Essay — Sonnet 15 (A)

Sonnet 15 Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15 echoes the idea of tempus fugit prominent in Renaissance writing, observing in its first two quatrains the inexorable loss of man’s youth to the passage of time. However, the poet recognises that it is precisely the ephemerality of the Fair Youth’s present beauty that renders it more vibrant and intense in his eyes, before introducing the immortalising potential of his verse — the creative enterprise of art can equally serve the natural function of procreation and triumph in the war against time. In the opening quatrain, the poet establishes not only the fleeting nature of youth but also man’s lack of control and agency, with one’s life a mere performance and fate dictated by the stars. The poet begins by contemplating how “everything that grows / Holds in perfection but a little moment,” with the evanescence of youthful prime and “perfection” reinforced by the almost tautological “little moment” and extra fading syllable of the feminine ending (“moment”). This impermanence is a natural, fundamental fact of life, underscored not only by the use of the absolute (“everything”) but also the allusion to the Aristotelian conception of the vegetative soul, which is universally possessed by “everything that grows.” Not only is man’s youth subject to the incessant flight of time, he is also devoid of agency over his own life — it is but a performance “present[ed]” on the “huge stage” of the world. This metaphor is most prominently expressed in Shakespeare’s own As You Like It (“All the world’s a stage”), but it originates from classical writers like Juvenal (“All of Greece is a stage, and every Greek’s an actor”) and Petronius (“because almost the whole world are actors”) from whom Renaissance writing commonly draws inspiration. The poet goes on to further undermine man’s power — not only is human life merely a series of performative appearances, the script is written by “stars in secret influence,” reflecting the widespread astrological beliefs of the era that the stars above us govern our conditions. In fact, it is the stars that appear to be the true stars of the world’s “stage” since it “presenteth naught but shows… [their] influence,” highlighting man’s lack of significance. Hence, the poet bleakly establishes the nature of human youth and existence — fugacious and astrologically determined. Subsequently, the poet (extending his description of the vegetative soul) compares men to “plants,” elucidating the intertwined nature of growth and decline and the inevitable erosion of youth with time. The poet establishes the constancy of the “self-same sky,” the sky’s unchanging quality not only evinced by the emphatic “self-same,” but also echoed in its sound with persistent sibilant alliteration and constant metrical stress in the molossus. This invariable

sky stands in sharp contrast to the plants that are both “cheered and checked” by it, with the alliterative association of the antithetical verbs highlighting the inext