ABSTRACT

The chapter addresses a central theme in the sonnets: the conflict between beauty and time. Time is depicted as ruthlessly destroying beauty but the sonnets propose that they themselves have the power to preserve beauty, i.e. the beauty of the young man to whom they are addressed: ‘His beauty shall in these black lines be seen’. How, though, is this supposed to work and what does it mean exactly? Through examining some of the crucial passages in the sonnets, the chapter proposes that there is a very tight connection (even identity) between the beauty that is being preserved and the beauty of the poetic lines that are doing the preserving. Also the love that is being expressed in the poems is itself not entirely distinct from the poems that express this love: the love is not so much described as enacted. The love, one might say, is here, not somewhere out there. The sonnets in this way are profoundly self-reflexive.