Sonnet 126

    O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power

    beauty
    time
    mortality
    nature
    O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy power
     
    Dost hold Time's fickle glass, his sickle, hour;
     
    Who hast by waning grown, and therein show'st
     
    Thy lovers withering as thy sweet self grow'st;
     
    If Nature, sovereign mistress over wrack,
     
    As thou goest onwards, still will pluck thee back,
     
    She keeps thee to this purpose, that her skill
     
    May time disgrace and wretched minutes kill.
     
    Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure!
     
    She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure:
     
    Her audit, though delay'd, answer'd must be,
     
    And her quietus is to render thee.

    What It Means

    Addressed to the 'lovely boy' — the young man — this final poem in the Fair Youth sequence is structured differently: twelve lines in couplets, with two empty parentheses at the end suggesting a missing final couplet in the original manuscript. Nature has held time back for you longer than for others. But nature must ultimately surrender you to time. This sonnet closes the Fair Youth sequence by handing the young man over to inevitable mortality.

    Context

    The final poem in the Fair Youth sequence (1–126). Its unusual structure — 12 lines plus empty parentheses in the 1609 quarto — suggests it was published incomplete, or that the empty brackets are deliberate: a formal acknowledgment of the sentence that can't be spoken.

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