Theme: Young Man
Content: Further encouragement for the subject to bear children, this time driven by references to the subject's future middle age without children.
- “When you have reached middle age and have started to lose your looks.”
- The use of forty here may be Biblically influenced (like Sonnet 1) where 40 days/nights/years are used extensively for Christ's time in the wilderness, Moses' time on the Mount, the length of the Great Flood, Israelis' banishment to the wilderness, etc.
- The use of winters here casts a cold, barren tone on the childless subject at that time of his life more than "years" would.
- “Your youthful beauty will by then have diminished.”
- Emphasises the transience of beauty by transforming the subject's beauty's rose from Sonnet 1 into just a tattered weed of small worth when he reaches middle age.
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.
- “To say that your beauty has been lost and you have not passed it on to succeeding children would be such a shameful waste.”
- Reproachement of the subject for wasting his youth and having nothing to show for it at middle age except for deep-sunken eyes.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty's
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.
- “How important it is that you can say that your beauty has been inherited by a child.”
- Rhyming of mine with thine actually assigns ownership to the subject in both instances: child of mine and beauty of thine.
- Emphasis on advanced age in old.
This were to be new
made when thou art old,
And see thy blood
warm when thou feel'st it cold.
- “You will live on in your child when you are old and past your prime.”
- Emphasis again on advanced age represented in old and echoed in cold which contrasts with the newness and warm blood of his children, if he were to have any.
Alternative of Sonnet 2 that exists in manuscript form (differences highlighted in blue):
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And trench deep
furrows in that
lovely field,
Thy youth's fair
liv'ry, so accounted
now,
Shall be like
rotten weeds of no
worth held.
Then being asked where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the lustre
of thy youthful
days,
To say "Within these
hollow sunken
eyes"
Were an all-eaten
truth and worthless
praise.
O how much better
were thy beauty's
use
If thou couldst say
"This pretty
child of mine
Saves my account
and makes my
old excuse",
Making his beauty
by succession thine.
This were to be new born
when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st
it cold.
Critical text © NigelDavies.home@Virgin.net