in the last three lines of the sonnet the speaker weeps at the fear of losing his love, ultimately realizing that he cannot escape time and time will come and take his love away. The couplet This thought is as a death, which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose. (64.13-14) William Shakespeare's Sonnet 64 scrutinizes the idea of losing his loved one to Time, and views Time as an agent of Death. Shakespeare's reference to 'outworn buried age' demonstrates the idea of his loved one being consumed or worn out by time and age. According to Helen Vendler, it seems that "the first twelve lines [are] a long defense – by thinking about the end of inanimate things – against thinking about the death of a living person". As James Grimshaw analyzes the final two lines, Shakespeare substitutes the word which for death in the couplet, adding more emphasis on the sonnet's theme of death as an overpowering force. The love he is losing could have one of two meanings: it could either be the true death of his beloved, or in fact simply the love he has for his beloved. Vendler interprets this death as the death of his beloved, in which the couplet justly displays this as Shakespeare's genuine concern, thus distinctly separating itself from the previous twelve lines. Shakespeare's dread of time and age taking away his praised beloved seems to alarm him above all of the other entities he observes throughout his Sonnet 64, though he despairs in the idea that losing him is beyond his control. Phonetic play in "Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate" Sonnet 64 is a great example of why people always say "You should never let your past interfere with your present". Barret argues that sonnet 64 "provides an example of past-oriented natural habitats that might interfere with the productive considerations of the future". In other words, because the speaker is letting the past overwhelm his thoughts, he therefore cannot think positively about the future due to past habits or tendencies. Unlike some of the other sonnets addressed to the young man, sonnet 64 moves toward a feeling of the lover's exposure to the risk of being destroyed. Barret also argues that the phonetic play between ruminate and ruinate is as she says an "underscore a relationship inherent in the poem’s logic", "Each quatrain