‘Sonnet 65’ by William Shakespeare is one of several poems that discusses time, aging, and what writing can and cannot do to fight against these forces. It is a fourteen-line poem that is contained within one stanza, is made up of three quatrains, or sets of four lines, and one concluding couplet, or set of two rhyming lines. The poem follows a consistent rhyme scheme that conforms to the pattern of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG and it is written in iambic pentameter.
in the first stanza he acknowledges in lines one and two that everything is at the mercy of time. This includes “brass,” “stone,” “earth” and the “boundless” or limitless, “sea”. There is nothing that’s strong enough to resist the “sad mortality”. If these things few quite strong forces can’t fight back against time, then what chance does “beauty” have in the face of such power? Beauty, he says, is “no stronger than a flower”. He asks a rhetorical question in the second quatrain, another technique that is quite commonly used within Shakespeare’s sonnets. He wonders how the youth’s beauty (what he refers to as “summer’s honey breath) will be able to stand up against the “wrackful siege of batt’ring days”.