Sonnet 17 fears future readers will dismiss its praise as a liar's exaggeration
What if your most honest compliment sounded like flattery to everyone who read it later? Sonnet 17 worries exactly that. Shakespeare imagines his yellowed pages mocked by future readers who cannot believe anyone was ever so beautiful, and concludes that only a living child could prove his poem true.
The opening question is about credibility rather than love. If the speaker filled his verse with everything the young man deserves, who in years to come would accept it? He then admits the poem is actually too weak, comparing it to a tomb that hides its subject and reveals less than half his qualities. Verse here is not a monument but a burial vault.
The middle of the sonnet stages an imagined scene of ridicule. Suppose he could capture those eyes and tally every grace in fresh metre; the next age would simply say "This poet lies", insisting that no earthly face was ever touched by such heavenly strokes. It is an unusually modern anxiety about how praise loses its value once it cannot be checked.
Shakespeare pushes the picture further. His manuscripts, gone yellow with age, would be scorned like talkative old men who say more than is true. The young man's real merits would be written off as a poet's frenzy, the overstretched metre of some antique song. The irony is sharp coming from a writer whose friend Ben Jonson, in the preface to the 1623 First Folio, would praise him as belonging not to one age but to all time.
The couplet offers an escape: if a child of the young man were alive when those doubters arrived, the beauty would exist twice, once in flesh and once in rhyme. The child becomes living proof that the verse is accurate, a witness no sceptic could argue with. Jonson's tribute appeared in a book assembled by fellow actors John Heminges and Henry Condell, which gathered 36 plays; the poet who feared being called a liar ended up hailed as timeless.
Source: Sonnet 17: Who will believe my verse in time to come
