Time

    Time is a common subject that is written about. This is done in fictive settings as well as scientific analysis, so it's a common theme, since time and chance happens to all. What can be said about time?

   If time is found in a fictional setting, you may want to abstract it from its context to consider the concept of time all by itself. However, then you have divorced time from its reason to be, since the violence done to time here is not thinking about it poetically. 

   What I mean here is that time needs a home for it to show how it operates in a given setting. Time considered on its own loses its power. And you might want to think about it scientifically, but now let's consider time by look at this sonnet from Shakespeare:

Consider Sonnet 19:

1. Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,
2. And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
3. Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
4. And burn the long-lived phoenix, in her blood;
5. Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet'st,
6. And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
7.To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
8. But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
9. O, carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
10. Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
11. Him in thy course untainted do allow
12. For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.
13. Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong,
14. My love shall in my verse ever live young.

   Time here is called a wild cat that tears her pray. And no one can stop here from destroying her targets. Then next, time is told not to devour the poet’s lover. So time’s face changes to an abstraction.

   The loss of time’s cast or how it is perceived from the sonnet’s opening lines to the ending couplets is not abrupt but developed. From line 10, we get the fact that time is a writer editing the beauty of a face.

   Time is dynamic within this sonnet in the sense that it has the power to destroy as well as to mar the faces of men. These actions have a similarity in its chaotic outcomes, but they are not the same because time is not a static entity here.

   The change comes from Shakespeare’s description. He encounters the feline animal to forbid destructive action on the part of its alternative manifestation, which is the writer with the pen.

   This abstraction is done within the parameters of the consideration of the destructive force of time, although it points to the experience that we all have of its ravages of our own youth and beauty.