SOURCE: Turner, Frederick. “Time the ‘Destroyer’ in the Sonnets.” In Shakespeare and the Nature of Time, pp. 7-27. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

In the following essay, Turner examines the associated themes of love and time in Shakespeare's sonnets. He argues that even though these verses depict time as corrupting all material or external things, especially beauty, they also represent true love as a transcendent, spiritual relationship to which time is irrelevant.

It is, perhaps, dangerous to ascribe a philosophy or a conceptual view of time to the sonnets. J. B. Leishman, in his Themes and Variations in Shakespeare's Sonnets (1961), makes an instructive contrast between the intellectual and even speculative tone of Michelangelo's sonnets and the more metaphorical and imagistic tone of Shakespeare's. Shakespeare did consider the nature of the world we live in; but he saw abstract ideas in concrete terms, and for him stones and animals and trees...