The vanished and the still

In Shakespeare¡¯s Sonnet 104, by following his own style of sonnets, Shakespeare portraits a mixed image of the vanishing time and the still beauty. He sets up an idea of ¡°you never can be old¡± in the first quatrain, and he delicately carves the lines in the second quatrain to shape the idea of ever-lasting beauty by contrasting the vanishing process of the four seasons. But as his thoughts develops, Shakespeare finds out that he ¡°maybe be deceived¡± at the end of the third quatrain, and thus brings the uncertainly of the still. Finally, the couplet shows that for the years to come, ¡°you¡± will never have any chance of seeing what true beauty is like, which means for every living creature there should be a process of losing and dying away. It seems that Shakespeare reaches his final picture smoothly by simply moving along with the flow of the sonnet, but actually he deliberately brings the readers to the inevitable decaying and vanishing factors beneath the illusion o...