ABSTRACT
When Shakespeare's sonnets on the theme of poetry as perpetuation are extracted from the whole collection and considered without further reference to it, there seems to breathe from them, as I have remarked in the First Part of this study, a conviction no less strong than Horace's that it is in and through poetry alone that we can hope that anything more of us than pulvis et umbra will survive. There are, though, later in the collection and probably, as I am inclined to think, written later, certain sonnets in which, not poetry, but love appears as the Defier of Time, sonnets on the theme that Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come;
