Sonnet 63

Foreseeing the young man's inevitable decline into age and infirmity, the speaker fortifies his memory against time's cruelty, vowing that his verses will preserve the beloved's beauty eternal even as the flesh withers.

Original

Modern

1 Against my love shall be as I am now

To guard against the day you become what I am now,

2 With Time’s injurious hand crushed and o’erworn,

Crushed and exhausted by time's harmful grip,

injurious: harmful; o'erworn: overworn, exhausted.

3 When hours have drained his blood and filled his brow

When the hours have drained your vitality and marked your forehead

4 With lines and wrinkles, when his youthful morn

With lines and wrinkles, when your youthful dawn

morn: morning, youth; youthful morn: the dawn of life.

5 Hath travelled on to age’s steepy night,

Has progressed into old age's steep descent into darkness,

steepy: steep, precipitous; age's steepy night: old age as a descending darkness.

6 And all those beauties whereof now he’s king

And all those beauties of which you now reign supreme,

king: supreme possessor, ruler.

7 Are vanishing, or vanished out of sight,

Are vanishing or already vanished from view,

8 Stealing away the treasure of his spring:

Stealing away the treasure of your youth.

spring: youth, the season of growth and vitality.

Volta The volta shifts from lamentation over the young man's inevitable aging to the speaker's resolute fortification: 'For such a time do I now fortify / Against confounding age's cruel knife.'

9 For such a time do I now fortify

So I now fortify my defenses

fortify: strengthen, prepare defenses.

10 Against confounding age’s cruel knife,

Against the cruel blade of destructive age,

confounding: destroying, confusing; cruel knife: time's destructive tool.

11 That he shall never cut from memory

So that time can never erase from memory

12 My sweet love’s beauty, though my lover’s life.

My beloved's beauty, even if not your actual physical life.

lover's life: the lover's (the young man's) actual lifetime.

13 His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,

Beauty preserved in black lines of poetry

Your beauty will be visible in these written lines,

black lines: the written verse.

14 And they shall live, and he in them still green.

The promise of eternal youth through verse

And they will endure, and you will live in them eternally young.

green: young, fresh, perpetually vital.

Prophetic Witnessing

Sonnet 63 is unusual in the sequence for its prophetic stance. The speaker is not remembering what has been lost but forecasting what will be lost. Lines 1–8 construct a vivid future landscape of decay: drained blood, wrinkled brows, the theft of spring. This is uncanny—the speaker speaks as though aging has already happened ('shall be as I am now'). The effect is hallucinatory: the young man's future age becomes present through language. Yet this is precisely the speaker's strategy: by making decay imaginatively real now, he prepares his defenses. The fortification he undertakes (line 9) is psychological and literary—a preemptive strike against time through commemorative verse.

The Immortality of Verse

The couplet offers the classical response to mortality: 'His beauty shall in these black lines be seen.' The 'black lines'—literal ink on paper—become the immortal vehicle for the beloved's eternal youth. Yet Shakespeare's formulation is careful: the lines will live; the beloved will 'in them still green'—he exists not independently but within the poetry. This is both redemptive and troubling: the price of immortality is absorption into art. The young man's body may age and die, but his essence lives perpetually in the poem's 'black lines,' becoming a kind of ghostly immortality. The poem preserves not life but its image, not the person but the beloved as fixed in time.

If this happened today

Like taking photos of someone you love because you know they'll change, or writing down memories before they fade. The speaker is saying: 'I can't stop you from aging, but I can make sure the world never forgets how you were beautiful.'

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