Sonnet 12 turns a summer harvest into a funeral procession
Shakespeare's Sonnet 12 starts with someone counting the strokes of a clock and then piles up evidence that everything fades: a wilting violet, dark hair gone silver, bare trees, and cut wheat carried off like a corpse with a white beard. Only then does the poem turn to the friend it is addressed to.
The structure is a long piling-up of 'when' clauses. When the speaker counts the hours, when he sees a splendid day swallowed by ugly night, when he notices a violet beyond its best and black curls silvered over, the reader waits for the main verb. The delay is the point: eight lines of decline accumulate before the sonnet reveals what all this watching has been leading to.
The most inventive image is agricultural. Tall trees that once shaded the herd from the heat now stand stripped, and the green growth of summer has been bound into sheaves and lifted onto a bier, its bristly white stubble doubling as the beard of an old man. Harvest, usually a picture of plenty, becomes a funeral. The seasons are not comforting here; they are a demonstration of loss.
At the ninth line the speaker finally turns to the friend. Having seen all this, he has to ask what becomes of that beauty, which must also travel among "the wastes of time". Sweet and lovely things abandon themselves and die just as quickly as they watch others grow. The couplet names Time as a reaper with a scythe and offers exactly one defence against him: breeding children, who can defy Time when he carries the parent away.
The poem's orderly rhetoric fits the schooling Shakespeare probably had. No attendance lists survive, but most biographers think he attended Stratford's King's New School, which charged no fees, had received its charter in 1553, and stood about a quarter of a mile from his home. Grammar schools of the Elizabethan era differed in quality, yet their teaching looked much alike, built on Latin classical authors, with the basic Latin textbook fixed by royal decree.
Source: Sonnet 12: When I do count the clock that tells the time
