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.
It follows the form's typical rhyme, abab cdcd efef gg and is written a type of poetic metre called iambic pentameter based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions.
[2] According to Vendler, "Each quatrain introduces a new and important modification in concept and tone, while the couplet—here a "reversing" couplet contradicting the body of the sonnet—adds yet a fourth dimension".
Vendler writes that the first two lines of the sonnet begin with trochees, which "draw attention to the hastening of the waves, the attacks by eclipses and by Time, and the countervailing praising by verse".
[5] Arbour argues that this sensation of waves crashing culminates at the beginning of the third line, in which a spondee, a foot with two stressed syllables, represents this climax.
[6] Despite this disagreement, both critics acknowledge that the non-iambic feet simulate the undulating and crashing waves that Shakespeare portrays in the first line of the sonnet.
[6] This contrasts greatly with the "smoothness of the first quatrain, describing the work of time, in which each line [after the initial trochee] runs to its end like the ripple to which it compares the succession of minutes".
The words chosen by Shakespeare such as toil, transfix, fight, contend, glory, confound, and scythe all hint at a violent conflict to which the speaker finds himself irreversibly attached.
He explains the third quatrain as the degradation of his fascination's beauty, that the weapons that time methodically uses to slowly strip what the speaker values is a crushing blow.
Similar to the shape of a human lifespan, with a rise from immaturity and incompetence, climaxing at a stage most able, and then steadily falling away from the high point of life and towards entropy, the second quatrain shows this parabolic idea of existence, from which Shakespeare longs to escape.
The English East India Company launched its first spice trading expedition in 1598, and England began its first colonization attempts in North America.
Time in the ancient world had been marked by the rising of the sun and its setting, the seasons, or the lunar and solar events, by birth and death.
As in Shakespeare's Sonnet 60, Ovid speaks of time as a cyclical, natural process, like waves on the sea:[19] Full sail, I voyage Over the boundless ocean, and I tell you Nothing is permanent in all the world.
Ovid, as in Shakespeare's sonnet, speaks of this same natural rhythm of time as seen through the process of birth, life and death: To the void air, there in light we lay Feeble and infant and were quadrupeds Before too long a little wobbled And pulled ourselves upright, holding a chair, And the side of the crib and strength grew into us And swiftness; youth and middle age went swiftly.
[22] 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 According to Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare relied heavily on these sections of Ovid's Metamorphoses while composing Sonnet 60, and these passages from Ovid roughly correspond to the three quatrains of the sonnet.