Thy Beauty's Field

A close reading of Shakespeare's Sonnet Two

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tattered weed of small worth held.
Then being asked where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use
If thou couldst answer “This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,”
Proving his beauty by succession thine.
 This were to be new made when thou art old
 And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

Photo by Summer C on Unsplash

This essay stands to serve as the first in a series on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The first sonnet has been purposely omitted, despite its richness, because I can only refer you to Helen Vendler’s superb commentary, to which I can add nothing significant. Among much else, she speaks of it as “an aesthetic investment in profusion.” I pass on, therefore, to the second sonnet.

The sonnet belongs to the procreation series, those sonnets which urge a young man to beget a child before his own beauty fades. On the surface, this seems perhaps a disappointingly simple purpose for a poem, and a bit of a crude one at that. Does a young man really need to be urged to the act that enables such reproduction? For this reason, among others, one could possibly read the intent of a seducer into the speaker, but that is not my suggestion here. The procreation sonnets emphatically insist on the importance of begetting offspring, not merely engaging in intercourse. They differ from the long tradition of love poems on precisely this point. In the opening line of the poem, the lines of the face are compared with trenches, evoking graves. Time is a gravedigger. The sonnet urges the young man to salvage the “treasure” of his “lusty days” from the ravages of time and thereby partake in the being of the beautiful, rather than merely in its passing.

An allusion to the Parable of the Weeds strengthens this reading. The young man is told to consider a time when he is forty years old, when “Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now, / Will be a tattered weed of small worth held.” Shakespeare uses the word “weed” in two senses— the first is the familiar, enduring garden variety, the other refers to a person’s clothes. Consider the end of Twelfth Night, where Orsino says to “Cesario,” newly revealed to be Viola, “Give me thy hand, / And let me see thee in thy woman’s weeds.” This usage recurs throughout the plays, but Shakespeare also uses the modern meaning. This double entendre does heavy lifting in Sonnet Two. It simultaneously alludes to the parable about weeds, or “tares,” and refers to a person’s outer appearance or their clothes.

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,
Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tattered weed of small worth held.

The young man’s “livery” specifically means riding clothes, and the associations with “liveliness” as well as the erotic implications of “riding” all emphasize the lustiness of youth. Yet those clothes will one day be nothing more than a “tattered” or “tottered weed.” The manuscript differences reveal another sense— one day the young man will be a bent, “tottering” old man, while now the field of his beauty is productive and fertile, one day the harvest will be over, and the loveliness of the young man in all his lustiness will be reduced to a weed left standing in the field, after the harvest.

In the aforementioned parable, Jesus speaks of how “the kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. ²⁵ But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. ²⁶ When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.”¹ When his disciples asked him if they should try to remove the weeds, he instructs them not to:

No,’ he answered, ‘because while you are pulling the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. ³⁰ Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.’”

The young man’s lusts are like weeds, yet they grow within “thy beauty’s field.” In Shakespeare’s secular reading of our longing for reproduction, the field also contains the pearl of great price, for which we should give all we have in order to purchase. The speaker asks, provocatively, where the young man’s treasure will lie when he is aged. The allusion to St. Matthew is unmistakable: “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” To make a bad pun, but one the Bard might have approved of, the seat of transcendental beauty has been moved, from the earth, to the “heir.”

In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates discusses a “ladder of love” revealed to him by his teacher, Diotima. She observes that there comes a time for all human beings when they feel themselves “pregnant” with a longing for immortality.

Those who are pregnant in the body only, betake themselves to women and beget children—this is the character of their love; their offspring, as they hope, will preserve their memory and giving them the blessedness and immortality which they desire in the future. (Jowett 208e)

There is, however, a higher form of reproduction, and a lover also seeks the beautiful, but seeks it in a purer form, “higher” up the ascent towards the beautiful itself. This is the poet.

Who, when he thinks of Homer and Hesiod and other great poets, would not rather have their children than ordinary human ones? Who would not emulate them in the creation of children such as theirs, which have preserved their memory and given them everlasting glory? (209d)

Appropriately, perhaps, Shakespeare achieves this form of immortality, and later sonnets explicitly acknowledge and anticipate this. The “procreation sonnets” seem to be the earthly, and fleshly prelude to a greater form of approximating immortality. Appropriately, there are hints of transcendence here, but the poems remain rooted in depictions of earthly beauty and its ruin. This is a materialist’s “immortality.”

There are indications that Shakespeare was acquainted with the theories of the circulation of the heart and blood developed by William Harvey (The Baconians make much of this). At the end of the sonnet, the speaker tells the young man that to have a son “were to be new made when thou art old, / And see thy blood warm when thou feelst it cold.” The winter imagery has come full circle, as it were, from the opening lines: “When forty winters shall besiege thy brow…” This movement of imagery imitates the experience of beauty passing from one individual to another, and reflecting back. The “heart,” for Shakespeare still the center of our emotions and the seat of the soul, has moved, to quote another sonnet, from within the “center of [his] sinful earth,” to his son, in whom transcendent beauty continues to shine forth, while he himself, dims and vanishes from sight.

1. Matthew, 13:24-43. New International Version. I must give credit to Rev. Dr. Hannah Scanlon for reminding me of this parable during a discussion while weeding an overgrown garden.