When Forty Winters Shall Besiege Thy Brow
by
William Shakespeare
This poem, ‘When forty winters shall besiege
thy brow’ is sonnet number two of 154 sonnets that Shakespeare wrote over his
lifetime. In this poem, the Fair Youth is encouraged to have children as a way
of guaranteeing one’s legacy and beauty. The poet addresses the Fair Youth,
informing him that soon he’s going to lose his beauty and his face is going to
look like a plowed field. The only remedy for this is if the young man has a
child to whom he can bestow his beauty. It will be as though he is himself
reborn.
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.
The
poem is made up of three quatrains and one concluding couplet. The poem follows
the pattern of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG and it is written in iambic pentameter. This
means that each line contains five sets of two beats, known as metrical feet.
The first is unstressed and the second stressed. It sounds something like
da-DUM, da-DUM. The final two lines suggest that having a child will make one
feel young again. They will be reborn with “warm” blood in their veins.
Shakespeare
makes use of alliteration and metaphor: “dig deep” in line two and “besiege”
and “brow” in line one. There is an example of metaphor in the first lines of
the poem where Shakespeare suggests that the Fair Youth’s complexion will
become a plowed field over time. There will be “deep trenches” (wrinkles) dug
in his face that will obscure “beauty’s fields”.
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