In his Sonnets, Shakespeare explores the nature of time and the different methods of overcoming the erasure that time causes. He identifies procreation through reproduction and publication as the most effective agents of preservation. Shakespeare wastes no time revealing his preoccupation with the passage of time and its potential to erase both a person's beauty and their legacy. From Sonnet 1, he sets out his objective: to find a way to fight time so “that the rose of beauty never dies” (1). He wishes to overcome the mortality of the human condition by preserving beauty and memory. This desire to immortalize his subjects permeates the Sonnets as he engages in a verbal battle against time using his artillery of words as a means of disrupting the endless cycle of time. As the Sonnets progress, Shakespeare's attitude toward time matures, but only after he discovers an effective and reliable means of countering the erasure of time: his verse. He literally takes charge of the endurance of his legacy and that of his golden youth, as he brings his pen to scroll and records his memories through the enduring medium of the written word. In this essay I will argue that Shakespeare uses his Sonnets as a means of preserving the legacy of his beloved Golden Youth and, on a broader scale, erects poetic monuments that will resist the erasure of time and preserve the legacy of their subject forever. In her book Death, Burial, and the Individual in Early Modern England, Clare Gittings observes that "it has often been suggested that late medieval people seemed to have been obsessed with death" (34). Gittings notes that, unlike today when people easily dismiss the threat of death, this would have been impossible... middle of paper... and an order beyond change” (236). Once Shakespeare outwits time and gains confidence in his verse as a means of preservation, his relationship with time changes. Instead of fighting against time, Shakespeare and time become equal. Shakespeare, in fact, "reduces the negative form of time and the domain it governs to trivial proportions, and replaces it with another positive conception of time which is squarely centered in the poet's personal experience and intimately associated with his work accomplished. feeling of stability” (Kaula 57). Moreover, “he sees the old enemy, cosmic time, in a different light. Instead of deploring the impermanence of earthly things, he regards time with a serenity that borders on satirical contempt, even when he observes its effects on the friend” (56). Shakespeare wants his Sonnets to be “the living testimony of your memory ».” (45 8).