Shakespeare Sonnet 12

‘When I do count the clock that tells the time’

Apr 20, 2007

The speaker of Shakespeare's marriage poem 12 again shows how changing nature always comes under "Time's scythe," and only one remedy can fend him off: producing an heir.

In marriage sonnet 12, “When I do count the clock that tells the time,” the speaker frames a series of “when” clauses followed by a “then”; in other words, he proposes a situation as “when such and such happens, then we can expect such and such result.”

First Quatrain

In the first quatrain, the speaker begins his series by asserting that when he looks at the clock and sees times flying by and the “brave day” is being engulfed in the “hideous night, and when he sees a young man like a fresh flower turning into an old gray haired man, . . . . Then the quatrain stops with a semi-colon, and at the point, we do not know where the speaker might go with his “when” clauses.

Second Quatrain

So we proceed to the second quatrain, wherein the speaker is continuing metaphorically to compare young man’s youth to trees that lose their leaves. What had once provided a leafy roof against the summer’s blazing sun becomes “summer’s green all girded up in sheaves, / Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard.” Now, it is becoming clear that the speaker is once again comparing the young man’s youth to nature; just as trees were once useful with their full branches, the green or youth gets bundled up and is “Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard.”

Third Quatrain

The third quatrain supplies the “then” or result of all the “whens”: then the youth and beauty that nature possessed passes away. And the speaker wants to ask the young man if he thinks his own beauty will not go “among the wastes of time.” Since these other natural things—the day that sinks into night, the violet that withers in time, the black hair that turns white, the trees in summer that lose their leaves to winter—lose their youthful attributes, how can the young man not realizes that he too will come under the sway of nature?

Couplet

The couplet, “And nothing ’gainst Time’s scythe can make defence / Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence,” offers the young man is only way to overcome “Time’s scythe”—that he marry and produce pleasing offspring.