Sonnet 19 by Shakespeare

Shakespeare's Sonnet 19, sometimes considered the last of the opening group of sonnets, treats the theme of redemption of time through art.

Source and analysis
G. Wilson Knight notes and analyzes the way in which "devouring" time is developed by trope in the first 19 poems; Jonathan Hart notes the reliance of Shakespeare's treatment on tropes from Ovid and Edmund Spenser. Like the poems that immediately precede it, the poem offers the immortality of art as a way to escape time and death.

Quarto's "yawes" (3) was amended to "jaws" by Edward Capell and Edmond Malone; this change is now almost universally accepted. George Steevens glosses "in her blood" as "burned alive" by analogy with Coriolanus 4.6.85; Nicolaus Delius has the phrase "while still standing."

Henry Charles Beeching perceives a valediction in the final line, meant to indicate that the opening group of sonnets ends here.

Interpretations

 * David Harewood, for the 2002 compilation album, When Love Speaks (EMI Classics)