Who will believe my verse in time to come
If it were filled with your most high deserts?-
Though yet, heaven 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 with fresh numbers number your graces,
The age to come would say ‘This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne'er touched earthly faces.’
So should my papers, yellowed by their age,
Be scorned, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be termed a poet’s rage
And stretchèd metre of an antique song.
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice: in it, and in my rhyme.
—————
I've really rather fallen for this sonnet. As opposed to its immediate successor, Sonnet 18, it feels incredibly human and fallible. The poet is far less confident of the infinite nature of his art, or more accurately, less confident of his poetic ability to represent the beauty of his subject without invoking such dramatic hyperbole that the scholars of the future think he’s lost the plot. I know the feeling, when words don’t work. It manifests here through the rather shaky start; 'come’ and 'tomb’ is a half-rhyme at best, and there’s no damn way I can make a rhyme of 'desert’ and 'part’ without severely mangling at least one of those words. But then the poet gets it; play to the impossibility, and do the impossible:
If I could write the fortune of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say 'This poet lies,
Such heavenly touches ne'er graced earthly faces’.
Even if I could tell the tale of your beauty, says the poet, it wouldn't matter, because I’d get called a hack for it anyway. This subtle jab against the very nature of the romantic sonnet, which is reiterated in the hilariously self aware 'stretchèd metre of an antique song’ at line 12, is Shakespeare at his most deconstructive, and a wonderful precursor to Sonnet 18, when he takes umbrage against the very nature of a summer’s day as a rubbish thing to compare such beauty against. But it’s also heartbreakingly romantic in how it pierces through to the very core of affection, and both laments and celebrates how the curious nature of love individualises our opinions of its targets in ways only we can see. The author tried to leave this note for the world, to mark his love, to save a portion of his subject’s beauty, and ultimately he doesn't seem to care very much whether anyone believes him or not.
Of course the point of this sonnet is a procreation sonnet, which is why the closing couplet turns towards 'have a baby, nudge nudge’ like its precursors. I'm not a big fan of this part of the sequence, as I honestly just think it’s kinda weird, but it doesn't faze me in this sonnet because, whatever the poet might have intended when he started Sonnet 17, the nature of procreation ends up as an afterthought, displaced by rising senses of affection and a preoccupation with survival through verse that leads us very nicely into Sonnet 18, and a'swinging off from there. 17 is ultimately a turn-point, a pivot, but that doesn't make it any less than what came before, and what will yet follow after.
So we've got romance, transitioning themes and deconstruction. No wonder I was so inclined to write about this rhyme.
