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 57 type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions. The sixth line exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter: The first line exemplifies an initial reversal and (optionally) a mid-line reversal: Rhian Williams asserts, "In literary value Shakespeare's sonnets are notably unequal. Many reach levels of lyric melody and meditative energy that are hardly to be matched elsewhere in poetry". His 57th sonnet is such a one and epitomises Shakespeare's signature sonnet structure as it conveys the influences of the 14th-century poet, Petrarch, and showcases again Shakespeare's talent. In fact, Danijela Kambasković-Sawers generalises, "The sonnet sequence genre constructs