Sonnet 68 claims that the young man’s face is a living record of an older and more honest age, which the speaker imagines as a time of natural beauty, before cosmetics and wigs made from dead people’s hair, and that Nature keeps him as proof of what true beauty was.
Sonnet 68: Full Poem
Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,
When beauty lived and died as flowers do now,
Before these bastard signs of fair were borne,
Or durst inhabit on a living brow;
Before the golden tresses of the dead,
The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,
To live a second life on second head;
Ere beauty’s dead fleece made another gay:
In him those holy antique hours are seen,
Without all ornament, itself and true,
Making no summer of another’s green,
Robbing no old to dress his beauty new;
And him as for a map doth Nature store,
To show false art what beauty was of yore.
Text from the 1609 Quarto, with spelling and punctuation lightly modernized.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about Sonnet 68 for quick reference.
What Sonnet 68 Means
The poem begins with “Thus,” which points back to Sonnet 67. That poem asks why the young man should live among corruption and ends with Nature keeping him “to show what wealth she had / In days long since.” Sonnet 68 picks up the thought and develops it: the young man’s cheek is “the map of days outworn,” a picture of times gone by.
The first two quatrains describe those earlier times. Back then, beauty lived and died naturally, as flowers still do. That was before the “bastard signs of fair,” counterfeit marks of beauty such as cosmetics, were worn or dared to live on a living face. It was also before the golden hair of the dead, which by right belonged to the grave, was cut off to make wigs, so that dead beauty’s “fleece” could dress up someone else.
At line 9, the speaker turns to the young man. In him, those “holy antique hours” can be seen again. His beauty has no ornament at all. It is itself and true. He does not make a summer for himself out of someone else’s green growth, and he does not rob the old to dress his own beauty in new clothes.
The couplet returns to the image of the map. Nature keeps the young man in store as a map, a model or record, to show “false Art” what beauty used to be like. He is evidence in an argument between Nature and artifice, and Nature is using him to win it.
Sonnet 68 Line by Line
Each line, with the sense of it in plain English.
Themes
Sonnet 68 is a poem about authenticity, and its themes arise from setting the young man’s natural face against the artifice of the present.
Nature Against Art
The couplet names the two opponents directly: “Nature” and “false Art.” In this poem, art means artifice, the human skill that imitates and improves on what Nature makes. The idea that cosmetic art insults natural beauty appears elsewhere in the sonnets. Sonnet 83 begins, “I never saw that you did painting need,” and Sonnet 127 complains of “Fairing the foul with Art’s false borrowed face.” In Sonnet 68, the young man is not just free of artifice. He is Nature’s exhibit, preserved to put artifice to shame.
The Past as a Purer Age
The poem imagines an earlier time when beauty was honest, and it describes that time in religious language: the past is made of “holy antique hours.” This idea of a lost golden age, before corruption set in, appears more than once in the sequence. Sonnet 67 speaks of “days long since, before these last so bad,” and Sonnet 106 reads old poets’ descriptions of beauty as prophecies of the young man. The speaker’s present is fallen, and the young man is a survivor from before the fall.
Death and Borrowed Beauty
The poem’s most vivid image is the wig made from a dead person’s hair. Shakespeare uses the same image in The Merchant of Venice, where Bassanio, choosing among the caskets, describes golden locks “often known / To be the dowry of a second head,” and names where that dowry came from: “The skull that bred them in the sepulchre.” In both places, the wig stands for beauty that is not merely false but stolen from the grave. The sonnet’s language makes the point grimly: the hair is “the right of sepulchres,” it is “shorn away” like a sheep’s wool, and it is “dead fleece.”
Form and Language
Sonnet 68 is built on contrast: the octave describes what the past was free of, and the sestet shows the young man free of the same things.
Meter and Rhyme
The poem follows the regular Shakespearean scheme in iambic pentameter, and its rhymes are full throughout, from “outworn” and “borne” to “store” and “yore.” The steady sound suits a poem that praises the plain and unaltered. Line 7, “To live a second life on second head,” repeats “second” to stress the idea of a borrowed, secondhand existence.
“Before” and “Ere”
The first eight lines are organized by time words. “When” in line 2 sets the scene, then “Before” introduces line 3, “Before” returns at line 5, and “Ere,” meaning before, opens line 8. The anaphora keeps pushing the reader further back into the past. The sestet answers with a run of negatives: “Without all ornament,” “Making no summer,” and “Robbing no old.” The young man is defined by what he does not do.
The Map
“Map” opens and nearly closes the poem. In Shakespeare’s time, the word could mean a picture or embodiment of something as well as a chart of land. In Richard II, the Queen greets her fallen husband as “Thou map of honour,” and Sonnet 68 uses the word in the same sense. The young man’s cheek is a map of the past because it shows, in small, what the whole of that earlier age looked like. In the couplet, Nature keeps him “as for a map,” the way one keeps a reference copy or a pattern to measure others against.
“Bastard Signs of Fair”
“Fair” here is a noun meaning beauty, and the “signs” of beauty are its outward marks, the colors of a painted face. “Bastard” calls these marks illegitimate, born outside the proper line. The word fits the poem’s interest in inheritance. True beauty descends naturally, as it did in the past, while cosmetics and wigs are counterfeit heirs.
A Closer Reading
Sonnet 68 praises the young man by turning him into a museum piece, and the compliment has a cost the poem does not quite admit.
On the surface, the poem is an attack on fashion. Painted faces and wigs made from dead people’s hair are condemned as false, and the young man’s unpainted beauty is praised as “itself and true.” But the poem’s real energy goes into the disgust. The images of the second quatrain, hair shorn from corpses and a dead “fleece” making “another gay,” are far more vivid than anything the poem says about the young man’s own appearance. The speaker defines the young man by contrast with what he finds repulsive.
The sestet’s praise is almost entirely negative. The young man wears no ornament, makes no summer from another’s green, and robs no old. We learn what he is not rather than what he is. This may be deliberate. True beauty, the poem suggests, needs no description, because it has no added features to describe. The young man is simply “itself,” and the speaker can only point to the absence of everything false.
The cost of the compliment appears in the couplet. Nature does not keep the young man to enjoy him. She keeps him “as for a map,” a specimen to be shown to “false Art” as a lesson. He has become an exhibit, and the verb “store” makes him sound like something kept in reserve rather than a person living in the present. The poem’s opening line had already made him a record of “days outworn.” He is praised as the last of his kind, and in being praised this way, he is set apart from his own time.
There is also a quiet irony in a poem that condemns art while being a work of art itself. The speaker attacks the art that improves on Nature, but his own verse is a kind of preservation too, keeping the young man’s beauty as a record for later readers. The difference, the poem implies, is that honest art records what is true, while “false Art” paints over it. Whether the young man can stay as true as the poem says is a question the next sonnet raises.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Sonnet 68, answered briefly.
Who Is Sonnet 68 Addressed To?
It does not address anyone directly. It describes the young man of the Fair Youth sonnets in the third person, continuing the thought of Sonnet 67, which also speaks of him as “he.”
What Does “The Map of Days Outworn” Mean?
It means a picture or record of times long past. The young man’s cheek shows what beauty looked like in an earlier, more honest age.
What Are the “Golden Tresses of the Dead”?
They are the hair of dead people, cut off to make wigs. The poem condemns the practice as robbing the grave to dress up the living.
Where Is the Volta in Sonnet 68?
At line 9, with “In him those holy antique hours are seen.” The octave describes the past, and the sestet shows the young man as a living example of it.
What Is “False Art” in Sonnet 68?
It is artifice, especially cosmetics and false hair, which imitate beauty instead of having it. Nature keeps the young man to show this kind of art what real beauty was.
Related Sonnets
Three sonnets share this poem’s concern with true beauty and its record in time.