Could you please help me with this poem? this is my waterloo anyway...?

SONNET 104


To me, fair friend, you never can be old,


For as you were when first your eye I eyed,


Such seems your beauty still. Three winters cold


Have from the forests shook three summers' pride,


Three beauteous springs to yellow autumn turn'd


In process of the seasons have I seen,


Three April perfumes in three hot Junes burn'd,


Since first I saw you fresh, which yet are green.


Ah, yet doth beauty, like a dial-hand,


Steal from his figure and no pace perceived;


So your sweet hue, which methinks still doth stand,


Hath motion and mine eye may be deceived:


For fear of which, hear this, thou age unbred;


Ere you were born was beauty's summer dead.





1. The speaker begins by saying that his fair friend cannot age. The passage of three years has left him apparently unchanged. Yet the speaker faces the supposition that his friend has perhaps changed, though imperceptibly. Do these lines contradict and weaken the emphatic statements with which the poem begins?

Could you please help me with this poem? this is my waterloo anyway...?
Try looking on Shakespeare sites before asking on here. Well in this sonnet, 104, his last couplet is addressing future generations that the height of beauty died before they were even born. No the lines do not weaken the message. They are just fooling Shakespeare that no time has passed. The tone may be one of assurance because he assures his lover that nothing about him has changed at all. But the tone could be one of solemness.

Crooked Teeth