This vigorous string of permissions culminates in a grant of total licence – “And do whate’er thou wilt” – in opposition to which there is set one prohibition, in that time is forbidden the “heinous crime” of ageing the beloved, here male. The direct command which opens Shakespeare’s sonnet is followed by others – “blunt,” “make,” “Pluck,” “burn,” and “make glad” – all of which are phrased as permissions.

This disruption of the expected metrical pattern of the sonnet emphasises the dissonant nature of time, which is being invited to perform violence upon the strongest of creatures – it being understood by the reader that time will perform such violence anyway, even if not invited. Line 4 is again irregular, with heavy stresses on both “long” and “lived”, and a third heavy stress directly afterwards on the first syllable of “phoenix”. Line 2 is regular iambic pentameter, but line 3 opens with a trochaic foot followed by the two strongly stresed words “keen” and “teeth”. This is a very heavily stressed line, containing a string of three heavy stresses which fall on “time”, “blunt” and “thou”. By contrast, in Sonnet 19 Shakespeare proceeds not by argument but by proclamation, in a dramatic soliloquy directly addressed to personified time: “Devouring time, blunt thou the lion’s paws”. Thus Sonnet 75 sets up a carefully argued opposition between earthly things and heavenly things. The metrical regularity and the music of alliteration provide a smooth background against which the poet carefully works out his argument, opposing the vanity of writing on a beach to the “vertues rare” and “glorious name” which can be written “in the heavens”. In Sonnet 75, Spenser writes in metrically regular lines which make great use of alliteration: “waves and washed”, “wrote it with”, “paynes his pray”, “dy in dust”, “verse your vertues”, “Where whenas”, “love shall live” and “later life”. Spenser more modestly and less assertively dilutes the claim he makes for his poetry by piously acknowledging the Christian promise of resurrection and an afterlife. Shakespeare similarly claims that “My love shall in my verse ever live young”, and ends his sonnet on this note, offering no evidence for this egotistical (or defiant) boast.

Spenser, having in the octet indicated the inevitability of death, then in the sestet makes the conventional claim that his verse will bestow immortality upon the beloved (lines 10 and 11). The use of metaphor rather than simile helps make Shakespeare’s the more direct and forceful poem. By contrast, Shakespeare works with metaphor all through Sonnet 19, in which personified time is an external agency which the poet addresses directly. By way of comparison, it is also worth noting that the chief image in Spenser’s octet, that of time as an erasing tide, is a simile. Arguably, then, Spenser’s poem is nderwritten by and refers to the poet’s actual religious beliefs, whereas Shakespeare’s poem is more of a pure rhetorical performance, a display of wit operating without any connection to the poet’s actual beliefs.

By contrast, Christian sentiment does not feature in Shakespeare’s poem, and we would not take Shakespeare to be a pagan worshipper of personified time. Indeed, Spenser ends his sonnet by positing a Christian resurrection which will “later life renew”. This claim permits this sonnet to be related to Christian doctrine in which mortality is an inevitable part of our inheritance in consequence of the original sin of Adam and Eve.

Shakespeer sonnet 75