the inexorable decay of aging". Decay of honor and beauty, often referred to in the sonnets addressed to the young man, are here explicitly paralleled with the sun's passage through the sky. As each day the sun rises and falls, so the young man will rise and fall both in beauty and admiration. The only way to "continue his beauty" is to reproduce. However uncommon direct reference to decay is in Sonnet 7, Thomas Tyler in Shakespeare's Sonnets ensures the use of verbs like "reeleth" indirectly evoke an image of decay by fatigue. "Reeleth" according to Tyler means "worn out by fatigue". Profound use of pronoun Shoenfeldt further addresses the abundance of sexual tension surrounding the issue of reproduction in Sonnet 7. Many as "fact" held the medical belief that each orgasm reduced one's life by a certain unit. Shakespeare may be struggling with this troubling "fact" in the image of the falling sun "from highmost pitch". Penelope Freedman accounts for this tension in the grammatical usage of "you" and "thou" in Power and Passion in Shakespeare's Pronouns: "Linguists have long since identified one isolated feature of verbal exchange in early modern English that can serve as an index to social relationships. It is generally accepted that the selection of 'thou' or 'you,' the pronouns of address, can register relations of power and solidarity". The singular use of "thou", which Freedman notes had a "dual role" to mark the emotions of anger and intimacy solely in the couplet of Sonnet 7 carefully mimics the height of tension in the sonnet, bringing it to a close with a mark of intimacy, and perhaps contempt, at the refusal of the addressee to reproduce. Whether this intimacy is based on a lovers' relationship is difficult to accurately assess. Freeman comments how there is evidence of "thou" being used between family members but hardly any between lovers. Instead, what can be inferred is that the two characters in Sonnet 7 are intimate enough to be of the same social class and to make a "direct appeal" of one another. The linguistic strength of a direct appeal of the couplet opposes the image of frailty in the third quatrain. Giving the hope of an escape from decay, the couplet restores what seems to be lost in the third quatrain. Imperialism Reverting to Hackett's criticism, Sonnet 7 may indeed be "read as a story of imperialism".