Here’s a full analysis of the poem 'Sonnet 19’ by William Shakespeare, tailored towards A-Level students but also suitable for those studying at a higher level.
Includes:
THE POEM
VOCABULARY
STORY / SUMMARY
SPEAKER / VOICE
LANGUAGE FEATURES
STRUCTURE / FORM
CONTEXT
ATTITUDES
THEMES
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 fleets,
And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one more heinous crime:
O, carve not with the 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.
VOCABULARY
Devouring - consuming / eating with enthusiasm
Time - The use of the capital ‘T’ shows that Time is personified here
To blunt - to make something lose its sharpness
Thou - you
Brood - babies or a group of young animals
Keen - sharp, eager
Phoenix - a mythological bird that burst into flames when it dies and is reborn again
Fleet - to move or pass quickly
Whate’er thou wilt - whatever you want
Heinous - terrible or wicked
Untainted - not harmed or stained
Succeeding - following on from / being successful
, STORY/SUMMARY
This is a poem addressed directly to ‘Time’, a personification of the idea of time, so the
speaker is speaking to it as if it were a conscious being. He says that Time is
‘devouring’, it consumes everything hungrily. He says it can blunt the sharpness of
lion’s paws and force the earth to take back its fruits and produce. He allows it to pluck
the teeth from a tiger’s jaws as it dies and decays, and to burn the Phoenix as it dies
and is reborn (typically, Phoenixes are ‘long-lived’ because it is thought that they lived
for 500 years before bursting into flames). He says that Time is welcome to make the
seasons shift from happy to sad as it moves quickly through the years, and do
whatever it wants to the world and all the sweet things in it that fade. But, the speaker
says, he forbids Time to do one terrible crime: Don’t carve his lover’s fair brow with
lines ( and don’t let him grow old and get wrinkles, drawing lines on his head with an
antique pen). Allow him to remain ‘untainted’ so that he can set an example of the
pattern of beauty to following generations of men. Finally, the speaker says that he no
longer cares and that time can do its worst, because regardless of what Time does to
the beautiful man, he shall be immortalised as a beautiful youth in this poem forever.
SPEAKER/VOICE
In Shakespeaere’s sonnets, the speaker is always an unnamed person who is telling
the situation from a personal perspective. Sonnets are traditionally explorations of
the theme of love, and so the persona of the poem often takes the form of a lover
who addresses their words to their desired partner. Yet here the speaker is also more
universal, he or she is talking about Time’s effect on youth, beauty and attraction in
general. It seems a pity to the speaker that Time destroys the beauty of youth.
LANGUAGE
● Animalistic imagery - ‘the lion’s paws’ / ‘the fierce tiger’s jaws’ - the speaker
uses various examples of beautiful, powerful and dangerous entities that have
only ephemeral power that lasts for a short time and fades over the years. There
is a sense here that anything powerful is only temporary, and that Time has the
ultimate power over all other things.
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