Sonnet 62 argues that the speaker’s vanity is real but misplaced: the self he admires so much is not his own aging face but the young man, whom he loves so completely that praising him feels like praising himself.
Sonnet 62: Full Poem
Sin of self-love possesseth all mine eye,
And all my soul, and all my every part;
And for this sin there is no remedy,
It is so grounded inward in my heart.
Methinks no face so gracious is as mine,
No shape so true, no truth of such account;
And for myself mine own worth do define,
As I all other in all worths surmount.
But when my glass shows me myself indeed,
Beated and chopp’d with tanned antiquity,
Mine own self-love quite contrary I read;
Self so self-loving were iniquity.
‘Tis thee, myself, that for myself I praise,
Painting my age with beauty of thy days.
Text from the 1609 Quarto, with spelling and punctuation lightly modernized.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about Sonnet 62 for quick reference.
What Sonnet 62 Means
The speaker opens by confessing a sin. Self-love has taken over his eye, his soul, and every part of him, and he says there is no cure for it because it is rooted so deep in his heart. The confession sounds serious, but it quickly becomes a boast.
In the second quatrain, the speaker praises himself without restraint. He thinks no face is as attractive as his, no body as well made, and no integrity worth as much. He sets his own value and finds that he surpasses everyone else in every kind of worth.
At line 9, the mirror interrupts. When his “glass” shows him what he really looks like, he sees a face “Beated and chopp’d with tanned antiquity”: battered, cracked, and weathered by age. Reading the evidence, he reverses his verdict. To love a self like this would be wrong, and the self-love of the first eight lines now looks absurd.
The couplet explains the mistake. The self he has been praising all along is the young man, whom he calls “myself.” Because the two are so closely joined in love, the speaker can borrow the young man’s youth and lay it over his own old face, “Painting my age with beauty of thy days.” The poem ends by turning an apparent vice into a compliment.
Sonnet 62 Line by Line
Each line, with the sense of it in plain English.
Themes
Sonnet 62 sets up a confession, overturns it, and then reinterprets it, and its themes come from that three-step movement.
Self-Love and Its Correction
The sonnets use the charge of self-love pointedly. In Sonnet 3, the speaker asks who would be so foolish as to “be the tomb / Of his self-love to stop posterity,” accusing the young man of hoarding himself. Sonnet 62 turns the accusation on the speaker. He admits to the sin in religious language, calling it a “sin” without “remedy” and finally “iniquity.” Then the poem shows that his vanity rests on a misreading.
Two Selves as One
The couplet depends on an idea that recurs in the Fair Youth sonnets: that lovers exchange identities. In Sonnet 22, the speaker says his heart lives in the young man’s breast, “as thine in me,” and asks, “How can I then be elder than thou art?” Sonnet 39 asks, “And what is’t but mine own when I praise thee?” Sonnet 62 uses the same logic. If the young man is “myself,” then admiring him is a kind of self-love, and the speaker’s sin becomes devotion.
Age and the Mirror
The mirror gives the speaker a truth he cannot argue with. Mirrors appear several times in the sequence as instruments of honesty about time. In Sonnet 3, the young man is told to “Look in thy glass,” and Sonnet 77 warns him that “Thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear.” Here the glass is turned on the older speaker, and what it shows anticipates the opening of Sonnet 63, where the speaker implies that he is already crushed and worn by “Time’s injurious hand.”
Form and Language
Sonnet 62 compresses a sermon, a boast, and a joke into fourteen lines, and its wordplay on “self” holds the three together.
Meter and Rhyme
The poem follows the regular Shakespearean scheme in iambic pentameter. The opening line begins with a stressed syllable, “Sin,” so the poem starts on a hard accent that suits a confession. The first rhyme, “eye” with “remedy,” pairs a stressed word with the light final syllable of “remedy.” The third quatrain’s rhyme is unusually full: “antiquity” and “iniquity” share their last three syllables, and the echo binds the speaker’s age to the wrong of loving it.
The Language of Sin
The first quatrain borrows the vocabulary of religious confession. “Sin” appears twice in four lines, there is “no remedy,” and the fault is “grounded inward in my heart,” as if the fault were part of his nature. The vocabulary returns in line 12 with “iniquity.” The speaker plays at penitence, but the poem’s comedy depends on the exaggeration: a man listing his own perfections is cataloging exactly the vanity he claims to regret.
“Beated and Chopp’d”
Line 10 is one of the harshest physical descriptions of the speaker in this part of the sequence. “Beated” means beaten or battered, “chopp’d” means chapped or cracked, and “tanned antiquity” suggests skin weathered and browned by years, like leather. The line’s heavy consonants, “Beated,” “chopp’d,” and “tanned,” sound like the blows they describe, and they contrast with the smooth abstractions of the boasting quatrain.
“Painting” in the Couplet
“Painting” in line 14 can mean adorning, as an artist paints a portrait, and it can mean applying cosmetics to cover the face. Both senses work. The speaker decorates his old age with the young man’s beauty, and he admits that the beauty is borrowed, laid over the surface like makeup. Cosmetic painting comes up again a few poems later, in Sonnet 68, where false beauty is set against the young man’s natural face.
A Closer Reading
Sonnet 62 is a joke at the speaker’s expense that becomes, in its final line, a serious statement about what love does to the boundary between two people.
The first eight lines are too extravagant to be read straight. The speaker says self-love possesses “all mine eye, / And all my soul, and all my every part,” and then he claims to surpass “all other in all worths.” The repeated “all” inflates the claim until it bursts. A reader who remembers Sonnet 29, where the speaker weeps over his “outcast state,” knows how unlikely this vanity is. The quatrains are a setup, and the mirror is the punch line.
What the mirror shows is not just an older face but a misreading. Line 11, “Mine own self-love quite contrary I read,” treats the self as a text. The speaker had been reading himself wrongly. The face that the glass “shows” him “indeed,” in fact, is beaten and cracked, so the admiring image of lines 5 to 8 must have come from somewhere else. The couplet names the source: the image he was admiring was the young man.
This answer is both flattering and unsettling. It flatters the young man, whose beauty is so powerful that it can transfigure the speaker’s own self-image. But it also shows how far the speaker has given himself away. He can no longer see his own face without seeing the young man’s, and his sense of his own worth depends on someone else’s youth. The commas that set off “myself” in line 13 isolate the word, as if the speaker pauses to insist on an identity he knows is not literally true.
“Painting my age with beauty of thy days” is the poem’s last admission, and its frankest. Paint covers the surface without changing what lies beneath. The speaker knows that the young man’s beauty does not make him young, only that it lets him look at himself with something other than disgust. The poem moves from a sin it says has “no remedy” to a remedy that is only cosmetic, and the speaker seems to accept the trade.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Sonnet 62, answered briefly.
Who Is Sonnet 62 Addressed To?
The young man of the Fair Youth sonnets. He is addressed directly only in the couplet, as “thee” and “thy,” but the poem’s point is that he has been its real subject from the start.
What Is the Sin in Sonnet 62?
Self-love, or vanity. The speaker confesses that it rules his eye, his soul, and every part of him. Then he discovers that the self he loves is really the young man.
What Does “Beated and Chopp’d With Tanned Antiquity” Mean?
It means battered and cracked by weathered old age. The mirror shows the speaker a face that looks worn and leathery, which ends his boasting.
Where Is the Volta in Sonnet 62?
At line 9, with “But when my glass shows me myself indeed.” The mirror overturns the speaker’s vanity. The couplet makes a second turn, explaining that the self he praised was the young man.
How Does Sonnet 62 Connect to Sonnet 63?
Sonnet 62 ends with the speaker’s age, and Sonnet 63 begins with it, implying that the speaker is already worn by time and then promising to protect the young man’s beauty in verse.
Related Sonnets
Three sonnets share this poem’s mirrors, self-love, and aging speaker.