...sei denn, dies trifft zu: Aus meiner Tinte Schwarz, draus leuchtest du. 65 Shakespeare: Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality...a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? Oh how shall summer's honey breath hold out Against the wrackful siege of battering days, When rocks...

...greatness 10 confounded to devastated to a point of 12 love beloved 14 to have for having 65 1 Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality o'ersways their power, 3 How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, 4 Whose action is no stronger than a flower? O, how...

...lose. (Sonnet LXIV) The 'hungry ocean'; a usual thought. So is the word 'rage'. Or again, Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality...stout, Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays ? (Sonnet ucv) summer airs are usual as a contrast. Notice 'siege* and 'battering', a metaphor which...

...immortalized in art. Now what would be a good poem to illustrate that? Sonnet 65 will do: Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality...how shall summer's honey breath hold out Against the wrackful siege of batt'ririg days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout, Nor gates of steel so strong,...

...besmear'd with sluttish time. Time becomes a symbol, almost a synonym, for mortality : Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, But sad mortality...how shall summer's honey breath hold out Against the wrackful siege of battering days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout, Nor gates of steel so strong,...

...also, like the rose-bud, fragile and short-lived. In a world of hostile forces, mortality and decay, How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea Whose action is no stronger than a flower? (65) 'Beauty' means 'youthful beauty', and so to imagine the boy at forty years old is equivalent to...

...than a flower? 0 how shall summer's honey breath hold out 5 Agatnst the wrarkful siege of hatt'ring days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout, Nor gates of steel so strong, bot time derays? 0 fearful meditation; where, alark, Shall Time's hest lewel from Time's chest lie...

...suffered the same fate as the lost Cardenio. In Sonnet 65 Shakespeare had lamented that neither 'brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, / But sad mortality o'ersways their power.' Leonard Digges, in his commendatory lines, picked up on this when he wrote that the Folio, 'When brass...

...HN Hillebrand and TW Baldwin (Philadelphia. 1953), pp. JS2, 554, 520, 522, 523. Against the wrackful siege of battering days, When rocks impregnable are...stout, Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays? The poet protests that he will remain constant despite Time with his scythe, and proclaims that: Love's...

...is felt; but the profusion of rhetorical questions produced by apparently solitary poetic speakers ("O how shall summer's honey breath hold out / Against the wreckful siege of battering days?") makes it a vexed issue to what extent interrogatives in general convey an explicit direction of address.10...