Ovid speaks of time as a cyclical, natural process, like waves on the sea: Ovid, as in Shakespeare's sonnet, speaks of this same natural rhythm of time as seen through the process of birth, life and death: Ovid closes this section, like Shakespeare, depicting Time as a devouring animal. Ovid writes: According to Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare relied heavily on these sections of Ovid's Metamorphoses while composing Sonnet 60, and these passages from Ovid roughly correspond to the three quatrains of the sonnet. Shakespeare would have looked back to ancient sources like many Renaissance writers of his time. In the book Shakespeare and Ovid, Johnathan Bate states that persons of the Renaissance period "believed passionately that the present could learn from the past" and that this belief "was the starting-point of education and a formative influence on the writing of the period". There was a strong belief in Shakespeare's day that, though times change—changes which are the result of the passing of time—the essentials of human nature, "the foundations of the affections of the human mind," did not change. To look into the past, therefore, meant also for Shakespeare to look more deeply into the meaning of the present. By looking back to Book XV of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Shakespeare also gives a modern view (one that includes minutes) of an ancient view of time, one that provides a contrast to the more mechanized time of the 1590s. Time, in Ovid's work and in the first three quatrains of Sonnet 60, is intertwined with the processes of nature, looking back to a time before time and nature were fractured. Just as the poem struggles with time, so Shakespeare's modernized use of Ovid struggles to reconcile the past view of time and the present view of time, the world as it was, and the world as it is. Recordings Richard Wilson, for the 2002 compilation album, When Love Speaks (EMI Classics) Paul Kelly, for the 2016 album, Seven Sonnets & a Song References Further reading External links Analysis British poems Sonnets by William Shakespeare