SOURCE: Hart, Jonathan. “Conflicting Monuments: Time, Beyond Time, and the Poetics of Shakespeare's Dramatic and Nondramatic Sonnets.” In In the Company of Shakespeare: Essays on English Renaissance Literature in Honor of G. Blakemore Evans, edited by Thomas Moisan and Douglas Bruster, pp. 177-205. Madison, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002.

In the following essay, Hart explores Shakespeare's treatment of the themes of time and death in the sonnets, observing that Shakespeare's rhetoric in the sonnets transcends the boundaries of language and poetic modes.

In the Sonnets a conflict occurs between the ruins of time and the gilded monuments of Shakespeare's powerful rhyme set out in the desire between rhetoric and poetics, lust and love. How in the formal elegance and compression of the sonnet does Shakespeare represent a longing for eternity or a remembrance of things past or a wish for the extension of the evanescence of physical...