Sonnet notes 3

Sonnet 5, line 7: “Sap check’d with frost and lusty leaves quite gone”

This line describes the hideous winter of line 6, a metaphor for advancing age. How well it applies to both! The blood runs cold, the lust all gone. As the next line says, beauty o’er-snow’d and bareness everywhere. The lines are stated quietly, but their message seems urgent. Something must be done, mustn’t it? Yet despite the urgency, the poetry proceeds slowly. This is a double sonnet—it takes 28 lines to complete its argument, urging the Young Man, once again to have a child or else To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir. The imagery leaves no room for escape.