The poetry of the sixteenth century, when Shakespeare probably wrote his sonnets, often used the same theme over and over again. Such a theme is called a topos (plural topoi), which is literally a place for the mind to go to, that is, a topic in the sense of an area for mental exploration. The poet demonstrated originality in the skill of handling the theme or in varying nuances, not in finding a new subject or in revealing his or her inner life. Popular topoi of Renaissance poetry were persuasion of a woman to yield to a man's desire, description of a woman's beauties, celebration of country life, celebrating the virtues of someone dead, and many others.
One favorite topos of the period is mutability, the power of time to destroy everything of human value, indeed every part of the world in which we live. Time is often personified, sometimes as the familiar skeletal figure with wings and scythe; in many poems Time is imagined as a lesser god within the classical pantheon. Or mutability may be, not personified, but pictured as a universal property of the world, like gravitation or magnetism. A modern parallel to this view is the concept of entropy as it has expanded from thermodynamics to be seen as a universal principle of decay in the world.
Sometimes mutability is presented as all-powerful, the destroyer of everything valuable, even a force that makes it impossible for human beings to know and understand anything of the world or themselves because they too are shifting and decaying. Thus Montaigne defends skepticism on the basis of mutability:
And we and our judgment and all mortal things else do uncessantly roll, turn, and pass away. Thus can nothing be certainly established, nor of the one nor of the other, both the judging and the judged being in continual alteration and motion. We have no communication with being, for every human nature is ever in the middle between being born and dying, giving nothing of itself but an obscure apparance and shadow, and an uncertain and weak opinion. And if, perhaps, you fix your thought to take its being, it would be even as if one should go about to prison the water; for how much the more he shall close and press that which, by its own nature, is ever gliding, so much the more he shall loose what he would hold and fasten. Thus, seeing all things are subject to pass from one change to another, reason, which therein seeketh a real subsistence, finds herself deceived as unable to apprehend anything subsistent and permanent, forsomuch as each thing either cometh to a being and is not yet altogether, or beginneth to die before it be born.
Montaigne, An Apology of Raymond Sebond
Sometimes poems offer consolations for the universal sway of mutability. In the ancient doctrine of contemptus mundi (contempt for this world) one is advised that the world is not worth being attached to and so one should turn to the next, to Heaven, where mutability has no power. Shakespeare uses that topos in Sonnet 146,which describes the speaker's body as a "fading mansion" and advocates seeking "terms divine":
So shalt thou feed on death, that feeds on men,
And death once dead, there's no more dying then.
Spenser has Mutability lay claim to universal sway in the "Mutability Cantos" of The Faerie Queene , and Nature herself responds by arguing that mutability is ultimately a tool through which the underlying permanence of God's divine plan manifests itself:
I well consider all that ye haue sayd,
And find that all things stedfastnes doe hate
And changed be: yet being rightly wayd
They are not changed from their first estate;
But by their change their being doe dilate:
And turning to themselues at length againe,
Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate:
Then ouer them Change doth not rule and raigne;
But they raigne ouer change, and doe their states maintaine.
Shakespeare constantly returns to the theme of mutability in his poems and plays. In the Sonnets "Devouring Time," as he calls it in Sonnet 19, is as much a presence as the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady. Shakespeare proposes two kinds of consolation. Especially in the first seventeen sonnets the speaker offers the Fair Youth immortality through having children, the "breed" of the couplet in Sonnet 12:
And nothing 'gainst time's scythe can make defence
Save breed to brave him, when he takes thee hence.
But the most common consolatory topos is the immortalizing power of poetry, demontrated by the very poem that argues it: though your body may die, this poem will immortalize you. See, for example, Sonnets 18, 19, and 55 as comparisons to Sonnet 60.
Return to sonnet.