Shakespeare's Sonnet 14 swaps the night sky for a friend's eyes
Astrologers in Shakespeare's day claimed to forecast plagues, famines, storms and the fortunes of princes. Sonnet 14 waves all that away. The poet says he does practise a kind of astronomy, but his only stars are the young man's eyes, and what they foretell is stark: have a child, or truth and beauty die with you.
The first eight lines are a list of what the speaker will not do. He does not pluck his judgements from the heavens. He cannot announce good or bad luck, predict epidemics, shortages or the character of the coming season, or divide the future into little slices and assign each one its thunder, rain and wind. Nor can he reassure rulers by reading frequent signs in the sky. The catalogue gently mocks the fashionable trade in forecasts while establishing that the speaker has insight of another kind.
At the ninth line the source of that insight is revealed. The speaker takes his knowledge from the friend's eyes, which he calls constant stars, and in them he reads a clear lesson. Truth and beauty, he learns, will flourish together if the young man turns his attention to 'store', meaning offspring to carry his qualities on.
The couplet adopts the astrologer's own solemn verb. If the friend refuses, the speaker will prognosticate that his death marks the doom and final date of both truth and beauty. The joke has a serious edge: having rejected star-gazing, the poet ends by making exactly the kind of grand prophecy he claimed to avoid, only now the fate of ideals rides on one person's choice.
Shakespeare's own reputation got a lasting forecast of its own. In 1623, after his death, fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell published the First Folio, a collected edition holding 36 of his plays. Its preface carried a poem by his rival Ben Jonson declaring that Shakespeare belonged to all time rather than to one age. By then he had spent a career with the company known first as the Lord Chamberlain's Men and later as the King's Men, before retiring to Stratford around 1613.
Source: Sonnet 14: Not from the stars do I my judgement pluck
