Sonnet 12 bristly beard," "violet past prime," and "sable curls all silver'd o'er with white." One last image to take note of is the fact that the only way to defy time is by creating new virtues and beauties. And to do this, Shakespeare tells the young man, is by creating descendants. This fact is shown in the volta, the last two lines of the sonnet, when Shakespeare says, "And nothing 'gainst time's scythe can make defence, / Save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence." Sonnet 12 follows the structure of a typical Shakespearean sonnet. It consists of 14
Sonnet 2 child and thereby protect himself from reproach by preserving his beauty against Time's destruction. Sonnet 2 begins with a military siege metaphor, something that occurs often in sonnets and poetry — from Virgil (‘he ploughs the brow with furrows’) and Ovid (‘furrows which may plough your body will come already’) to Shakespeare’s contemporary, Drayton, “The time-plow’d furrows in thy fairest field.” The image is used here as a metaphor for a wrinkled brow. Trenches are also carved into a field when a farmer plows, and the agricultural connotation is touched on two lines later with the image of worthless weeds.