Sonnet 67 Ah Wherefore With Infection Should He Live - Analysis

A Beautiful Man as Moral Evidence Against His Age

This sonnet’s central claim is almost paradoxical: the beloved’s beauty is so real that it becomes an argument against the present world. The speaker isn’t simply praising him; he is asking why such a person should have to live in an era described as infection and impiety. The repeated Why should questions sound less like curiosity than indictment. Beauty, here, is not a comfort—it’s a standard that exposes corruption by contrast, and even risks being used to decorate that corruption.

Beauty Used as a Costume for Sin

The opening questions insist that the man’s presence doesn’t just exist alongside vice; it can be made to grace impiety. That verb grace stings: what should ennoble becomes a kind of finishing touch on something unworthy. The speaker fears that sin can gain advantage by association, even lace it self with his society, as if wrongdoing could be trimmed and ornamented by merely standing near him. The tension is sharp: the beloved seems innocent, yet his very excellence can be exploited, turned into a social accessory that makes vice look refined.

Counterfeit Color: Makeup and Roses of Shadow

The poem then moves from moral infection to visual imitation. false painting tries to imitate his cheek and steal a dead seeming version of his living hue. Even the language of copying feels vampiric: the fake must rob life to appear lively. When poor beauty seeks Roses of shadow, the speaker suggests that ordinary attractiveness has been reduced to special effects—mere tinted illusion—because it lacks the beloved’s natural truth: since his rose is true. The praise is almost cruel, because it implies everyone else’s beauty is poverty forced into deception.

Nature as a Bankrupt Institution Living Off One Account

A clear turn arrives with Why should he live, now Nature bankrupt is. The poem stops focusing on imitators and makes a larger claim: the world’s source of beauty has run out. Nature is imagined as financially ruined—bankrupt, with no exchequer—and the beloved’s body becomes her last treasury: she is Beggared of blood to blush through lively veins, except in him. This is extravagant praise, but it carries an ominous undertone. If Nature lives upon his gains, then he is being spent like currency, as if his beauty is not just rare but the last reserve in a depleted world.

A Living Exhibit of a Better Past

The closing lines sharpen the historical sadness: Nature stores him like a prized item in a vault, not for the present’s sake, but to show what wealth she had in days long since. The final phrase—before these last so bad—makes the compliment double-edged. He is proof that greatness existed, but also a sign that it is mostly gone now. The tone blends awe with disgust and a kind of elegy: the beloved’s beauty is so genuine that it feels out of place, and the speaker can’t decide whether to celebrate his survival or resent the world that forces such beauty to function as a museum piece.

What if the Compliment Is Also a Sentence?

There’s an uncomfortable implication in calling him Nature’s exchequer: if his value is what keeps Nature solvent, he is being used, not cherished. The poem’s repeated insistence that others steal, imitate, and lace themselves with him raises a sharp question: is the speaker defending the beloved from a corrupt age, or is he also turning the beloved into an emblem—something to be possessed as evidence that the present is so bad?