Sonnet 2 warns a young beauty that forty winters are laying siege
Shakespeare pictures age as an invading army digging trenches across a handsome face. When the beauty is gone and someone asks where it went, pointing to your own sunken eyes will be shameful. The fix Sonnet 2 proposes is blunt: have a child, and your looks will be renewed in someone else.
The opening quatrain is a small war poem. Forty winters besiege the young man's brow and dig deep trenches in the field of his beauty, turning wrinkles into siege works. The fine clothing of youth, admired by everyone now, will become a tattered weed, an old word for garment, worth almost nothing. Forty years is presented as the point at which the campaign is lost.
Next comes an imagined interrogation. Someone asks where all that beauty and all the treasure of his lusty days have gone. To answer that it lies within his own deep sunken eyes would be an all-eating shame and a spendthrift kind of praise, since it admits the treasure was hoarded and then lost. The vocabulary is financial as much as moral: thriftless, use, count.
The solution is to invest. How much better, the speaker argues, if the man could point to "This fair child of mine" as the sum that settles his account and excuses him in old age, proving that the child's beauty is inherited from him. The couplet promises a kind of rejuvenation by proxy: to be made new when old, and to see his blood warm while he feels it cold. Among the 154 sonnets Shakespeare left, few make their case in such plainly practical terms.
The poet himself had married young. At 18 he wed Anne Hathaway, then 26, under a licence issued by the Diocese of Worcester on 27 November 1582; the banns were read once instead of the usual three times, a hint of haste. Their daughter Susanna was baptised six months after the wedding, on 26 May 1583, and the twins Hamnet and Judith followed in early 1585.
Source: Sonnet 2: When forty winters shall besiege thy brow
