Sonnet 104 by Shakespeare: To me, fair friend, you never can be old

To me, fair friend, you never can be old,

For as you were when first your eye I ey’d,

Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold,

Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride,

Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn’d,

In process of the seasons have I seen,

Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn’d,

Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.

Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand,

Steal from his figure, and no pace perceiv’d;

So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,

Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceiv’d:

For fear of which, hear this thou age unbred:

Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.

Beauty's fleetingness is a topic often discussed, but Shakespeare's 104th sonnet has a different take on the matter. The speaker describes how he has known the person to whom he is speaking for three years, and his or her beauty has not changed at all. He uses both personification and metonymy to describe how three years have flowed by. Instead of saying "summer replaced spring," Shakespeare says "Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd," using "perfumes" as metonymy, using perfume to be understood as the sweet smell of spring, representing spring in general. Shakespeare also uses personification when depicting the shift from summer to winter, by describing the forests shaking off "summer's pride," or symbolically leaves. Also, like all Shakespearean or Elizabethan sonnets, it is clearly structured with fourteen lines, and a rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG, and has a meter of iambic pentameter (five feet of "short long" per line).

The turning point in this poem comes in the lines "Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand,/ Steal from his figure, and no pace perceiv'd" which is when the speaker admits that although he sees no change in his object's beauty, people do age and time does flow by like a dial-hand. After this, the sonnet changes from describing the passage of three years, to the speaker ruminating on how it is entirely possible that the beauty of the person he is addressing is indeed moving, or "hath motion." The sonnet is more melancholy, even nostalgic, in this second half. He seems to accept the fact that beauty is ever changing and inherently fleeting, and ends the poem by directly addressing unborn generations, an abstract apostrophe: "hear this thou age unbred:/Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead." This is a warning that there will never again be such beauty in the world when future ages come, because the beauty he admires now will soon inevitably die.