Shakespeare’s Sonnet#2

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.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet#2

You may remember that in https://poetrypoeticspleasure.wordpress.com/2017/06/08/shakespeare-today/ a problem was discovered:

How to contemporise and popularize Shakespeare?

and a promise was made:

We will do it.

This post is my step#2 in our journey. I intend to cover all 154 sonnets of his on this blog, post after post, week after week.

No, I’l neither analyse this poem nor write about it in a scholarly manner, for others have done it, and have done much better than what I can do. I will try to USE this poem in a micro-insta manner. In our previous post with sonnet#1 I had looked for the lines/phrases that were the wittiest and had the most concentrated matter and had then worked with and on them to create my micropoem. That method will always work.

We will employ a different technique here. We’ll find out the meaning of the sonnet, and write something parallel, even try to keep the central metaphor in place. The sonnet roughly means:

When age has dug furrows through your face and all your beauty is gone. When your body-cloth is not new but tattered and worn. Then you will know how wise and right it is to have a child. your beauty and youth, passed on thus, live and thus you live your youth when old.

Taking the lines and converting them into verse form, we get something like this:

When age has dug furrows

through your face

and all your beauty is gone.

When your body-cloth

is not new

but tattered and worn.

Then you will know

how wise and right

it is to have a child.

Your beauty and youth

passed on thus, live