Sonnet 60 claims that time destroys everything it gives, and that the poet’s only defense is a verse that will stand in future times he can only hope for.
Sonnet 60: Full Poem
Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown’d,
Crooked eclipses ‘gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty’s brow;
Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
Text from the 1609 Quarto, with spelling and punctuation lightly modernized.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about Sonnet 60 for quick reference.
What Sonnet 60 Means
Sonnet 60 spends twelve lines showing how time wears everything away, then uses its last two to push back.
The poem opens at the seashore. Waves run up a stony beach one after another, each pushing the one ahead of it, and our minutes behave the same way: every minute replaces the one before and hurries toward its own end. Nothing in this picture chooses to move. Time is simply motion that never stops.
The second quatrain tells a whole human life in four lines, shaped like the course of the sun. A newborn enters the wide sea of daylight, crawls slowly up to maturity, and is crowned at the high point. Then eclipses darken that glory, and the same Time that gave the life turns around and destroys it. The gift and its ruin come from one giver.
In the third quatrain Time stops being a process and becomes an attacker. It pierces the bloom of youth, digs wrinkles into a beautiful face, eats the rarest things nature has made, and cuts down everything that grows. The quatrain ends on the bleakest line in the poem: nothing stands except to be mown.
Then the couplet turns with “And yet.” The poet says his verse will stand in times to come and will go on praising the young man in spite of Time’s cruelty. It is a real act of resistance, but a modest one. He does not say the poem will beat Time, only that it will stand, and the times it will stand in exist so far only in hope.
Sonnet 60 Line by Line
Each line, with the sense of it in plain English.
Themes
Sonnet 60 builds one argument about time in three stages, and each theme below follows one of them.
Time as Motion That Cannot Stop
The opening quatrain treats time as a physical force with a rhythm and a direction. Waves do not decide to move toward the shore; moving is what they are. Minutes are the same. The simile removes anyone to appeal to: time does not destroy out of cruelty or intention but because forward motion is its nature. Even so, the minutes are not passive. “Toil” gives them labor and “contend” gives them struggle, so the ceaseless replacement of one moment by the next is pictured as work, and work that never ends.
The Life That Time Gives and Takes Back
The second quatrain compresses a human life into the course of the sun: birth into light, a slow climb, a crown at noon, then eclipse. What makes the passage bleak is its last line. “Time that gave doth now his gift confound” means the force that produced the life is the same force that undoes it. There is no second power to rescue anyone, no version of time that gives without eventually taking. Every gift in the poem arrives already on loan.
Poetry Against Time
Like Sonnet 18 and Sonnet 55, Sonnet 60 sets the poem itself against time’s destruction. The difference is in the size of the claim. Sonnet 18 says its lines will live “so long as men can breathe.” Sonnet 55 says marble will not outlive this “powerful rhyme.” Sonnet 60 says only that the verse will stand “to times in hope,” in a future it cannot see. The defense is real, but it is offered as an intention rather than a guarantee.
Form and Language
Sonnet 60 is one of the most tightly organized poems in the sequence, and its form does much of its arguing.
Meter and Rhyme
The poem is a standard Shakespearean sonnet in iambic pentameter, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The opening line is famous for its steady, regular beat, which mimics the even arrival of waves: “like AS the WAVES make TOWARDS the PEBbled SHORE,” with “towards” said as one syllable, as it usually was in Shakespeare’s time. Each quatrain is a complete unit with a single subject, so the poem moves forward in three distinct surges before the couplet, much as the waves it describes.
The Wave Simile
“Like as the waves” announces a simile and then develops it for four lines. The image has a classical source: in Book 15 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the philosopher Pythagoras compares the passing of time to waves pushed on by the waves behind them. Shakespeare knew Ovid well, both in Latin and in Arthur Golding’s 1567 English translation. The “pebbled shore” is his own addition, and it gives the image sound and texture: a hard beach the waves strike again and again.
The Sun’s Course and Astrological Language
The second quatrain borrows the vocabulary of astrology. “Nativity” was the term for a birth and the horoscope cast for it, and “crooked eclipses” were read as signs of misfortune, “crooked” meaning malignant or perverse. The life rises like the sun from the “main of light,” reaches its zenith, and is darkened. The phrase “main of light” also links the quatrain back to the sea, so the wave image flows into the second stage of the argument rather than being dropped.
Images of War and Harvest
The third quatrain turns violent. “Transfix” means to pierce through. “Delves the parallels” draws on siege warfare, where attackers dug parallel trenches toward a wall, so wrinkles become earthworks dug against beauty. “Feeds on” makes Time a devourer, and the “scythe” makes him a reaper. The shift from battlefield to harvest field matters: a reaper does not choose his targets. He cuts everything that stands.
“And Yet”
The volta falls at the start of line 13, and it is gentle. “And yet” does not deny anything the quatrains have said; it concedes all of it and then resists anyway. The couplet also picks up the verb from the line before it. Line 12 says “nothing stands.” Line 13 says “my verse shall stand.” The poem contradicts its own previous sentence, and that contradiction is the whole of its defiance.
A Closer Reading
The couplet’s defense of poetry is placed in the one location the poem has already proved unsafe: the future.
Everything in Sonnet 60 is measured forward. The waves “make towards” the shore, the minutes “hasten,” the life “crawls to maturity,” and every movement ends in loss. By line 12, the reader has learned one thing about the future with complete certainty: it is where Time does its work. Then the couplet sends the verse there. “To times in hope” means into future times, times that do not yet exist and can only be hoped for. The poet is asking his poem to survive in exactly the territory where nothing else has.
That is why the couplet cannot be read as a triumph in the way Sonnet 55’s can. Sonnet 55 declares that the monuments of princes will fall and the rhyme will outlive them, and it states this as fact. Sonnet 60 has done something more honest. It has shown, quatrain by quatrain, that nothing is exempt, and it has not found an exception. What it offers instead is a posture: the verse will “stand,” the way a person stands their ground, and it will keep “praising thy worth” whatever happens to it.
The opening image supports this reading. Waves move; the shore stays. In a poem where everything that moves is carried to its end, the one thing that does not move is the pebbled shore the waves break against, and a pebbled shore is itself stone worn down by the sea, still there. The verse that “shall stand” takes the shore’s place. It will be struck, and worn, and it may not last forever. But it will not be the thing that runs.
Read this way, the modesty of the couplet is its strength. Sonnet 60 does not promise immortality. It promises resistance, offered by someone who has looked clearly at what he is up against and decided to go on praising anyway.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Sonnet 60, answered briefly.
Who Is Sonnet 60 Addressed To?
The young man of the Fair Youth sonnets. He appears only once, in the final line’s “thy worth.” For thirteen lines the poem is about time in general; the address to him is held back until the end.
Why Does Sonnet 60 Talk About Minutes?
Many editors have noticed that the sixtieth sonnet is about minutes, of which there are sixty in an hour. The match may be deliberate. Sonnet 12, which begins by counting the clock, lines up with the twelve hours on its face in the same way.
Where Does the Wave Image Come From?
From Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Book 15, where Pythagoras compares the flow of time to waves driven on by the waves behind them. Shakespeare likely knew the passage both in Latin and in Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation.
What Does “Delves the Parallels in Beauty’s Brow” Mean?
Time digs parallel lines into a beautiful forehead: wrinkles. “Delves” means digs, and “parallels” were the trenches that besieging armies dug toward a fortress wall, so aging is pictured as a siege on the face.
Does Sonnet 60 End Hopefully?
Yes, but guardedly. The couplet says the verse will stand and keep praising the young man, but only “to times in hope,” meaning future times that do not yet exist. It is a promise to resist, not a claim of victory.
Related Sonnets
Three sonnets set their own terms for the contest between verse and time.