Analysis of Sonnet 65For brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea, but sad mortality overwhelms their power, As with this fury beauty will hold a supplication, the whose action is not stronger than a flower? Oh, how will the honeyed breath of summer stand Against the devastating siege of violent days, When the impregnable rocks are not so strong, Nor the steel gates so strong, but time decays? Oh terrible meditation! where, alas, shall Time's best jewel be hidden from Time's breast? Or what strong hand can hold back his swift foot? Or who can prevent her spoils of beauty? they continue to shine. This sonnet shares many similarities in imagery with sonnets 63 and 66, and also with the theme of time and Rome as seen in Spencer's translation sonnet sequence, _Ruins of Rome by: Bellay_. To better understand this sonnet we must realize what or who the pronouns refer to. My explanation relies on the "they" in line 2 referring to both time and ruin, a theme supported by sonnet 64. 1-2: 'Only depressing mortality can overthrow the tyranny of time and ruin, whereas brass, stone, earth or sea cannot prevent it." Death is therefore an escape from time and the ruin it imposes. The second quatrain recalls the thematic imagery of Rome's susceptibility to time in sonnet 9 of _Ruins of Rome_: "Why were not these Roman palaces / Made of matter no less hard and strong? . . . All the things that under the Moon they have being/Are temporal and subject to decay." Echoing elements of the first line of the sonnet, Shakespeare reiterates the inability to avoid and prevent time. “Battering days” also shares this image as “the harmful hand of time crushed”; which, it should be further noted, appears as an "inrious time" in Spencer's work. Knowing this, he appeals to the terrible and harmful knowledge in verse 9: “where we should hide the most precious jewel of time [our youth] from the crypt where it is kept.” the reason why I believe the jewel is a symbol of youth comes from sonnet 63, in which time steals "the treasure of its spring". Spring here, and in many of Shakespeare's other sonnets, refers to youth and flourishing sex.