The British Library website is a good place view material related to Shakespeare. Besides plays he wrote 154 sonnets and today we’ll take a brief look at Sonnet 2, one of the “Fair Youth” sonnets, which are addressed to a young man. “The first 17 sonnets encourage this youth to marry and father children, because otherwise… his beauty will die with him.”
The Poem
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.
Publication
Shakespeare probably composed his sonnets between 1590 and 1605. They were published in sequence in 1609.
Commonplace Books
Besides a first edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the British Library has a commonplace book which was created by Margaret Ballasys circa 1630. In it she copied by hand passages and poems by the likes of John Donne and William Herbert.
Apparently Sonnet 2 has been found in many commonplace books. “Here the sonnet has the Latin title, Spes Altera, meaning ‘in hope of another’. It also differs in other ways from the 1609 printed text. For example, the eyes’ ‘deep trenches’ have become ‘deepe furrowes’ and youth’s ‘treasure’ is changed to ‘lustre’.”
