Sonnet 17: Who Will Believe My Verse in Time to Come
Sonnet 17: Who Will Believe My Verse in Time to Come - context Summary
Fair Youth Sequence
Sonnet 17, part of Shakespeare's Fair Youth sequence, presents a speaker anxious that his verse cannot truthfully preserve a young man’s merits. He imagines future readers dismissing poetic praise as exaggeration and aging manuscripts as unreliable. The poem contrasts literary immortality with biological legacy, proposing a child as the surest means to carry the beloved’s qualities forward alongside the poet’s rhyme. It is framed within the sonnet tradition of praise and preservation.
Read Complete AnalysesWho 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 in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say, This poet lies, Such heavenly touches ne’er touched earthly faces. So should my papers, yellowed with 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.
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