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The Full Text of “Sonnet 19: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws”
1Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,
2And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
3Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
4And burn the long-liv'd Phoenix in her blood;
5Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,
6And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
7To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
8But I forbid thee one more heinous crime:
9O, carve not with the hours my love's fair brow,
10Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen!
11Him in thy course untainted do allow
12For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.
13Yet do thy worst, old Time! Despite thy wrong
14My love shall in my verse ever live young.
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“Sonnet 19: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws” Introduction
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William Shakespeare composed "Sonnet 19" in the 1590s, publishing it in 1609 as part of what's now known as the "Fair Youth" sonnet sequence. Like others in this sequence, the poem meditates on the fleeting nature of youth and beauty. The speaker personifies time as a "devouring" force and suggests that even the strongest, most powerful creatures in the world are susceptible to decay and change. For this reason, the speaker asks time to leave the speaker's lover alone, hoping to protect the lover's youthful beauty. By the end of the poem, though, the speaker insists that it doesn't matter whether time ruins the lover's beauty, since the poem itself will preserve this beauty forever.
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“Sonnet 19: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws” Summary
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All-consuming Time, dull the lion's claws and force the earth to ravenously eat up her own sweet children. Remove the sharp teeth from the powerful tiger's mouth, and burn the immortal Phoenix in her own blood. Turn happiness into sadness as you quickly slip away, and do whatever you will, quick-moving Time, to the whole world and all its fleeting pleasures. But I refuse to let you commit one truly unspeakable crime: don't etch wrinkles into my love's young and beautiful forehead. Don't use your old pen to draw any lines on his face! Leave him alone so that his beauty can serve as a model for future generations of men. That said, you might as well do your worst, old Time! Because even if you wrong my love, he will remain forever young in my poetry.
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“Sonnet 19: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws” Themes
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Time and Decay
“Sonnet 19” focuses on the idea that everyone and everything is at the mercy of time, a force that the poem argues leads to inevitable deterioration and decline. Even the fiercest lions and tigers aren’t exempt from the personified “Time’s” mighty power, the speaker says, which eventually makes all things fade. Nothing lasts forever, the poem implies, and the speaker is particularly troubled by the fact that “[d]evouring Time” will lay waste to the youth and beauty of the speaker’s lover.
The speaker notes that even the strongest, most respected creatures on earth are vulnerable to the passage of time, which can “blunt” a lion’s claws or “pluck” the sharp teeth from a tiger’s mouth. Given that these animals are so strong and powerful, their physical deterioration highlights that the cruelty of time makes no exceptions—no matter what, all living things are fated to decline.
Time, in other words, has its way with everything in the end, an idea the speaker further accentuates by mentioning the “long-liv’d Phoenix.” The Phoenix is a mythical creature that, upon burning to death, rises from its own ashes and begins life anew. Although this bird usually represents the idea of immortality, this poem highlights something else about the Phoenix—namely, that this mythical creature is susceptible to the passage of time just like everything else is. After all, its many life cycles demonstrate that even things that live forever are still subject to destruction.
If even the immortal Phoenix is influenced by time’s unrelenting march, it’s clear that humans are even more vulnerable to decay and change. This is why the speaker implores time to spare the lover, asking it to not etch wrinkles into his face. This, however, is not a reasonable request, since it’s obviously impossible to protect somebody from the effects of age and time. In the end, the speaker knows, time will do its “worst” to the lover, and this spotlights the inarguable fact that nothing can withstand the pull of time. Simply put, everything in life—including youth and beauty—is fleeting.
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Art and Immortality
Despite arguing that time is an all-consuming, destructive force, the speaker spends much of the poem trying to fight back—imploring the personified “Time” to spare the youth and beauty of the speaker’s beloved. In the end, however, the speaker seemingly rejects the rules the poem has established altogether, declaring that if Time won’t spare the lover, then the speaker will simply preserve this person through “verse.” Although it’s impossible for people to avoid the ravages of time, then, the speaker argues that it is possible to use art—and, more specifically, poetry—to immortalize certain aspects of human life.
The speaker accepts that there is no avoiding the passage of time and the destruction it brings. To make this easier to bear, the speaker takes comfort in the idea that the poem itself will preserve the lover. Time may “carve” wrinkles and “draw” lines onto his face, but the speaker is confident that the lover will remain youthful and attractive in poetry, saying, “My love shall in my verse ever live young.”
The word “live” in this phrase is especially important, since it suggests that poetry isn’t just a record of the past, but rather something capable of housing the ongoing spirit of the lover’s youth—something the poem implies will continue to live long after time has had its way with the lover. In this sense, part of the lover’s youth will survive old age and even death.
Poetry, then, is more than a simple historical document—it’s something that gives lasting life to otherwise short-lived, ephemeral things like youth and beauty. In the face of so much impermanence, the speaker suggests, creating art is a meaningful way to immortalize a person’s most fleeting qualities.
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Sonnet 19: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws”
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Lines 1-2
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;The sonnet begins with both apostrophe and personification, as the speaker directly addresses time itself. By using the word "devouring," the speaker invites readers to see time as an all-consuming, destructive force that ravages everything in its path.
To further demonstrate time's might, the speaker goes on to say, "blunt thou the lion's paws." Lions are very powerful and strong animals, and the fact that time is capable of dulling their sharp claws implies that even the fiercest, most fearsome creatures on earth are no match for time, which gradually weakens everything in its path. In other words, age inevitably brings on decay, as everything that was once glorious and strong eventually loses its edge.
This, it seems, is simply the way the world works—an idea the speaker highlights by personifying the earth, saying, "And make the earth devour her own sweet brood." This phrase repeats the word "devour," emphasizing the idea that time lays waste to everything and that experiencing this kind of ruin is simply part of being alive.
The metaphorical idea of time forcing the earth to eat "her own sweet brood" also implies that the earth itself is bound to time in unavoidable ways—that life on earth is defined by the passage of time.
These opening lines also establish the poem's use of iambic pentameter, a meter in which lines contain five iambs (metrical feet consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable: da-DUM). However, the first two lines contain two metrical substitutions:
Devou- | ring Time, || blunt thou | the li- | on's paws,
And make | the earth | devour | her own | sweet broodFor the most part, there is a strong iambic rhythm in these lines, as phrases like "And make the earth devour" feature the da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM thump created by a string of iambs. And yet, these lines also include two spondees, which are metrical feet consisting of two stressed syllables. For instance, the words "blunt thou" in the first line create a spondee, as do the words "sweet brood" in the second line.
This subtly disrupts the iambic rhythm, but it doesn't totally upend the overall feel of the poem. Instead, these spondees indicate that the poem won't perfectly follow its own meter, effectively leading to a slightly off-kilter feel that perhaps reflects the speaker's discomfort with the fact that time lays waste to all.
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Lines 3-4
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
And burn the long-liv'd Phoenix in her blood;
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Lines 5-7
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleets,
And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets; -
Lines 8-10
But I forbid thee one more heinous crime:
O, carve not with the hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen! -
Lines 11-12
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty's pattern to succeeding men. -
Lines 13-14
Yet do thy worst, old Time! Despite thy wrong
My love shall in my verse ever live young.
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“Sonnet 19: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws” Symbols
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The Lion, Tiger, and Phoenix
The speaker mentions a lion, a tiger, and a Phoenix in "Sonnet 19," all of which normally represent strength and vitality in literature. However, the speaker doesn't use these animals just to symbolize power, but also to demonstrate that not even the fiercest, most resilient creatures are capable of withstanding the cruel passage of time.
According to the speaker, time will "blunt" the lion's claws and "pluck" the sharp teeth from a tiger's mouth. What's more, time burns the Phoenix—a mythological bird that usually represents immortality—in its own blood (or perhaps in the tiger's blood, depending on how readers interpret the speaker's words).
Of course, one might think that the Phoenix has found a way to triumph over time, since it rises from its own ashes to begin a new life each time it burns to death. However, this cyclical process actually highlights time's inevitable influence, since the Phoenix is just as bound to the revolutions of time as anything else. In turn, all the animals in "Sonnet 19" are symbols of time's mercilessness, illustrating that even the most powerful creatures can't escape time-related decay.
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“Sonnet 19: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Parallelism
The first half of the poem is defined by the speaker's use of parallelism, with lines 2, 4, and 6 all beginning the same way:
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
[...]
And burn the long-liv'd Phoenix in her blood;
[...]
And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed TimeIn each of these lines, the speaker addresses time and tells it to do something specific, urging it to force the earth to "devour her own sweet brood," then telling it to burn the "long-liv'd Phoenix," and finally telling it to generally do whatever it wants. This firmly establishes the poem's overall structure, which is based upon the speaker's attempt to talk directly to time.
This parallelism also adds a certain rhythm to the poem, making it feel repetitive and predictable. This, in turn, makes it all the more noticeable when the speaker breaks from this pattern in line 8 by saying, "But I forbid thee one more heinous crime."
Until this point, all of the even-numbered lines begin with the word "And." This one, however, begins with the word "But," signaling a change in the speaker's attitude. Indeed, the speaker suddenly tries to "forbid" time from doing whatever it wants, and this shift is accentuated by the fact that the poem transitions away from the parallelism that defines the feeling, rhythm, and structure of the first six lines.
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Assonance
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Consonance
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Alliteration
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Personification
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Metaphor
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Caesura
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Allusion
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End-Stopped Line
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Apostrophe
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“Sonnet 19: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws” Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Devour
- Blunt
- Thou/Thy/Thine
- Brood
- Pluck
- Keen
- Long-liv'd Phoenix
- Fleets
- Whate'er
- wilt
- Swift-footed
- Heinous
- Fair
- Antique
- Untainted
- Succeeding
- Ever
Devour-
To "devour" something is to eat it ravenously or, alternatively, to completely destroy it.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Sonnet 19: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws”
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Form
This is a Shakespearean sonnet, a 14-line poem broken into three quatrains followed by a final couplet:
- Quatrain
- Quatrain
- Quatrain
- Couplet
The first two quatrains establish the idea that time lays waste to everything in the world—even the most powerful and seemingly untouchable creatures. Then, in the third quatrain, the speaker tries to convince time itself to leave the lover alone—a plea that the speaker eventually abandons in the poem's "turn," which appears in the first line of the couplet. In this moment, the speaker gives up trying to protect the lover from time's influence and instead tells time to do its "worst." This shift then allows the speaker to set forth a new idea, which is that the poem itself will preserve the lover's youthful beauty even after time takes its toll. In this way, the structure of the sonnet clearly outlines the speaker's developing thought process.
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Meter
"Sonnet 19" is written in iambic pentameter, meaning that the majority of its lines contain five iambs—metrical feet consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (da-DUM). Consider, for example, the first two lines:
Devou- | ring Time, || blunt thou | the li- | on's paws,
And make | the earth | devour | her own | sweet broodThese lines have a definite iambic feel, but it's worth noting that not all the metrical feet create an iambic bounce. For instance, the first line's third foot isn't an iamb, but a spondee (a metrical foot made up of two consecutive stressed syllables: "blunt thou"). Similarly, the last foot of line 2 as a spondee: "sweet brood." These opening lines still maintain the general da-DUM da-DUM rhythm of iambic pentameter, but the spondees make them sound a little less predictable, keeping the poem interesting and fresh.
Similar variations appear elsewhere in the poem, such as when the speaker tells time in line 9 to leave the lover alone:
O, || carve | not with | the hours | my love's | fair brow
The caesura after "O" in the first foot sets the word apart and makes it sound stressed. As a result, "O, carve" is yet another spondee. The line's second foot is then a trochee (stressed-unstressed): "not with." As such, the first three syllables of the line are all stressed, giving this moment a particularly forceful, assertive sound that reflects the speaker's determination to sternly "forbid" time from ruining the lover's beauty. It's also worth pointing out that the final foot could be read as a spondee, too, placing emphasis on the word "fair" and thus accentuating the idea that it would be a "heinous crime" for time to deface the lover's good looks.
On the whole, then, the speaker's use of meter not only makes sure the poem's rhythm avoids monotony, but also spotlights certain important words or phrases that align with the theme at hand.
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Rhyme Scheme
The poem follows the standard rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet, which looks like this:
ABAB CDCD EFEF GG
Each quatrain features alternating end rhymes, giving the lines a feeling of musicality and cohesion. The steady pattern creates a sense of predictability that aligns with the poem's overall message—namely, that time marches on no matter what and that there's no stopping the effect this has on people. The final one-two punch of the rhyming couplet then ends the poem on a forceful, rousing note.
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“Sonnet 19: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws” Speaker
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There isn't much identifying information about the poem's speaker. However, readers can conclude that the speaker is in love with a young, attractive man (as evidenced by the personal pronoun "him") and that the speaker finds the thought of time destroying this man's beauty unbearable. In some ways, this thought process implies that the speaker is older than the lover and knows all too well that time inevitably destroys all the positive things associated with youth.
This reading aligns with the widely held belief that the speaker in all 126 of Shakespeare's "Fair Youth" sonnets is the same person: an older male poet involved in a romantic affair with a beautiful younger man. Even on its own, though, "Sonnet 19" presents the speaker as someone determined to cherish the lover's youthful qualities in any way possible, even if this is only achievable through poetry.
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“Sonnet 19: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws” Setting
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The setting of the poem is ambiguous because neither the physical surroundings nor the time period factor very heavily into the sonnet's subject. After all, the poem meditates on love, the passage of time, and art's ability to immortalize otherwise fleeting aspects of human existence. These ideas are relatively universal, and by not placing the poem in a specific place or time, the speaker in a way plucks the beloved himself out of time's grasp.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Sonnet 19: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws”
Literary Context
"Sonnet 19" belongs to Shakespeare's "Fair Youth" sequence, which consists of 126 sonnets that typically revolve around themes of love, art, and the passage of time. Most readers believe that the speaker of these sonnets is an aging male poet who's in a romantic relationship with a younger man. Throughout this sequence, the speaker laments the "swift" nature of time and worries about how it will ruin the lover and, in turn, their romantic bond.
The "Fair Youth" sequence often turns to art as a way to preserve and immortalize the love between the speaker and the young man—something "Sonnet 19" does very clearly when the speaker suggests that, despite the ravages of time, the lover will "ever live young" in the speaker's own poetry.
In general, these ideas draw upon concerns that are very common in Renaissance poetry. Indeed, most sonnets during this period dealt with the various sorrows and joys associated with romantic affection—a tradition that began in the 1300s, when the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch seized upon such themes in his sonnets, the majority of which centered around love and desire. These sonnets were so popular that the form Petrarch used (though did not invent) became a template that many poets copied—a template now known as the Petrarchan sonnet.
"Sonnet 19," of course, isn't a Petrarchan sonnet, but rather a Shakespearean sonnet. This means that it features a different rhyme scheme and a slightly different structure; whereas Petrarchan sonnets consist of an octave followed by a sestet, Shakespearean sonnets consist of three quatrains followed by a final couplet. Nonetheless, there's no denying that Shakespeare's thematic interests in "Sonnet 19" take cues from Petrarch's work. The difference in structure and presentation, then, simply highlights the ways in which the sonnet evolved as a form between the 1300s and the late 1500s, taking on new iterations as it spread through medieval Europe.
Historical Context
Most scholars believe that "Sonnet 19" was written in the 1590s, which was a remarkably peaceful and prosperous time in England. In 1588, Spain sent a fleet of 130 ships to invade England with the purpose of overthrowing Queen Elizabeth and destroying one of the prominent footholds of Protestantism in Europe. However, the fleet, known as the Spanish Armada, lost miserably to England, and the ensuing years were relatively calm in Britain as a result.
This, therefore, meant that Englanders had time to focus on and patronize the arts, which is possibly why the 1590s were among the most prolific years of Shakespeare's writing career (at least in terms of creative output). During this time, he not only composed plays like Henry IV (parts I through III), A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Merchant of Venice, but also penned his sonnets. And although there were certainly some very dark moments (including the outbreak of Bubonic plague in 1592 that shut down London's theaters and killed 15,000 people), this time period is generally seen as a fruitful, productive era in England, especially for writers like Shakespeare.
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More “Sonnet 19: Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws” Resources
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External Resources
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Patrick Stewart Reads the Poem — Listen to the actor Sir Patrick Stewart give a dramatic reading of "Sonnet 19."
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Long Live the Phoenix — To better understand the poem's reference to the "long-liv'd Phoenix," explore the information about the mythological creature.
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More About the Bard — To learn more about Shakespeare, take a look at this overview of his life and work.
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1609 Facsimile — Check out this facsimile of the 1609 publication of "Sonnet 19" to get a sense of what it would have been like to read Shakespeare during his lifetime.
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Shakescleare Translation — Gain some extra clarity with our concise and understandable modern English translation of "Sonnet 19."
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