Sonnet 19 lets Time destroy lions, tigers and the phoenix, but not one face
Sonnet 19 opens by handing Time a licence to wreck the natural world. Blunt the lion's claws, pull the tiger's teeth, burn the phoenix alive, the speaker says, do anything at all. There is just one crime he forbids: carving wrinkles into his love's brow. Then, in the last line, he dares Time anyway.
The poem begins with an address to Time as a devourer, and the first quatrain is a catalogue of permitted violence. The earth is told to swallow her own offspring, the fiercest predators are disarmed, and even the phoenix, the bird famous for living long, is to be burned in her own blood. By granting Time power over the strongest and most enduring creatures, the speaker makes his later demand look all the more audacious.
Next Time is allowed to hurry through the seasons, making some glad and some sorry, and to do as it pleases with the world and every sweet thing that fades. Its epithet, swift-footed, stresses speed rather than cruelty. The speaker sounds almost generous, like a ruler signing away provinces.
The volta arrives in line eight with a single prohibition, what he calls one most heinous crime. Time must not engrave the hours onto his beloved's forehead or sketch lines there with its antique pen. The pen image links wrinkles and writing: Time is imagined as a rival author scribbling on a face. The young man should instead be left untouched as a model of beauty for later generations.
The couplet abandons pleading for bravado: "Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong, / My love shall in my verse ever live young." The speaker no longer needs Time's cooperation because the poem has become the preserve. Shakespeare probably received a Latin grammar-school education at the King's New School in Stratford, where classical authors were the core of study, and the personification of Time as a hungry destroyer has a distinctly classical flavour.
Source: Sonnet 19: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws
