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Teachers & SchoolsSea Imagery
The basic structure of Shakespeare's Sonnet 60 is pretty simple: each of the poem's three quatrains centers on a different set of imagery, but each set of imagery illustrates a different aspect of the poem's main theme: the passage of time. The sea is the main image for the passage of time in the first quatrain.
What light does it shed on that theme? What's key is that the first stanza describes the sea from the perspective of somebody on shore. This makes him think of the waves as endlessly moving in one direction—toward their own destruction. Bummer, right? So how does he connect this idea to the idea of time? Well, the minutes and hours of our lives all go in one direction. In other words, we can't turn back time. We're all headed toward our ends (deaths), whether we like it or not.