature of time that he describes in this quatrain. He says that just like the waves rush forward to replace each other, so do the minutes in “sequent toil.” Although the entire poem is written in iambic pentameter, the third and fourth lines are especially distinct. In the first quatrain, Shakespeare sets up the poem by describing time as the tide. The poem follows the pattern of three quatrains, each with an alternating rhyming scheme, followed by a rhyming couplet that is typical of Shakespeare’s sonnets.Įach quatrain presents a self-contained metaphorical description of time’s passage in human life, but the ending couplet stands out as a defiant declaration that despite time’s “cruel hand,” his words will live on.

In this sonnet, Shakespeare describes the cruel effect that time has on our human condition.

Shakespeare sonnet 60