Sonnet 17: “My papers yellowed with their age…”

17

Who will believe my verse in time to come

If it were fill’d with your most high deserts?

Though yet heav’n 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 heav’nly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces.”

So should my papers (yellowed with their age)

Be scorn’d, like old men of less truth than tongue,

And your true rights be term’d a Poet’s rage,

And stretchèd meter of an Antique song.

     But were some child of yours alive that time,

     You should live twice, in it and in my rhyme.

“Shakespeare now lets his wordplay go all out…This wordplay adds to the sonnet’s light, carefree tone. There are no grave exhortations, no prophesies of doom, simply a disarming, humble assessment of the inadequacy of W.’s verse to show the true nature of Y.M…. 

“Note the intertwining of two conceits at once in the second and third quatrains: (1) that no one will believe W.’s verse because Y.M.’s graces are so great as to be unbelievable, and (2) nobody will believe a poet anyway…The playfulness of the verse helps make it recognizable as a device. This has the effect of making the poet seem clever and the compliment showier. Future readers may not be expected to believe the verse, but W. expects Y.M. to believe every word.

“The conclusion of Sonnet 17 says more. Even as W. imagines the scorn heaped on his papers (yellowed with their age), rather than suggesting Y.M. ignore the value of his worth in favor of having a child, he suggests instead—in what reads like a delightful surprise in the couplet—why not have the best of both worlds, my verse and your child? W., it seems, is moving a step further away from the steady procreation narrative he has been harping on. The story goes on.”

—Shakespeare’s Sonnets Among His Private Friends, p.49-50 (publication date 10/1/21)