莎士比亚十四行诗第六十首

Unlike many of his sonnets, William Shakespeare’s sonnet 60 concerns not love but the relentless and destructive march of time. The meter, rhyme, and acoustic devices that Shakespeare employs in sonnet 60 all support its major themes, but critics have not discussed them as creators of meaning; as I argue below, these elements present a battle motif that unifies the sonnet and explains the importance of the “immortality” (Evans 167) asserted in the couplet.
KEYWORDS
Gustav Freytag, Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon
WORKS CITED Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics. Trans. J. Hutton. New York: Norton, 1982. Print. Freytag, Gustav. Freytag’s Technique of the Drama: An Fra Baidu bibliotekxposition of Dramatic Composition and
novel as a whole, therefore illustrates the insight that all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
—BARRY LEWIS, University of Sunderland, England Copyright © 2009 Heldref Publications
The battle motif continues into the second quatrain, with “Nativity” (5) representing youth as a combatant in a battle against time. By evoking both an infant and a sunrise with the term “nativity,” Shakespeare joins nature and humanity in a battle against time. The rhyme of “light” (5) and “fight” (7) serves to emphasize the theme of battle by connecting the light of the sun with a fight against time. The eclipses endeavor to extinguish the sun’s (i.e., youth’s) light, and because the light symbolizes goodness, these lines portray time, which controls the eclipses, as an enemy attempting to extirpate goodness. Line 8 introduces “Time” as the one who eventually destroys the “gift” (8) of life (in the case of a person) or light (in the case of the sun), and the assonance in the phrase “now his gift confound” (8) emphasizes that, with both sides of the conflict introduced, the battle begins “now” in line 8.2 While the rhyme of “crowned” (6) and “confound” (8) does extend the theme of the vitiation of the good by linking the apex of life with its destruction, with the meaning of crown as “[t]he head” (“crown, n.,” def. 17b), the rhyme implies
Art. Trans. Elias J. MacEwan. Charleston: BiblioBazaar, 2008. Print. Pynchon, Thomas. Mason & Dixon. New York: Holt, 1997. Print.
Shakespeare’s SONNET 60
Although Helen Vendler remarks that the trochaic feet at the beginnings of some lines of the sonnet “draw attention to the hastening of the waves, the attacks by eclipses and by Time, and the countervailing praising by verse” (286), the meter accomplishes still more than this. The sonnet’s first two lines begin with the trochees “Like as” (line 1) and “So do” (2), and the metrical similarity of the lines connects them, enhancing the comparison of minutes and waves. While the trochees do convey the haste that Vendler observes, they also connote the crashing of waves against the shore (1). Shakespeare follows the initial trochee of line 1 with a calm, iambic meter, then starts line 2 with another trochee, suggesting the forceful impact of the waves. The second line then returns to iambic meter, and the spondee in “Each changing” that starts line 3 represents the climax of the strength of the waves.
The falls and destructions described in the three quatrains are not discrete; instead, they feed into the poem’s unifying battle motif. The motif begins in line 4, when the iambic meter of “In sequent toil”—which conveys the inexorable, unchangeable nature of time—is disrupted by the spondee in “all forwards” (4). I propose that this is a pun on forwards, portraying the movement of minutes in a fixed, forward direction but also suggesting the homonym foreward, which means the “first line of an army” (“foreward, n.2,” def. 1). With the pun, the spondee hints at the power and force of an army, as does the repetition of the hard d in “forwards do contend” (4). Stephen Booth remarks that, in a fighting context, toil can signify “a dispute” and to contend can mean to “fight against” an opponent (Shakespeare’s Sonnets 239). Furthermore, with the implied military context, the “sequent toil” (4) can describe the march of soldiers, with the iambic meter relating their steady, continuous advance.
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of a child or the sun.1 Lines 6 and 7 begin with trochees—“Crawls to” and “Crookèd”—and with the stress on “crowned” in line 6, the meter highlights the alliteration, which, as G. Blakemore Evans notes, traces the destruction, and possible corruption, of humanity and nature, with the “eclipses” (7) obscuring both the sun and the luster of humanity (168). Lines 6 and 7 express this theme metrically, sharing the precise structure of lines 1 and 2. In the first two lines of the sonnet, the waves approach the shore and minutes reach their “end” (2). Similarly, in lines 6 and 7, the child or the sun “Crawls to maturity” (6) and is crowned, but then has its “glory” destroyed by “Crookèd eclipses” (7). The sets of lines are metrically and thematically related, and they describe descents from well-being, a theme culminated in the summary destruction in the third quatrain, which gives a conventional personification of Time with his scythe, ravaging at once youth, beauty, and nature.
The second quatrain personifies time, and the meter and alliteration of the quatrain predict and underscore the fall of nature. The quatrain begins with the iambic “Nativity,” but the trochaic “once in” (5) interrupts the iambic meter and foretells the destruction of that nativity, which might refer to the birth