DSC 401: Sonnet 65. 2027,

Youth sonnets, claiming that the speaker does not believe fully in the immortalising power of his verse; that it is merely literary and ultimately unreal. He treats the "still" in line 14 as wordplay, reading it to mean "dead, unmoving" rather than "perpetual, eternal".[7] There is some scholarly debate over this point, though. Carl Atkins, for example, writes that the reader is "not to take the couplet's 'unless' seriously. We are not expected to have any doubt that the 'miracle' of making the beloved shine brightly in black ink has might. Of course it does - we have been told so before. 'Who can hold back time?' the speaker asks. 'No one, except me,' is the answer".[8] Philip Martin tends toward agreement with Atkins, but refutes the suggestion that the reader is "not to take the couplet's 'unless' seriously," asserting instead that, "the poem's ending is...deliberately and properly tentative".[9] Murray Krieger agrees with Martin's point that, "the end of 65 is stronger precisely because it is so tentative".[9] "The soft, almost non-consonantal 'how shall summer's honey breath hold out' " offers no resistance to Time's 'wrackful siege of batt'ring days'.[10] Krieger suggests that while the sonnet does not resist Time through an assertion of strength, the concession of weakness by the placement of hope solely on a 'miracle,' offers an appeal against Time: "May there not be a strength that arises precisely from the avoidance of it?".[10]

Connection to The Tragedy of Julius Cæsar

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Time is a natural force from which none of us is immune. This theme pervades the sonnet; the speaker recognises that time will strip the beloved of his beauty and by saying that implies that time will take his beloved from him. Eventually, time will consume everyone in death, and, whether one chooses to recognise it or not, he will not have any control over exactly when that consumption will take place. This theme translates to Julius Caesar as well. Caesar is unfazed by the soothsayer's proclamation in act one, and even though Calpurnia seems for a time to have succeeded in keeping Caesar home on the day of his eventual murder, he goes to Senate anyway. Caesar walks into his own death, much less literally than Brutus, who does actually walk into the sword that kills him. But in these deaths in the context of the play serve to elucidate the truth that death (or 'Time', as the sonnet refers to it) will consume you regardless of your ambitions or future plans; it does not take you into consideration. Obviously, Caesar would not have gone to Senate if he knew he would be stabbed upon entering, just as Brutus and Cassius would not have engaged in a full-blown war if they knew they would be dead before it was over.

It is coincidental enough that the speaker suggests that the only way to immortalise his beloved as he is, is through his writing. And the way that Caesar and the others are kept alive is through writing, through history, and in some senses through Shakespeare himself.

It is rather universally accepted that a body of Shakespeare's sonnets, including 65, are addressed to a young man whose beauty the poems make known. The young man is like Caesar, then, in that Shakespeare recognises the presence of feminine qualities in a man. But the common theme is more than recognition, it is an acknowledgment of tension created by that recognition. Especially by Cassius, Caesar is made out to be rather feminine, as is the young man in descriptions of his beauty. In that the speaker does not directly refer to the addressee of the sonnets as a man, and in that Brutus and the others find discomfort in Caesar's ruling ability because of his appeared weaknesses, shows that Shakespeare recognises an anxiety about men with feminine qualities, or women with masculine qualities, like Queen Elizabeth, of whom Caesar may or may not be representative.

Interpretations