Sonnet 13 treats a young man's beauty as property held on a lease
Shakespeare's Sonnet 13 borrows the language of landlords and tenants. The friend's good looks are only rented, the poet argues, and the lease expires at death unless it passes to an heir. It ends on one of the sequence's simplest lines: you had a father, so let a son of yours say the same.
The sonnet begins with a wish that sounds almost philosophical: if only you were truly your own. But the speaker immediately qualifies it. The friend belongs to himself only for as long as he is alive, so he should prepare for the approaching end and hand his lovely appearance on to someone else. Throughout, the addressee is called 'you' and, twice, 'love', which gives the argument a warmer, more intimate colour.
The middle lines lean on legal and household vocabulary. Beauty is something the young man holds "in lease", and if it passed to a child that tenancy would never run out. He would then become himself again after his own death, because his offspring would carry his features forward. The rhetoric turns a tender plea into a question of sound estate management.
The third quatrain pictures a fine house. Who would let such a building fall into ruin, the speaker asks, when careful husbandry could keep it standing honourably through the storms of a winter day and the barren cold of death? The answer comes at the start of the couplet: nobody but spendthrifts. Then the tone softens into direct address, reminding the friend that he had a father and urging him to give a son the chance to say so too.
Shakespeare's own early adulthood is strikingly hard to trace. Between the baptism of his twins in 1585 and a mention of him on the London stage in 1592 he almost vanishes, and scholars call the gap his 'lost years'. Legends fill it: Nicholas Rowe, his first biographer, repeated a Stratford tale that he fled a deer-poaching charge on Thomas Lucy's estate, while John Aubrey said he had worked as a country schoolmaster. Little evidence supports either story.
Source: Sonnet 13: O! That you were your self; but, love you are
