Sonnet 2

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The first twelves lines of Sonnet 2 in the 1609 Quarto
Q1 Q2 Q3 C When forty winters shall besiege thy brow And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field, Thy youth’s proud livery, so gaz’d on now, Will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held: Then being ask’d 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 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! This were to be new made when thou art old, And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold. 4 8 12 14 —William Shakespeare

Sonnet 2 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a procreation sonnet within the Fair Youth sequence.

Structure

Sonnet 2 is an English or Shakespearean sonnet, which consists of three quatrains followed by a couplet. It follows the form's typical rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Like all but one sonnet in the sequence, it is written in iambic pentameter, a type of poetic metre based on five pairs of metrically weak/strong syllabic positions:

 ×   /    ×     /     × /       ×  /   ×   / 
How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use, (2.9)

/ = ictus, a metrically strong syllabic position. × = nonictus.

Analysis

Shakespeare's Sonnet 2 is the second procreation sonnet. Shakespeare looks ahead to the time when the youth will have aged, and uses this as an argument to urge him to waste no time. It urges the young man to have a child and thereby protect himself from reproach by preserving his beauty against Time's destruction.

Sonnet 2 begins with a military siege metaphor, something that occurs often in sonnets and poetry — from Virgil (‘he ploughs the brow with furrows’) and Ovid (‘furrows which may plough your body will come already’) to Shakespeare's contemporary, Drayton, “The time-plow’d furrows in thy fairest field.” The image is used here as a metaphor for a wrinkled brow. Trenches are also carved into a field when a farmer plows, and the agricultural connotation is touched on two lines later with the image of worthless weeds.

Livery is usually a uniform for a butler or soldier, which may suggest that the young man's beauty does not belong to him.

In the second quatrain, it points out that when the young man is old and asked where his beauty went, and he must then answer that his treasure is found only in his own self-absorbed “deep sunken” eyes, it would be a shame.

The third quatrain suggests that this waste and shame could be avoided if the young man were to have a child who could inherit his beauty.

Interpretations

• Caroline Blakiston, for the 2002 compilation album, When Love Speaks (EMI Classics)

Further reading

• Baldwin, T. W. On the Literary Genetics of Shakspeare's Sonnets. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950.
• Hubler, Edwin. The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952.

First edition and facsimile

• Shakespeare, William (1609). Shake-speares Sonnets: Never Before Imprinted. London: Thomas Thorpe.
• Lee, Sidney, ed. (1905). Shakespeares Sonnets: Being a reproduction in facsimile of the first edition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. OCLC 458829162.

Variorum editions

• Alden, Raymond Macdonald, ed. (1916). The Sonnets of Shakespeare. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. OCLC 234756.
• Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed. (1944). A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare: The Sonnets [2 Volumes]. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. OCLC 6028485. — Volume I and Volume II at the Internet Archive

Modern critical editions

• Atkins, Carl D., ed. (2007). Shakespeare's Sonnets: With Three Hundred Years of Commentary. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. ISBN 978-0-8386-4163-7. OCLC 86090499.
• Booth, Stephen, ed. (2000) [1st ed. 1977]. Shakespeare's Sonnets (Rev. ed.). New Haven: Yale Nota Bene. ISBN 0-300-01959-9. OCLC 2968040.
• Burrow, Colin, ed. (2002). The Complete Sonnets and Poems. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0192819338. OCLC 48532938.
• Duncan-Jones, Katherine, ed. (2010) [1st ed. 1997]. Shakespeare's Sonnets. Arden Shakespeare, third series (Rev. ed.). London: Bloomsbury. ISBN 978-1-4080-1797-5. OCLC 755065951. — 1st edition at the Internet Archive
• Evans, G. Blakemore, ed. (1996). The Sonnets. The New Cambridge Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521294034. OCLC 32272082.
• Kerrigan, John, ed. (1995) [1st ed. 1986]. The Sonnets ; and, A Lover's Complaint. New Penguin Shakespeare (Rev. ed.). Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-070732-8. OCLC 15018446.
• Mowat, Barbara A.; Werstine, Paul, eds. (2006). Shakespeare's Sonnets & Poems. Folger Shakespeare Library. New York: Washington Square Press. ISBN 978-0743273282. OCLC 64594469.
• Orgel, Stephen, ed. (2001). The Sonnets. The Pelican Shakespeare (Rev. ed.). New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 978-0140714531. OCLC 46683809.
• Vendler, Helen, ed. (1997). The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-63712-7. OCLC 36806589.

External links

• Works related to Sonnet 2 at Wikisource
• An analysis of the sonnet
• An analysis and paraphrase of the sonnet