Shakespeare’s Sonnet 2: A Reflection on Beauty and Legacy

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,

Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,

Will be a tattered 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 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.

This were to be new made when thou art old,

And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

In Sonnet 2, Shakespeare warns the young man that he will soon lose his beauty. Time, symbolized by forty winters, will leave his face looking like a plowed field, marked and aged. When this happens, he will be ashamed of how his looks have faded and will no longer be able to hold onto the admiration he once received.

The speaker suggests that the only way to preserve his beauty and justify his future wrinkles is by having a child. If he passes his beauty on to a child, he will have a valid excuse for his aging appearance. More than that, it will feel like he has been reborn, his youth living on through another.