Shakespeare Sonnet 4

‘Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend’

Mar 27, 2007

Each "marriage sonnet" employs a particular metaphor, but the speaker continues with his one theme; he is trying to persuade the young man to marry and produce offspring.

Shakespeare Sonnet 4, “Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend,” employs a financial and inheritance metaphor of spending and lending; it mentions “bounteous largess,” sum, audit, and executor.

First Quatrain

In the first quatrain, the speaker addresses the young man, asking him why he spends his lovely qualities upon his own selfish pleasure. He says that nature does not give you your pleasing qualities for yourself alone; she merely puts them on loan to you. Nature lends you your beauty freely. The speaker tells the lad that the lad did not have to earn his loveliness from nature. Because nature has been so unselfish in bestowing on the young man his pleasing qualities, the speaker hopes to instill in the young man a duty to continue what nature has begun.

Second Quatrain

And then the speaker chides the young man, calling him “beauteous niggard” or beautiful selfish one, and asks him why he is misusing his “bounteous largess”; the reader will remember that the speaker is repeatedly nudging the young man to marry and produce offspring that will inherit the young man’s admirable qualities. So after having experienced the three earlier “marriage sonnets,” the reader understands the nature of this question.

Then the speaker calls the young man a “Profitless usurer,” again employing the financial metaphor. The speaker is complaining that the lad is hoarding his wealth of positive qualities, instead of using it to a greater good, and his lack of properly using his gifts is even worse because those gifts cannot endure eternally.

Third Quatrain

In the third quatrain, the speaker again rebukes the young man for the selfish attitude for which the speaker is often accusing the lad. The speaker employs his often repeated question, “Then how, when Nature calls thee to be gone, / What acceptable audit canst thou leave?” The speaker wonders just how the young man will give an account of his selfish action when he has to die and leave no beautiful heir to replace him and continue his fair qualities.

Couplet

In the couplet, the speaker declares that if the young man does not marry and produce offspring, the lad’s beauty will die, “must be tomb’d with thee,” but if he would just take the speaker’s advice and use his beauty properly, he would leave a living heir, who, upon the death of the father, could serve as his executor. The speaker tries to motivate the young man to follow his advice, by painting a lonely portrait of the young man in old age.