QUESTIONS ON THE SONNET

1. What are the points of comparison between waves and the minutes of our lives? Why is the shore described as "pebbled"?
2. The next two lines, 3 and 4, might seem repetitious. What do they add to the first two lines in relation to the waves and to the minutes?
3. The second quatrain (group of four lines) offers a different metaphor for the dominance of time, apparently of a human being passing from babyhood through maturity to old age. How does it change the picture of time? What are the implications of describing eclipses as "crooked"? The word "confound" means "utterly destroy" in sixteenth-century English; how is it given special emphasis?
4. There are four one-line images in the third quatrain. What does each add to the picture of time? Look especially at the verbs chosen. The image of Time as a reaper with a scythe is the most conventional figure in the poem. Why does Shakespeare place it last in this series? Is there any visual link between this image and that in the first quatrain?
5. Line 13 is expressed in inverted syntactic order, with the subject in the middle and the verb at the end. Aside from providing the rhyme, what does this word order do? What image do you see in the word "stand"?
6. To whom does "thy" refer in line 14? What is the effect of introducing the person so late and indirectly?
7. What inferences can you make about the person speaking the words of this sonnet, drawing on the sonnet itself? Is it a man or a woman? Why might the person be saying these things? How do his or her feelings change during the course of the poem?
8. Notice how the sentences and stages of feeling fit the formal divisions of the poem. How does this patterning affect the expression of thoughts and feelings? What would be gained and lost if these thoughts were expressed in straightforward prose?

Return to Sonnet.