SOURCE: Kaula, David. “‘In War with Time’: Temporal Perspectives in Shakespeare's Sonnets.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 3, no. 1 (Winter 1963): 45-57.

In the following essay, Kaula discerns two different time perspectives in sonnets 1-126, and analyzes the sonnets' syntax, rhetoric, and imagery in order to explain the disparate strategies these poems use to defy the tyranny of time.

The figure of time which occurs so often in the sonnets Shakespeare addresses to the young friend (1-126) points to one of the central preoccupations of the sequence. Appearing as it does in several of its familiar allegorical guises—as thief, tyrant, devourer, and harvester—the figure is thoroughly conventional in origin.¹ Shakespeare, however, endows it with a more than conventional vitality. In lamenting the impermanence of all the good things of the world, especially the resplendent qualities exhibited by the friend, he does not reduce them to trivial significance in...