SOURCE: "Shakespeare," in All in War with Time: Love Poetry of Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, Marvell, Harvard University Press, 1975, pp. 1-63.

In the following excerpt, Ferry calls attention to the poet-lover's assertions that through his manipulation of language he can transform nature and substitute the laws of poetic order for those of the temporal world. She focuses her analysis on the eternizing sonnets—particularly Sonnets 15, 18, and 65—to demonstrate how Shakespeare creates verbal constructs that are based on human experience yet nevertheless alter that experience and the laws of nature.

The speaker in Shakespeare's Sonnet 15 declares himself to be "all in war with Time for loue of you," the friend whose precious quality he would preserve from mortality. Throughout the first one hundred and twentysix poems in the collection we find sonnets concerned with this struggle.¹ The speaker varies in the attitudes he takes toward it, challenging or lamenting time's...