“Sonnet 104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old” Introduction

• "To me, fair friend, you never can be old" is the 104th sonnet in William Shakespeare's famous 154-poem sequence, first collected and published in 1609. Addressed to a beautiful young man, this poem explores the power of love to transcend time—or at least to appear to transcend time. The poem's speaker feels that his beloved "fair friend" hasn't aged a day since they met three years ago. But he can't help but admit that his "eye may be deceived." He's aware that the sheer strength of his feeling might make him see his beloved as eternally young and beautiful, even if it's not so. And he knows that time often works so gradually that it's nearly impossible to mark its progress until after the fact. This, however, seems no reason to give up his firm belief that his beloved will always be young and lovely in his eyes.

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“Sonnet 104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old” Summary

• To me, lovely friend, you can never be old. For the way you looked when I first saw your eyes is the way you still appear to me. Three cold winters have shaken three lush summer crops of leaves from the woods; I've seen three beautiful springs turn to yellow autumn as the seasons have changed. Three sweet-scented Aprils have burnt up in three hot Junes since I first saw you at your freshest (though you're still fresh and young now). Ah, but beauty, like the hand of a clock, sneaks away from his face, so slowly one can't see it happening. Thus, your lovely coloration, which to me seems never to change, indeed moves, and I may see you falsely. In fear that this is true, listen here, you years to come: before you were born, the height of youthful beauty was dead.

“Sonnet 104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old” Themes

• 

  Love, Beauty, and Time

  The speaker of "To me, fair friend, you never can be old" gazes at his "fair friend"—a gorgeous young man—with eyes dazzled by love. So far as he can tell, his beloved hasn't aged a day since they first met, three years ago: "as you were when first your eye I eyed, / Such seems your beauty still," he declares. But he's also not a fantasist; he knows that the word "seems" is pulling a lot of weight there. By describing how his beloved appears eternally youthful to him—while also admitting that appearances may be deceiving and there's no escaping aging—this poem's speaker suggests that love has the strange power to defeat time and age, not by doing away with them, but by altering a lover's perceptions.

  The speaker declares that his beloved looks just as "fresh" and "green" (or youthful) as the moment they laid eyes on each other, three years back. But he also admits that such well-preserved looks probably can't last forever and maybe don't even truly exist in the first place. Beauty, he reflects, acts rather like a "dial-hand" (the hour hand of a clock or the shadow on a sundial): it alters so very slowly and gradually that there's no catching its disappearance in the moment. Though his beloved seems exactly the same to him after three years, then, he knows that his "eye may be deceived," both because change is gradual and because he's so lovestruck that he can't see his beloved objectively.

  Acknowledging this, the speaker must also acknowledge that his beloved will indeed one day grow old and die. But even as he makes this admission, his lovestruck vision doesn't dim. He merely declares that the unfortunate "age unbred" (the generations yet to come) will never get the chance to experience "beauty's summer"—that is, the height of human loveliness, as embodied by his beloved. Forced to admit that time wears away even the greatest beauties, he nonetheless refuses to concede his deeply felt impressions of that beauty.

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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Sonnet 104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old”

• Lines 1-3

  To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
  For as you were when first your eye I eyed,
  Such seems your beauty still.

  Sonnet 104 begins with a declaration of enduring love—or, more precisely, a declaration of enduring beauty. The poem's speaker addresses his "fair friend," a lovely young gentleman, and assures him that he looks just the same as he did when "first your eye I eyed" (when first the speaker looked at his beloved's eyes). The beloved, in other words, looks just as beautiful to the speaker as he did when they first met.

  The line "when first your eye I eyed" presents the beloved's eye as something that the speaker sees, more than something that might look back at the speaker. The speaker's eye is a thing that eyes, performing an action; the beloved's eye is simply there to be seen. This, then, will be a poem about one lover gazing at another.

  It will also be a poem about the way that love might distort that lover's gaze. For the speaker isn't precisely saying that his beloved is completely unchanged since first they met. The very first words of the poem—"To me, fair friend, you never can be old"—make it clear that the speaker's view of his beloved is subjective. He doesn't tell his beloved, your beauty is eternal; he tells him, "such seems your beauty still." To the speaker, the beloved is eternally beautiful and youthful. To the speaker, the beloved's beauty is changeless. But that doesn't mean that time isn't working away on this "fair friend," and on the speaker, too.

  This reflection on time, love, and beauty is the 104th in a sequence of 154 sonnets that Shakespeare published in 1609. Like nearly all of those sonnets, this one follows the classic English form:

  • It's fourteen lines long;
  • It's written in iambic pentameter—lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm, as in "To me, | fair friend, | you nev- | er can | be old";
  • And it uses an ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyme scheme.

• Lines 3-8

  Three winters cold
  Have from the forests shook three summers’ pride,
  Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turned
  In process of the seasons have I seen,
  Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burned,
  Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.

  

  

• Lines 9-12

  Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
  Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived;
  So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,
  Hath motion, and mine eye may be deceived:

  

  

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• Lines 13-14

  For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred:
  Ere you were born was beauty’s summer dead.

  

  

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“Sonnet 104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

• Simile

  In the poem's central simile, the poem's speaker compares a young man's beauty to the hour hand of a clock or the shadow of a sundial. All of these things, the speaker observes, share a stealthy quality. They change without appearing to change:

  Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,
  Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived;

  One can't really catch the "dial-hand" of a clock moving, in other words. It creeps along almost imperceptibly slowly. And yet, it most certainly moves. His beloved's youthful beauty, the speaker frets, might be fading away in exactly the same way, bit by infinitesimal bit. An elegant little pun makes that point especially clear. A dial hand "steal[s]" (or creeps away) from a "figure," a number on the clock. And beauty steals away from the beloved's figure, his physical form.

  Though his "fair friend" looks exactly as lovely to the speaker now as he did three years ago when they first met, he knows that his "eye may be deceived." In fact, by so firmly connecting the beloved's beauty to the movement of a clock—the physical embodiment of time itself—the simile suggests that the speaker's eye must be deceived. Time ticks away whether we "perceive[]" its workings or not.

  Shakespeare's deployment of this simile is fatalistic and deeply romantic at the same time. His speaker has to admit that time is moving along and his beloved's beauty (and his beloved himself!) aren't immortal. But he also makes it clear that, gazing at his "fair friend" with lovestruck eyes, he can perceive no alteration in him whatsoever.

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• Metaphor

  

  
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• Repetition

  

  

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• Euphony

  

  

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"Sonnet 104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old" Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Fair
• Dial hand
• Steal from his figure
• No pace perceived
• Hue
• Methinks
• Age unbred
• Ere

• Beautiful, lovely to look at.

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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Sonnet 104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old”

• Form

  "To me, fair friend, you never can be old" is a Shakespearean sonnet. That might sound obvious: it's a sonnet, and Shakespeare wrote it. But this is also a "Shakespearean sonnet" because it's a specific form of sonnet named after Shakespeare, its acknowledged master.

  By far the most common flavors of sonnet are the Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet and the Shakespearean (or English) sonnet. These two types of sonnet have a number of qualities in common:

  • They're fourteen lines long.
  • They're written in iambic pentameter: lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. (Line 1—"To me, | fair friend, | you ne- | ver can | be old"—provides a perfect example.)
  • They use a set rhyme scheme.

  The difference is in the rhyme scheme—and the different internal form that rhyme scheme creates. The Shakespearean sonnet uses a rhyme scheme that divides the poem into three quatrains (ABAB, CDCD, EFEF) and a closing couplet (GG). That shape creates a sense of thoughtful progression ending in a strong conclusion: the couplet often delivers a firm last word, a realization, a declaration, or an abrupt change.

  Here, the speaker uses that final couplet to cut against the grain of the rest of the sonnet. Up until the end of the poem, he's spent most of his time making the point that, in his eyes, his beloved doesn't seem to have aged one bit since they met three years ago. By the closing lines, however, he's forced to admit that his beloved probably isn't immortally youthful; time and change come for everyone. He thus closes on the idea that "beauty's summer" will die with his beloved: that no one will ever reach quite the pinnacle of beauty his beloved has, even if that beauty can't last forever.

• Meter

  Like the vast majority of sonnets, "To me, fair friend, you never can be old" is written in iambic pentameter. That means that it uses lines of five iambs, metrical feet with a da-DUM rhythm. Here's how that sounds in line 14:

  Ere you | were born | was beau- | ty’s sum- | mer dead.

  Sometimes, a little variation in this steady rhythm adds color or emphasis, as in line 10:

  Steal from | his fig- | ure, and | no pace | perceived;

  The first foot there is a trochee—the opposite of an iamb, with a DUM-da rhythm. Fittingly, this trochee creates a little hiccup in the meter at just the moment when the speaker worries that his beloved's beauty might be draining away—so slowly that he can't even tell it's happening, but nonetheless...

  But for the most part, the familiar old rhythm of iambic pentameter, pulsing like a heartbeat, carries the poem gently along.

• Rhyme Scheme

  Shakespeare uses the traditional rhyme scheme of the English sonnet here. That means that the poem's rhymes run like this:

  ABAB CDCD EFEF GG

  This rhyme scheme became popular in English sonnets because it offers more flexibility than the Italian sonnet rhyme scheme (a pattern that uses at most five rhymes, starting with an ABBA ABBA pattern and ending with a mixture of C, D, and sometimes E rhymes). The latter pattern developed, as its name would suggest, in Italy—and English simply doesn't have as many rhymes as Italian does!

  The more varied pattern of rhymes gives the English sonnet a different sort of motion than the Italian. The procession of alternating rhymes leading up to a closing couplet creates a steady momentum, a progress toward a calm, firm conclusion (or, oftentimes, a surprise).

  Here, that conclusion is a profoundly romantic one. The speaker must admit that his young beloved must have aged at least a little since they met three years ago and that therefore he's not immortal. But even if his beloved must one day grow old and die, the speaker concludes, he'll still have been the most beautiful youth ever to walk the earth.

“Sonnet 104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old” Speaker

• The poem's speaker is a lover obsessed with time, mortality, and beauty. Profoundly enamored with a gorgeous young man (the "fair friend" he addresses all through this poem), he discovers that love might be playing tricks on him. For although the speaker and his beloved met three full years ago, the speaker can't perceive the slightest sign of aging or change in the young man. "To me," he tells his beloved, "you never can be old."

  But the words "to me" are doing a lot of lifting there. The speaker is well aware that he's seeing through the highly subjective eyes of love and that what he sees in his beloved may not be what another viewer might. Nonetheless, he remains committed to his beautifully distorted vision, even after he's forced to admit that his eye "may be deceived." Even though he can't faithfully say that his beloved's beauty will never fade, he can declare that this beauty is the pinnacle of all beauties that will ever be.

  The poem's speaker thus comes across as a complex character. On the one hand, he's profoundly and faithfully romantic. On the other, he's a realist: he knows that his "eye may be deceived" and fully admits that (as a far later poet would put it) you cannot conquer time.

“Sonnet 104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old” Setting

• There's no clear setting in "To me, fair friend, you never can be old," no explicit time or place. But an atmosphere of lush natural beauty surrounds the speaker's love affair. When the speaker thinks back on how much time has passed since he and his beloved first met, he thinks in terms of the seasons: "three summers' pride" of lively green leaves, "three April perfumes" of blossom and bud. He could just as easily have measured these years out in more human events—three Christmases or three St. Crispin's Days, for example. But he doesn't. He feels his time with his beloved as something connected deeply to the rhythm of the seasons.

  By connecting his romance to the seasons, the speaker might suggest that there's something timeless about his love. He knows already that he simply can't perceive any signs of time or change in his beloved; the seasons pass, but the young man's beauty seems (and "seems" is an important word here!) to remain the same. In this, his beloved might seem more like the eternally renewing idea of summer rather than any one summer in particular. (He's forced to admit, however, that his beloved's summer will certainly one day pass.)

Literary and Historical Context of “Sonnet 104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old”

• Literary Context

  Sonnet 104 is one of the 154 sonnets that William Shakespeare published in a 1609 book—a world-famous sequence of poems that reflects on love, desire, beauty, time, mortality, and faith. The first 126 of these sonnets are known as the "Fair Youth" sequence, and they address a beautiful young man the speaker has fallen deeply in love with. Almost all of the rest of the sonnets (but for the final two, which are mythological tales about the love god Cupid) are devoted to another beloved, the mysterious "Dark Lady." In their interest in the pains and pleasures of love, their elegant wit, and their ingenious construction, these poems epitomize the sonnet form.

  However, they also cut across the sonnet tradition. Sonnets were wildly popular during Shakespeare's lifetime. The English sonnet's tight, intricate shape demanded a lot of poetic skill and was an ideal place to deploy the clever wordplay that the writers of the English Renaissance loved. And with their steady, heartbeat-like meter and harmonious rhymes, sonnets were also strongly associated with an evergreen subject: love. Most sonnet-writers in Shakespeare's time were penning verses in praise of idealized, remote beloveds. The speaker of Shakespeare's sonnets, meanwhile, pokes fun at such conventions.

  While Shakespeare is the best-known sonnet-writer in English, he's far from the only one. The sonnet is still a popular form to this day, and poets from Donne to Milton to Keats to Rossetti have written famous examples. But part of what makes Shakespeare's sonnet sequence special is the insight it gives readers into the life of the most influential and most mysterious of the English poets. As a playwright, Shakespeare seems to inhabit myriad different characters without ever revealing himself. But the sonnets have traditionally been read as at least somewhat autobiographical. In them, readers find a poet grappling with his own overwhelming feelings—and transmuting them into intricate, elegant art.

  Historical Context

  Readers new to Shakespeare's sonnets might be surprised that most of them are addressed from a male speaker to a young man. Romantic and erotic, these poems don't necessarily fit in with how a modern reader might expect the Elizabethans (that is, people who lived under the 16th-century reign of England's Queen Elizabeth I) to think about sexuality.

  But in Renaissance Europe, ideas about same-sex love and passion worked a lot differently than they do today. The people of the Renaissance certainly policed sexuality carefully. Sex outside marriage was a major scandal (and an important plot point in many of Shakespeare's plays for that reason!). And sex between men was often considered a literal crime (albeit one that many governments chose to prosecute selectively or to overlook). But Renaissance people also didn't really have concepts like gayness, straightness, bisexuality, or queerness. Instead, they acknowledged that powerful forms of love could exist in many different contexts. Marriage and the act of sex might have been intensely regulated, but love and sexuality were fairly free.

  In Shakespeare's time and place, love between men could also be interpreted as part of the intellectual tradition of ancient Greece and Rome. Renaissance thinkers venerated classical literature and philosophy, in which love between men was often seen as an honorable and beautiful rite of passage. (No lesser thinker than Plato wrote a whole series of dialogues about the philosophical import of love between an older and a younger man, in fact.)

  In addressing his poem to a lovely young man, then, this sonnet's speaker isn't so far outside the cultural standards of his time as one might at first imagine.

More “Sonnet 104: To me, fair friend, you never can be old” Resources

• External Resources

  • The Poem Aloud — Listen to Sir Patrick Stewart reading the poem aloud.

  • Shakespeare's Sonnets — Visit the Folger Shakespeare Library's website to learn more about Shakespeare's sonnets.

  • A Brief Biography — Shakespeare is the most influential writer in the English language—but we know comparatively little about his life. Read the Poetry Foundation's short biography of the poet to learn what we do know.

  • The Fair Friend — Read an essay discussing the mystery of Shakespeare's "fair youth"—the handsome young man to whom the first 126 of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets are dedicated.

  • Shakespeare's Influence — Visit the Royal Shakespeare Company's website to learn more about how Shakespeare's work lives and evolves today.

• LitCharts on Other Poems by William Shakespeare

  • Sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds

  • Sonnet 129: Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame

  • Sonnet 12: When I do count the clock that tells the time

  • Sonnet 130: My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun

  • Sonnet 138: When my love swears that she is made of truth

  • Sonnet 141: In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes

  • Sonnet 147: My love is as a fever, longing still

  • Sonnet 18: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

  • Sonnet 19: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws

  • Sonnet 20: A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted

  • Sonnet 27: "Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed"

  • Sonnet 29: When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes

  • Sonnet 30: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

  • Sonnet 33: Full many a glorious morning have I seen

  • Sonnet 45: The other two, slight air and purging fire

  • Sonnet 55: Not marble nor the gilded monuments

  • Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore

  • Sonnet 65 ("Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea")

  • Sonnet 71: No longer mourn for me when I am dead

  • Sonnet 73: That time of year thou mayst in me behold

  • Sonnet 94: "They that have power to hurt"