Sonnet 17 claims that future readers will not believe a poem praising the young man’s beauty, and that only a living child could prove the poem was telling the truth.
Sonnet 17: Full Poem
Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were filled with your most high deserts?
Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say, “This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.”
So should my papers, yellowed with their age,
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage
And stretched meter of an antique song:
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice, in it and in my rhyme.
Text from the 1609 Quarto, with spelling and punctuation lightly modernized.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about Sonnet 17 for quick reference.
What Sonnet 17 Means
Sonnet 17 worries that the poet’s praise of the young man will not be believed, and offers a child as the solution.
The first quatrain asks a question: who in the future will believe my poetry, if it describes your merits as highly as they deserve? And yet, the speaker admits, his verse actually falls short. It is like a tomb, which marks where the young man lies but hides his life and shows less than half his qualities.
The second quatrain imagines doing better. If the poet could capture the beauty of the young man’s eyes and list all his graces in fresh verse, future readers would simply say he was lying. No real face, they would say, was ever touched with such heavenly beauty.
The third quatrain pictures the poem’s future. The manuscript, yellowed with age, would be scorned like an old man who talks more than he tells the truth. The praise the young man truly deserves would be dismissed as a poet’s frenzy and the exaggerated meter of an old-fashioned song.
The couplet offers a way out. If some child of the young man’s were alive at that future time, he would live twice: once in the child, and once in the poem. The child’s face would prove that the poem did not exaggerate.
Sonnet 17 Line by Line
Each line, with the sense of it in plain English.
Themes
Sonnet 17 ends the Procreation Sonnets by asking what poetry can and cannot prove.
The Limits of Poetry
The poem opens by doubting itself. The verse is “but as a tomb,” a marker of the young man that hides more than it shows. The doubt is not new: in Sonnet 16 the speaker had already called his verse “my barren rhyme” and urged the young man toward “a mightier way.” Sonnet 17 takes that doubt to its conclusion. Even the best poem is a monument, not a life.
Truth That Sounds Like a Lie
The second quatrain describes a trap. If the poet understates the young man’s beauty, the poem fails; if he describes it accurately, future readers will call him a liar, because no real face could be that beautiful. The more exceptional the truth, the less believable it becomes. Praise at this level cannot prove itself from inside the poem.
The Child as Evidence
In the earlier Procreation Sonnets, a child is the way beauty survives. In Sonnet 17 the child has a new job: proof. A living descendant with the young man’s face would show future readers that the poem was accurate. The couplet makes the child and the poem partners, each confirming the other: “You should live twice, in it and in my rhyme.”
Form and Language
Sonnet 17 argues like a case at law, with testimony, witnesses and a jury of future readers.
Meter and Rhyme
The poem is a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic pentameter, rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. Line 12 needs “stretched” to be pronounced with two syllables, “stretch-ed,” to fill out the meter, a small reminder of the old-fashioned verse the line is describing.
The Language of Testimony
The poem is full of words about believing and doubting witnesses: “believe,” “lies,” “less truth than tongue,” “true rights,” “termed.” The future is pictured as a court where the poem gives evidence and is not believed. The couplet produces the one witness that court would accept: a living child.
The Tomb
In line 3 the poem calls itself “but as a tomb / Which hides your life and shows not half your parts.” A tomb displays a name and an inscription while concealing the body inside. The image turns the poem’s usual claim upside down: instead of preserving the young man, the verse covers him up.
“Fresh Numbers Number”
“Numbers” was the usual word for verse, because poetry was measured in counted syllables. Line 6 plays on this: to “number” the graces in “fresh numbers” is to count them and to put them into poetry at the same time. The pun suggests a catalog of beauty so complete that it would stop being believable.
The Imagined Reader
Lines 7 and 8 give the future reader a speaking part: “This poet lies; / Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces.” The speaker writes his own critic’s line for him, and the critic even gets a neat pun in “touches” and “touched.” The quoted voice makes the skepticism concrete and places it inside the poem it doubts.
A Closer Reading
Sonnet 17 predicted its own future accurately: we are the “age to come,” and we have the poem without the child.
Every reader of Sonnet 17 today is the future audience it imagined. We hold the “papers, yellowed with their age,” and we have no living descendant to compare them against. The young man’s identity is unknown. No portrait can be securely matched to him, and no child of his has ever been traced. The couplet’s condition, “were some child of yours alive that time,” was not met, or if it was, nothing connects that child to these poems.
That makes the poem’s image of itself exact. It called itself “a tomb / Which hides your life and shows not half your parts,” and that is what it became. It preserved the praise and concealed the person. We know the young man had beautiful eyes and many graces because the poem says so, and we know nothing else about him. The verse did survive time; what it saved was a monument with no body we can identify.
And yet the second half of the prediction failed. The age to come did not say “this poet lies.” Readers for four centuries have believed the sonnets without any child to vouch for them. What convinced them was not evidence about the young man but the quality of the writing itself, which is the possibility Sonnet 17 could not bring itself to trust.
One poem later, the speaker trusts it. Sonnet 18 drops the child entirely and claims that the verse alone “gives life to thee.” Sonnet 17 is the hinge between the two positions: the last time the speaker asks for outside proof, and the poem whose fears history both confirmed and overturned.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Sonnet 17, answered briefly.
Who Is Sonnet 17 Addressed To?
The young man of the Fair Youth sonnets, the same unnamed figure the Procreation Sonnets urge to marry and have children.
Why Is Sonnet 17 the Last Procreation Sonnet?
Sonnets 1 to 17 all urge the young man to have children. Sonnet 17 is the last to mention a child. From Sonnet 18 on, the speaker relies on poetry alone to preserve the young man.
What Does “Stretched Meter of an Antique Song” Mean?
The exaggerated verse of an old-fashioned poem. “Stretched” means strained or overstated, and “antique” means old, with a possible play on “antic,” meaning grotesque. Future readers, the speaker fears, will treat his praise as quaint exaggeration.
What Does “Less Truth Than Tongue” Mean?
More talk than truth. The phrase describes old men who tell long, embellished stories, and the speaker fears his aging manuscript will be dismissed the same way.
How Does Sonnet 17 Lead Into Sonnet 18?
Sonnet 17 says the verse needs a child to be believed. Sonnet 18 drops the child and says the verse is enough: “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”
Related Sonnets
Three sonnets trace the speaker’s changing confidence in what verse can do.