Sonnet 68: Thus Is His Cheek the Map of Days Outworn
Sonnet 68: Thus Is His Cheek the Map of Days Outworn - form Summary
Shakespearean Sonnet Structure
This poem is a Shakespearean sonnet that uses the sonnet’s tight fourteen-line form to make a single, sustained argument. Over three quatrains the speaker contrasts authentic, aged beauty with artificial, borrowed appearances—likening the young man’s face to a map of past days—and the final couplet condenses the claim: Nature preserves original beauty as a standard against false Art. The sonnet form sharpens the comparison and conclusion.
Read Complete AnalysesThus is his cheek the map of days outworn, When beauty lived and died as flowers do now, Before these bastard signs of fair were born, Or durst inhabit on a living brow; Before the golden tresses of the dead, The right of sepulchres, were shorn away, To live a second life on second head; Ere beauty’s dead fleece made another gay: In him those holy antique hours are seen, Without all ornament, itself and true, Making no summer of another’s green, Robbing no old to dress his beauty new; And him as for a map doth Nature store, To show false Art what beauty was of yore.
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