The second marriage sonnet continues the speaker's plea to the young man to marry. He urges the lad to think "carpe diem" before his beauty fades.
First Quatrain
Because human life expectancy was around fifty years of age in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the age of forty was well into old age, so in the first quatrain, the speaker tells the lad that by the time he is forty years old, his face will be wrinkled like a plowed field that shows “deep trenches.” The young man’s pride of a handsome face will be little more than a “tatter’d weed” and therefore worthless to those who will see him then: “Thy youth’s proud livery, so gaz’d on now, / Will be a tatter’d weed, of small worth held.”
Second Quatrain
If the lad remains single producing no heir to his handsome qualities, he will have to admit that all of his natural human treasure resides only in his own old withered face: “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.” The speaker seems to become more and more frustrated by this young man’s satisfaction in allowing himself to be the only benefactor of his special qualities. The speaker deems it a pity that the lad will later have to admit it “[w]ere an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.”
Third Quatrain
In the third quatrain, the speaker chides the young man by comparing the lad’s present childless lot to the riches of being able to say, “This fair child of mine / Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse.” And the heir, the child of such graces, will prove that the old man was a handsome beauty in his younger days by the very fairness and boundless beauty the child will possess, having inherited it from his well-endowed father: “Proving his beauty by succession thine!”
The Couplet
In the couplet, the speaker concludes by emphasizing that the young man will keep a portion of own youth by intelligently fathering the offspring that will bear his features and his name; after the young man inevitably grows old, he will be warmed because of the warm blooding flowing in the veins of his handsome heir: “This were to be new made when thou art old, / And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.”
Other articles on Shakespeare:
Sonnet Commentaries
Sonnet 1, Sonnet 2, Sonnet 3, Sonnet 4, Sonnet 5, Sonnet 6, Sonnet 7, Sonnet 8, Sonnet 9, Sonnet 10, Sonnet 11, Sonnet 12, Sonnet 18, Sonnet 19, Sonnet 116, Sonnet 126, Sonnet 130
