When I Have Seen by Time’s Fell Hand Defaced is the first line of Sonnet 64 by the great English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. Shakespeare ranks as the finest dramatist who wrote in the English language. He is also one of the best English poets. See Shakespeare, William.
Shakespeare’s sonnets were published in 1609, when he had already become a successful playwright. No one knows when Shakespeare wrote the poems, but he probably composed them over several years. There are 154 sonnets in the sequence, though some scholars believe that a different author wrote Sonnets 153 and 154, those dealing with Cupid, the Roman god of love. Only two of the sonnets were published before 1609, in a collection called The Passionate Pilgrim (1599).
Like almost all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, Sonnet 12 consists of three quatrains (four-line units) followed by a concluding couplet (two-line unit). Each quatrain has a rhyme scheme of abab, cdcd, efef, with the final couplet a rhyming one (gg).
When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age; When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed, And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the watery main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store; When I have seen such interchange of state, Or state itself confounded to decay, Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That Time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death, which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
This is one of Shakespeare’s most pessimistic sonnets. Like many others in the sequence, it is a contemplation on the theme of time. However, in contrast to many of the sonnets, which build to a triumphant conclusion in the final couplet, this one ends in doom. The poet darkly muses on age, death, war, the cycles of nature, and changing states. The result is an overwhelming sense of “ruin.” This leads to the sad conclusion, expressed with simplicity, that “Time will come and take my love away.”
Sonnet 64 belongs to a larger group of sonnets (1-126) that are addressed to an unidentified young nobleman. Many of the sonnets are tributes to the friend, and aim to set his beauty, love, and friendship against the ravages of time. Here, however, Shakespeare devotes the entire descriptive force of the sonnet to the destructiveness of time. Precious things (“rich proud cost”) are defaced by age. Towers and brass—usually symbols of permanence—are defeated by the “rage” of time and death. The land and the sea, in an endless exchange, intrude upon each other to result in “loss” for both.
Such powerfully dark reflections on universal reality result in a moving personal statement. The sonnet reminds us that the condition of love is one of fear of loss. This is the stark conclusion that Sonnet 64 must reach, though such a thought is “as a death.”
For more information on the sonnets, see Shakespeare, William (Shakespeare’s poems). See also English literature (Elizabethan poetry); Poetry (Forms) (Renaissance poetry).
