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Shakespeare's Sonnets

Chapter 8: VII
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About This Book

A sequence of lyric sonnets presents a speaker who examines love, beauty, time, and mortality through intimate, shifting addresses. Many poems urge a beloved to preserve beauty through progeny, while others meditate on aging and the ravages of time; a contrasting strand records erotic passion, jealousy, and betrayal. The pieces vary tone from pleading to defiance and experiment with sonnet form and rhetorical argument, often asserting poetry’s power to memorialize. Recurring images and contrapuntal voices probe desire, artistic rivalry, and the tension between physical love and spiritual admiration.

VII

Lo! in the orient when the gracious light
Lifts up his burning head, each under eye
Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,
Serving with looks his sacred majesty;
And having climb’d the steep-up heavenly hill,
Resembling strong youth in his middle age,
Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,
Attending on his golden pilgrimage:
But when from highmost pitch, with weary car,
Like feeble age, he reeleth from the day,
The eyes, ’fore duteous, now converted are
From his low tract, and look another way:
    So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon:
    Unlook’d, on diest unless thou get a son.