Sonnet 2/II "When forty winters"

When forty Winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauties' field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a totter'd weed of small worth held.
Then, being asked, where all thy beauty lies—
Where, all the treasure of thy lusty days—
To say within thine own deep sunken eyes
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserv'd thy beauties' use,
If thou couldst answer, "This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,"
Proving his beauty by succession thine.
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.


Quatrain 1

1 When for/ty Win/ters shall / besiege / thy brow
2 And dig / deep tren/ches in / thy beau/ties' field,
3 Thy youth's / proud li/very, // so gazed / on now,
4 Will be / a tot/ter'd weed / of small / worth held.

Quatrain 2

5 Then, be/ing asked, // where all / thy beau/ty lies—
6 Where, // all / the trea/sure of / thy lus/ty days—
7 To say / within / thine own / deep sun/ken eyes >
8 Were an /all-ea/ting shame / and thrift/less praise.

Quatrain 3

9 How much / more praise / deserv'd / thy beau/ties' use,
10 If thou / could'st an/swer, // "This / fair child / of mine >
11 Shall sum / my count / and make / my old / excuse,"
12 Proving / his beau/ty by / succes/sion thine.

Couplet

13 This were / to be / new made / when thou / art old,
14 And see / thy blood / warm // when / thou feel'st / it cold.


Q 1 explains that, in the future, the FY's beauty will be gone; Q2 imagines a shameful interview if he does not procreate, and Q3 and the C, a praiseworthy one.

2.1-4

Q1-2 provide the FY with a prophetic vision of his aging. Q1 is a complex sentence, the dependent clause of lines 1-2 providing the FY's future, the independent one of 3-4, the state of his beauty then. Shakespeare likes to open sonnets with such clauses, especially when-clauses (cf. 30). Line 1's metrical regularity enacts the natural condition of aging, and its metaphor identifies advanced age with the season of winter, a conventional metaphor, yet he then identifies the season with an army besieging the FY’s face, a field where beauties are grown. The spondee of foot 2 in line 2—"And dig / deep trenches"—slows the line, and the dental alliteration emphasizes the labor required to age the FY. That field is then imagined as clothing—the body clothes the soul—which becomes a worn garment, yet the S's metaphor of that clothing as now a weed brings one back full circle to "beauties' field": the FY's beauties are now weeds. Many editors turn the "beauties" of Q into "beauty's"; I prefer to maintain it in the plural--"beauties'."

2.4-8

In that prophetic future, the S imagines the FY interviewed about his beauty, now metaphorically identified with treasure. "[W]here all" may be scanned three ways, depending on interpretation, but it's no pyrhhic. Does one wish to emphasize the location of loss ("where") or its totality ("all") or both? The repetition of "where all" (an instance of anaphora, the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses) sets up a double-question in Psalm-like, parallel structure, where the second colon specifies the first. Notice that the parallel structure (as emphasized by the anaphora) allows ellipsis or omission of the second "lies," the repetition of phrasing and structure intensifying the import of the question. Anaphora is "the Figure of Report" for Puttenham.

"Treasure" here alludes to Matthew 6.19-21 and to 13.44: The field of the FY’s treasure is his face, not his heart; since that is the case, he must reproduce it. By opening the second line with a spondee broken by a caesura, the S’s tone for the imagined interlocutor is hectoring. In the imagined response to the interlocutor, the S identifies the FY's unwillingness to reproduce with a burial within his own eyes, now seen as grave-like (cf. 1.13-14)—“deep sunken.” The S then indicts the FY, his emotional appeal one to a shameful act which devours everything of worth about the FY, the beauty for which he is praised now seen as thriftless since its hoarding is not real economy, yet the adjective “thriftless” logically belongs, not to the praise, but to the FY, an instance of hypallage, where the adjective properly belonging to one noun is used for another, related one--what Puttenham calls "the Changeling."

2.9-12

Q3 and C provide the remedy to that grim future. The praise of the S's volta in line 9—"How much more praise"—is greater than the "thriftless praise" because it will be merited, not by possession, but by use. Yet the conditional construction of line 10's introduction of the imagined response—"If . . . could"—makes that response more, not less remote. The hypallage of “old excuse” indicates that it is the FY who will be old, not his excuse. The metaphor within "sum my count" is economic: the child’s beauty will rectify the FY's financial records—where the FY's old age puts him into debt, the child's beauty pays that debt off. The final participial phrase of line 12 opens with a trochee-- "Proving"--reversing the fear over the tottered weed of Q1, yet it is difficult to tell who the antecedent of the participial phrase is: Is it the FY during his answer, or is it the FY's child? The ambiguity here is wonderful since it enacts the lineal argument of the S's appeals in the procreation sonnets; after all, whose beauty proves, or is proven by, reproduction? Whose beauty is warrant for whose? As B would have it, "This line exemplifies the constructive vagueness by which S. makes a word or phrase do double duty." The regal metaphor of "succession" indicates a monarchy, whose legitimacy is not political, but aesthetic. The FY is a king of beauty who requires a prince of beauty to both continue and confirm his once beautiful rule. Though it will strike us as peculiar, the patriarchal assumption that the father's appearance, not the mother's, will be transmitted to the child was common in the period. Shakespeare ironizes it, I suspect, in order to show the S's hyperbolic intensity of focus upon his beloved. Puttenham calls hyperbole "the Overreacher" or the "Loud Liar."

V points out that WS's S's "report" of the FY's speech here, like that of the DL's later, is "one way of building up a credible existential character for these dramatis personae over time." The entirety of the sequence is in the voice of WS's S since a report, even if accurate, is in the voice of the reporter. We need not assume that the S is falsifying their speech, but we ought to remember that this is an epic of the S's lyric love, not of theirs.

2.13-14

W points out that the couplet is composed entirely of monosyllabic words, giving it "bite." The bite results, I suspect, from the direct overlap of meter and word.

The ambiguity of the demonstrative pronoun here ("[t]his"), especially when accompanied by trochaic emphasis, is common: What is its antecedent? I suspect it refers to all that the S has represented in Q3—the imagined response of a prince of beauty to a future social world skeptical of the FY's own earlier beauty. Sexual reproduction will redeem the FY's beauty: he will be "new made," the spondee providing heretical grandeur to resurrected beauty—redemption now understood as profane. The consolation here is modulated by the shift from sight—the FY will "see" his blood warm in his offspring—to sense—he will "feel" his own to be cold. That "thy"—the belief that children have the father's "blood"—is a consolation, yet a consolation for loss, loss of beauty in the cold season of old age.