Sonnet 63
Against my love shall be, as I am now,
aging
time
poetry
immortality
Against my love shall be, as I am now,
With Time's injurious hand crush'd and o'er-worn;
When hours have drain'd his blood and fill'd his brow
With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn
Hath travell'd on to age's steepy night,
And all those beauties whereof now he's king
Are vanishing or vanish'd out of sight,
Stealing away the treasure of his spring;
For such a time do I now fortify
Against confounding age's cruel knife,
That he shall never cut from memory
My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life:
His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
And they shall live, and he in them still green.
What It Means
Shakespeare prepares for when the young man will be as old and beaten as Shakespeare is now. Time will ravage his beauty the same way it ravages everyone. Against that day, Shakespeare is building a fortress in these poems. Even when the young man's beauty is gone, the verse will carry 'his beauty still.' Black ink — the simplest technology — will hold what time destroys.
Context
Part of the Fair Youth sequence. Sonnet 63 anticipates the young man's aging with a kind of pre-emptive mourning.
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