This excerpt comes from <em>Sonnet 64,</em> written by William Shakespeare.
The correct answer is
- personification of Time in the opening lines
<em>When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
</em>
<em>The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;</em>
This also tells us the theme of the sonnet, how fleeting life is and how powerless we are against Time, that is, death.
Personification is a <em>figure of speech</em> used in literature and especially in poetry, in which human emotions, qualities, and even the ability of speech, are given to non-human/inanimate things or abstract notions.
