Sonnet 126 - Missing Text

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While previous sonnets of this sequence act to console against attempt to circumvent time’s inevitable destructive victory, scholars have argued that 126 concedes the point. Rather than suggest that the boy can indeed find a way around time, “here the speaker makes no such proposals; this twelve-line poem lacks the final two lines where, in the sonnet, the speaker often constructs his consolations. By the end of this subsequence, mutability has proved to be the speaker's ally rather than a foe to be defeated. Instead of seeking consolations for the destruction of beauty, the final three couplets simply warn the young man of nature's inevitable defeat at the hands of time”. The speaker here seems to accept, rather than fight against, the inevitability of time’s changes.

While inherent, unpreventable change at the hands of time stand as a negative throughout the previous poems, it here takes on a beneficial role. Although the boy’s beauty may be destroyed by time, time has also waned the speaker’s love, making this destruction more bearable. As Stockard argues, “Shakespeare…constructs the sequence so as to demonstrate the consolation provided by the waning of the speaker's love, and in the final sonnet of the first subsequence the speaker accepts the consolation that changing reality provides”. In accepting the reality of his unrequited, and ultimately shifting, love, the speaker is able to find peace, to some extent, in his relationship with the boy.