17

Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb,
Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts:
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say, ‘This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.’
So should my papers (yellowed with their age)
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage,
And stretched metre of an antique song;
But were some child of yoruse alive that time,
You should live twice:  in it, and in my rhyme.

Shakespeare praises the fair youth for his beauty and urges him to reproduce. He is making the claim that words cannot describe his beauty and that if he tried other people would not believe him. After the fair youth has passed on, history will see Shakespeare’s words as biased and exaggerated. However, if he has offspring his legacy (beauty) will live on in real life and in the written record. The structure stays true to the Elizabethan structure of three quatrains and a couplet. Iambic pentameter is almost exclusively used except in lines 6 & 8.

The definition of the word ‘deserts’ changed my ideas about the sonnet a little bit. Dictionary.com defines the word as ‘the fact of deserving well; merit; virtue,’ which leads me to believe that Shakespeare was interested in the fair youth’s inner beauty as well as his external appearance. The definitions of ‘heavenly’ and ‘earthly’ reenforce Shakespeare’s argument that the fair youth’s beauty is indescribable because words are a man-made idea and confined to the rules of the Earth.