In his Sonnets, Shakespeare explores the nature of time and the different methods of overcoming the erasure that time causes. He identifies procreation through both reproduction and publication as the most successful agents of conservation. Shakespeare wastes no time revealing his concern with the passage of time and its potential to erase both a person's beauty and their legacy. Starting in Sonnet 1, he states his purpose in finding a way to fight time so that “thus the rose of beauty never dies” (1). He wishes to overcome the mortality of the human condition by preserving its beauty and memory. This desire to immortalize his subjects pervades the Sonnets as he engages in a verbal battle against time using his artillery of words as a means to interrupt the endless cycle of time. As the Sonnets progress, Shakespeare's attitude towards time matures, but only after he has discovered an effective and reliable means of counteracting the erasure of time: his verse. He literally takes the endurance of his legacy and that of his Golden Youth into his own hands, as he flows his pen and records his memories through the enduring medium of the written word. In this essay I will argue that Shakespeare uses his Sonnets as a means to preserve the legacy of his beloved Golden Youth and, on a larger scale, erects poetic monuments that will resist the erasure of time and preserve the subject's legacy forever. In her book Death, Burial, and the Individual in Early Modern England, Clare Gittings notes that “it has often been suggested that people of the late Middle Ages seemed to be obsessed with death” (34). Gittings notes that, unlike today, when people easily set aside the threat of death, it would have been imposed…half the paper…and irreversible order” (236). Once Shakespeare outsmarts time and gains confidence in his verse as a means of preservation, his relationship with time changes. Instead of fighting with time, Shakespeare and time become equals. Shakespeare in effect, “reduces the negative form of time and the domain it governs to banal proportions, and replaces it with another positive conception of time which is squarely centered in the poet's personal experience and intimately associated with his achieved achievements” . sense of stability” (Kaula 57). Furthermore, he “sees the old enemy, cosmic time, in a different light. Instead of lamenting the impermanence of earthly things, he regards time with an equanimity that borders on satirical contempt, even as he observes its effects on his friend” (56). Shakespeare wants his Sonnets to serve as “The living record of your memory” (45 8).