Sonnet 19

Praise and Beauty

Notes

TLN 253classical allusion
“Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws”
The opening address to 'Devouring Time' echoes Ovid's phrase 'tempus edax rerum' ('Time, devourer of all things'), from Metamorphoses 15. Ovid uses the same image to catalogue everything time consumes before boasting that his own poetry will survive it — the exact argument this sonnet will make.
classical Ovid's Metamorphoses
TLN 263archaic vocab
“Him in thy course untainted do allow”
'Pattern' here means 'model' or 'exemplar' — the original from which copies are made. The beloved is not just beautiful but is the standard of beauty itself, the template by which future generations will know what beauty looks like. 'Untainted' means uncorrupted or undefiled — kept free of Time's usual spoiling touch.
TLN 265rhetorical device
“Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong”
The couplet delivers the poem's final reversal: having conceded Time everything and forbidden him one thing, the poet now withdraws even the prohibition and throws down a challenge. 'Do thy worst' is a deliberate dare — Time will deface the youth, but the verse will keep him young anyway. The immortality-through-verse claim completes the argument that Ovid made at the close of the Metamorphoses and that Sonnet 18 ('So long as men can breathe') had already introduced.
historical The sonnet form