Shakespeare's Sonnet??

Question

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 totter'd 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 deserv'd 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.

Could anyone explain what exactly this poem means, I'm not looking for answers or to cheat but I was hoping someone out there understnads this and could explain it. I try, but once i get to about the 3rd line my head is like ........... so confused.
Thanks. =]

Answer 1

The main idea of the poem is: the poet is speaking to a beautiful young man, but asks him what will happen in forty years, when he has become old, with deep lines and wrinkles on his face. What will happen if someone asks him where his beauty has gone? He could say that it is buried somewhere within himself, hidden under the marks of age, but that suggests only that he has wasted his looks, by allowing them to become worn and distorted. The only solution is for the young man to get married and have a child. _Then_ if someone asks where his beauty has gone, he can show the child's face, to prove that he himself was once beautiful because the child has inherited it. The last two lines suggest that procration (having children) thus gives you kind of immortal youth: you may look and feel old, but in your child, you are reborn, new and fresh and beautiful.

Answer 2

The poet looks ahead to the time when the youth will have aged, and uses this as an argument to urge him to waste no time, and to have a child who will replicate his father and preserve his beauty. The imagery of ageing used is that of siege warfare, forty winters being the besieging army, which digs trenches in the fields before the threatened city. The trenches correspond to the furrows and lines which will mark the young man's forehead as he ages. He is urged not to throw away all his beauty by devoting himself to self-pleasure, but to have children, thus satisfying the world, and Nature, which will keep an account of what he does with his life.

Answer 3

When you are 40, your face will be wrinkled and people will no longer be impressed by your beauty. If somebody asks where your beauty went, it would be a shame to say, In my eyes. You should say, My beautiful child has my beauty, and is my excuse for how I look now. This would prove that the child's beauty is actually yours. This way, you are reborn when you are old, and warm when you feel cold.

Answer 4

When you're 40 years old and wrinkled (they aged faster then?), your husband (wife?) may ask, why did any one ever think you good looking? Just look at you. If you reply, well, I was a looker, then, that's a useless thing to say now, and you shouldn't be proud to say it. You should reply instead that you had a child. The child is both of ours, and so the child's young beauty comes from each and both of us. You're getting old, but the child is young. You're getting closer to death, while the child is the new generation.

Answer 5

in a nutshell, he's saying that when the woman he loves is old and ugly and people ask what happened to her beauty, she can respond that her child's beauty now proves her own and makes it eternal.

an easy (at least easier) way to take apart any sonnet by Shakespeare is to break it up by quatrains (4 lines) and couplet (2 lines). Every Shakespeare sonnet starts with 3 quatrains and ends in a couplet. You'll notice that at the end of each quatrain there is so end-stop punctuation (period, colon, or semi-colon)...this signals the end of a thought or idea...that way if you can break down each four lines and the final couplet, it becomes a bit easier to manage (as opposed to taking on all 14 lines at once)

Hope that helps!