of the sonnet open with the same construction — "When I have seen" — yet these statements are never met with a summational "then", so the temporal ambiguity the phrase creates the remains unresolved: Does the speaker gesture toward repeated past actions ('in the instances that I have seen') or forward to a causational limit point ('once I have seen')?". When we read the lines that pertain to the waves and the shore, "at times the waves are winning against the shore, and then at times the shore is winning against the waves", the speaker almost speaks in a tone of confidence and determination to not let time control his life. Although when he goes to say Time will take my love away we begin to get a sense of uncertainty within the speaker. This uncertainty within the speaker is described by Barret when she argues "The sonnet registers temporal matters in personal terms; the couplet never corrects the poem's grammatically obscured engagement with time, but instead introduces a paralyzing temporal collapse: the present moment becomes overwhelmed by an anticipation of future loss—an extreme version of 'I miss you already.'.... The ruin/ruminate pairing bespeaks a suspicion of an imagined time spent looking back". References Bibliography Baldwin, T. W. On the Literary Genetics of Shakespeare's Poems and Sonnets. Urbana (IL): University of Illinois Press; 1950. pp. 279, 353. Barret J.K. 'So written to aftertimes': Renaissance England's Poetics of Futurity. Annarbor(MI): ProQuest LLC.; 2008. pp. 13–16 Fontana, E. "Shakespeare's Sonnet 55." The Explicator v. 45 (Spring 1987), pp. 6–8 Grimshaw, James. "Amphibiology in Shakespeare's Sonnet 64." Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Winter, 1974), pp. 127–129. Stirling, Brents. "A Shakespeare Sonnet Group." PMLA, Vol. 75, No. 4 (1960). pp. 340–349. Stockard, Emily. Patterns of Consolation in Shakespeare's Sonnets 1–126. Studies in Philology, Vol. 94, No. 4 (1997). pp. 465–493. British poems Sonnets by William Shakespeare