The Full Text of “Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore”
1Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore,
2So do our minutes hasten to their end;
3Each changing place with that which goes before,
4In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
5Nativity, once in the main of light,
6Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,
7Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
8And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
9Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
10And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
11Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
12And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
13And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
14Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
The Full Text of “Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore”
1Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore,
2So do our minutes hasten to their end;
3Each changing place with that which goes before,
4In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
5Nativity, once in the main of light,
6Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,
7Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
8And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
9Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
10And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
11Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
12And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
13And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
14Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
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“Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore” Introduction
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"Sonnet 60" tackles a theme common to many of William Shakespeare's sonnets: the relentless march of cruel, unfeeling time. Just as waves endlessly roll onto the shore, the speaker says, the moments of our lives endlessly roll forward toward death, robbing people of their beauty along the way. Part of what scholars call Shakespeare's "Fair Youth" sequence, the poem is addressed to a young man whom the speaker hopes to immortalize within the poem itself; the speaker argues that this sonnet will survive the test of time, and, in doing so, praise its addressee forevermore.
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“Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore” Summary
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Just as waves move towards the pebbly shore, the moments of our lives rush towards death. Each new moment swaps places with the previous one, moving forward in a constant struggle. Babies, after being thrust into the light of life, start crawling towards adulthood. And once they reach maturity, the darkness of old age starts to set in. Time takes back the gift he gave, piercing the glow of youthfulness and carving wrinkles into people's foreheads. Time feeds on all the wonders and beauties of nature, and nothing can avoid time's swinging scythe. That said, I hope my poems will survive to praise you, despite time's cruelty.
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“Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore” Themes
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Time, Art, and Immortality
“Sonnet 60” is about the relentless forward march of time. Life is short and even cruel in this poem: youth and beauty never last, and the brief candle of life is doomed to be snuffed out before too long. Just one thing might survive the destructive forces of time, says the speaker, and in doing so grant its subject immortality: this poem itself.
“[O]ur minutes,” the speaker says, are like waves rolling onto the shore; just as a new wave rolls forward as soon as the previous wave disappears, a new moment “toil[s]” forward as soon as the previous moment is over. Through this comparison, the speaker presents time’s passage as inevitable and unstoppable, with the “minutes” of human life pulled ceaselessly toward “their end.” As soon as people are born, it follows, they start “crawling” towards adulthood, old age, and death. In other words, life goes by in a few blinks of the eye; people are born, they wear the “crown[]” of “maturity” and then everything’s over.
With time’s forward march comes pain and decay, the speaker says, presenting time is like a mean trickster who gives people the joys of life in one instant only to take them back in the next. Time grants people youthful beauty, yet later sculpts lines (“parallels”) into their brows. Time is the grim reaper who feeds on the “rarities” of life—everything good and joyful about being alive—and “mows” people down with his “scythe.”
The only thing that might “stand” up to time, states the speaker, is this poem itself. Written as part of a sonnet sequence praising a young man known as the “Fair Youth,” the poem ends with Shakespeare’s common rebuttal to the fact of time’s power: poetry has the power to preserve people’s “worth” in verse, even when people themselves die by time’s “cruel hand.” Poetry, then, presents a kind of immortality. At least the speaker’s “hope[s]” that’s the case—only time will tell.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore”
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Lines 1-2
Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;The poem opens with a simile comparing the passage of time to waves as they "make towards" the shore. The speaker is talking about the way that waves keep moving towards the shoreline (pulled by an unstoppable force which, not too long after this poem was written, was identified as gravity). Likewise, "our minutes"—our time as individuals on earth—quickly flow toward their end.
The first line captures this sense of unrelenting motion through its sound. This poem, like most sonnets, uses iambic pentameter: a meter with five iambs, feet with a da-DUM (unstressed-stressed) pattern, per line. But this pattern gets disrupted immediately with a trochee (stressed-unstressed) in the poem's first foot:
Like as | the waves | make towards | the peb- | bl'd shore,
A metrical stress can be used to suggest force, and that's exactly what's going on here. The emphasis on "Like" lends the line extra strength, as does the extra stress on "make." All these stressed beats thrust the line forward.
Assonance adds to this feeling of forward momentum, the long shared vowels sounds of "Waves make" and "towards [...] shore" again pulling the reader through the line just as the waves are pulled towards the sand. Also note how the first two lines use sibilance to conjure the sounds of the sea, words like "towards," "shore," "So," and "minutes hasten" evoking the hiss and spray of the waves as they roll onto the beach.
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Lines 3-4
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend. -
Lines 5-8
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound. -
Lines 9-12
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow: -
Lines 13-14
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.
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“Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
"Sonnet 60" uses alliteration to bring its images and ideas to life. The clearest alliteration comes in the poem's second quatrain, where the speaker tells the story of a human life in miniature—showing how quickly the prime of life starts to fade. Youth, the speaker says:
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,
Crooked eclipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.Note the repetition of /cr/ sounds above, which link the stages of life: the "crawl" of youth, the "crown" of maturity, and the "crooked eclipses" of old age. The alliteration creates the sense of life moving ceaselessly forward, each phase "changing place with that which goes before"—just as "waves" and "minutes" do in the poem's first quatrain.
The sharp /c/ sound then gets echoed by "eclipses" (which counts alliterative because the shared sound falls at the start of a stressed beat, "eclipses") and "confound." All this alliteration makes the story sound all the more powerful and inescapable, much like the passage of time itself.
The other alliterative sound in these lines pits those aforementioned "crooked eclipses" (again, the passage of time and dawning of old age) "'gainst" the brief "glory" of youth. These hard /g/ sounds feel aggressive, suggesting a futile struggle against the mighty force of time. The alliteration of "gift" and "gave" in the very next line has the same effect.
Finally, the alliteration in line 10 is deliberately show-offy: "beauty's brow." The poem makes the point that beauty is short-lived and soon taken away by time. The sonic play in the phrase "beauty's brow" seems like a vain attempt by the poem itself to hang onto the beauty being described.
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Assonance
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Caesura
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Consonance
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Metaphor
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Personification
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Analogy
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"Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore" 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.
- Hasten
- Sequent
- Toil
- Contend
- Nativity
- Main
- Maturity
- Wherewith
- Eclipses
- 'Gainst
- Doth
- Confound
- Transfix
- Flourish
- Set On
- Delves
- Parallels
- Scythe
- Mow
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Hurry towards.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore”
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Form
"Sonnet 60" is a Shakespearean sonnet, meaning that its 14 lines divide neatly into three quatrains and a closing couplet.
Each quatrain deals with a different aspect of time—how it flows, how affects human life, and how it inevitably takes away the "gift" of beauty and youth. The first three quatrains, then, all expand on the same theme.
As is traditional for a Shakespearean, the couplet then offers a twist on everything that has come before. If the quatrains make the struggle against time seem hopeless and futile, the couplet reveals the speaker's hope that this "verse shall stand" the test of time—that this very poem will immortalize the "worth" of the person to whom the poem addressed ("Sonnet 60" is part of a sequence addressed to a young man known as the "Fair Youth"—check out the Context section for more).
The couplet thus adds another dimension to the poem, making it an example of meta-poetry in addition to a meditation on time. In other words, the poem comments on poetry itself, hoping that it is through verse that humanity can score a victory over time's destructive power.
It's also worth taking note of this poem's placement within the overall sonnet sequence. Placing it in the 60th position is a gesture towards measurements of time (e.g., 60 minutes in an hour).
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Meter
"Sonnet 60" is written in iambic pentameter, meaning there are five iambs (feet with an unstressed-stressed beat pattern) per line. Take line 8 for a perfect example of this meter at work:
And Time | that gave | doth now | his gift | confound.
The steady march throughout the poem evokes the steady but unstoppable flow of time.
That said, there are plenty of variations on this overarching meter throughout the poem. Lines 6, 7, 9, 11 and 14, for example, all open with a trochee (stressed-unstressed) rather than an iamb:
Crawls to [...]
Crooked [...]
Time doth [...]
Feeds on [...]
Praising [...]These opening stresses portray time as a powerful force and convey a sense of struggle and difficulty. Take lines 6 and 7, where trochees appropriately slow things down on the word "Crawls" and twist the poem's rhythm on the word "Crooked." In line 11, the stress on "Feeds" adds force to the description of time's insatiable appetite for destruction, whereas line 14's "Praising" represents the equivalent of the poem puffing out its chest, willing to do battle with time.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Sonnet 60" follows the typical rhyme scheme for a Shakespearean sonnet:
ABAB CDCD EFEF GG
All the quatrains have the same alternating rhyme pattern, and fittingly all focus on the same theme: time's destructive power. The poem then shifts the rhyme scheme in that closing couplet as the speaker responds to everything that has come before.
Some of the actual rhyme words themselves also subtly dramatize the conflict between humanity and time. The poem presents time as a kind of destructive god, against whom nothing can "stand," and this battle plays out in rhyming pairs:
- The pairing of "end" and "contend" (lines 2 and 4) suggests that all moments quickly disappear ("end") and that the push forward toward death is a kind of draining struggle.
- The "light[ness]" (line 5) of innocent childhood is soon locked in a "fight" (line 7) with time.
- Once "Crown'd" (line 6) with the confidence of maturity, people are "confound[ed]" (line 8) by Time—that is, time confuses and battles against them.
- The speaker hopes that this poem will "stand" (line 13) up against time's "cruel hand" (line 14).
The rhymes themselves, like humanity and time, are at war!
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“Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore” Speaker
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For the most part, the speaker stays out of the poem. This makes most of the poem feel objective, as though the speaker is a detached observer simply relaying the truth about time.
But this all shifts in the closing couplet, when the speaker suddenly enters the poem directly. The speaker references "my verse" (meaning this very poem itself) and reveals that they have a stake in this terrible fight against time: the speaker has addressed this poem to another person, whom the speaker hopes to immortalize within this sonnet.
The speaker is usually equated with Shakespeare himself, and the addressee with someone scholars call the "Fair Youth," a young man to whom the majority of Shakespeare's sonnets were written. Shakespeare isn't just railing against time for the sake of it, then, but rather showing this young man how much he means to him (and, of course, praising his own poetic skill in the process).
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“Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore” Setting
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The poem aims to be as universal as possible, discussing general truths about humanity and time rather than anything particularly specific to the speaker's own situation. As such, the poem doesn't have a concrete setting, instead taking place in the realm of metaphor. It opens with the image of a shoreline, which is both constant and ever-changing—like the force of time itself. The poem also performs an incredible feat of compression, squeezing an entire (hypothetical) lifetime in to the space of lines 5-8. This supports the poem's argument that life is short, and that time comes to destroy everything before too long.
More broadly, the poem takes place while the speaker and the poem's addressee are still alive—that is, before time "mow[s] them down with "his scythe." The fact that we're still reading the poem today shows that the speaker's goal of immortalizing the address in "verse" has worked out well so far!
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Literary and Historical Context of “Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore”
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Literary Context
This poem first appeared in the 1609 Quarto edition of Shakespeare's poetry, which contained 154 sonnets. The bulk of these (1-126) are known as the "Fair Youth" sequence, and are addressed to a young, aristocratic man with whom the speaker (generally taken to be Shakespeare himself) had an intimate relationship.
These sonnets don't have titles and are identified by their first lines and position in the sequence. That's why this poem is called "Sonnet 60": it's the 60th sonnet in the sequence (and the fact that there are 60 minutes in an hour probably isn't a coincidence!).
"Sonnet 60" comes as a pair with "Sonnet 59," which focuses more on the past (rather than the unending destructive power of time). But time, and art's relationship to time, is a constant theme throughout Shakespeare's poetry—and Renaissance poetry in general. Sonnet 18, for example, famously features a concluding couplet that's very similar to this one:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.For further comparison, readers might want to check out sonnets 19, 55, 81, 107, and 123 (to name only a few). Edmund Spenser's "Sonnet 75" also sees a speaker attempting to immortalize his beloved through poetry.
The sonnet form is arguably poetry's most enduring, and is still popular today. The 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch established the now common link between the sonnet and love, and also began the long tradition of poetic skill being read as evidence of powerful romantic feeling.
The sonnet was later popularized in the English language by writers like Sir Thomas Wyatt (who translated/interpreted a number of Petrarch's sonnets) and Sir Philip Sidney (whose sequence, Astrophel and Stella, was a major influence on Shakespeare's own). So-called Shakespearean (or English) sonnets differ from Petrarchan sonnets through their rhyme scheme and structure, with the latter focusing more on a shift (or "volta") between the eight and ninth lines. By contrast, Shakespearean sonnets end with a couplet that often summarizes or concludes what came before (though sometimes it also introduces a last-minute surprise or twist, as it does here).
As with a number of Shakespeare's sonnets, this one has its roots in classical literature. It closely follows a template set out by the Roman poet Ovid in the 15th book of the Metamorphoses, which also compares the passage of time to waves and discusses time's all-devouring appetite for destruction.
Historical Context
Shakespeare's sonnets were composed in the 1590s and early 1600s, though only first published in 1609. This means the sonnets were mostly written in the Elizabethan period, but published in the Jacobean, when King James succeeded Queen Elizabeth.
The Elizabethan era is known as an age of adventure and discovery, with British ships exploring the globe and the age of colonialism on the horizon. It was a culturally rich time, too: Shakespeare was one of London's many celebrated poets and playwrights, making a name for himself through exciting linguistic innovation and psychologically complicated characters.
This poem makes a concerted effort to look beyond its historical time period, allowing no culturally specific objects into its world. Instead, images based on the waves and, later, agricultural rhythms, speak to the poem's universal truth: that time changes—and destroys—everyone and everything.
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More “Sonnet 60: Like as the waves make towards the pebbl'd shore” Resources
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External Resources
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Shakespeare's Sonnets — Find all the sonnets, plus some analysis, in one useful place!
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The Identity of the Fair Youth — Read about the debated identity of the sonnet's mysterious addressee.
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The Poem Out Loud — "Sonnet 60" read by the legendary Patrick Stewart.
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The First Edition of the Sonnets — See the poem in its original context: the 1609 Quarto edition.
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Time in Shakespeare's Sonnets — Learn more about how Shakespeare treats one of his favorite themes throughout his poetry.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by William Shakespeare
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