Sonnet 9: Is It for Fear to Wet a Widow’s Eye
Sonnet 9: Is It for Fear to Wet a Widow’s Eye - meaning Summary
Procreate or Be Mourned
Shakespeare reproaches a young man for remaining single and childless. Using widow imagery, the speaker argues that by not producing heirs the man wastes his beauty and leaves the world bereft of his shape. Procreation is presented as a social duty: other goods persist through circulation, but beauty ends if unused. The poem frames childlessness as selfish and almost murderous because it halts a lineage and communal memory.
Read Complete AnalysesIs it for fear to wet a widow’s eye, That thou consum’st thy self in single life? Ah, if thou issueless shalt hap to die, The world will wail thee like a makeless wife. The world will be thy widow and still weep, That thou no form of thee hast left behind, When every private widow well may keep, By children’s eyes, her husband’s shape in mind. Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend Shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it; But beauty’s waste hath in the world an end, And kept unused the user so destroys it. No love toward others in that bosom sits That on himself such murd’rous shame commits.
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