1. Oh how much more doth beauty beauteous seem

2. By that sweet ornament which truth doth give,

3. The Rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem

4. For that sweet odour which doth in it live:

5. The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye,

6. As the perfumed tincture of the Roses,

7. Hang on such thorns and play as wantonly,

8. When summer's breath their masked buds discloses:

9. But, for their virtue only is their show,

10. They live unwoo'd, and unrespected fade,

11. Die to themselves. Sweet Roses do not so,

12. Of their sweet deaths, are sweetest odours made:

13. And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,

14. When that shall vade, my verse distills your truth.

Your Truth

Dedication: To Henry

Another verse meant to reveal Henry’s true identity and give him the immortality a prince like Henry would deserve.

1^st Quatrain: (1-4)

Reflecting on Henry and commenting and playing on the beauty of Henry's already much referred to and embodied "beauty" being all the more so for Henry also embodies truth which of course our poet so cherishes and which also undoubtedly reflects on him. Also of course continuing to play on Henry as a flower. Line 2 is also meant to be a clue the relationship between Henry and Oxford (Oxford being the “truth”).

2^nd Quatrain: (5-8)

Telling Elizabeth and future readers that even the sick blooms of roses that have been cankered still contain the same deep color and pigment. Further commenting on how blossoms awakened in the summer reveal something masked in comparison to Henry.

3rd Quatrain: (9-12)

Contrasting blooms without the odor to those that are sweet and make perfume via their distillation.

couplet (13-14),

Finishing with the metaphorical comparison that such is Henry the sweet and truthful perfume revealed in this sonnet when he is gone.

Commentary:

The second in a row to Henry a first. This sonnet is another memorial to Henry with very transparent references to aspects of his looks belying his true nature. This is an interpretation almost completely lost on orthodoxy. For while they understand that the youth’s beauty will fade from memory and the sonnet is left to remind us of it, it is not his beauty that is his truth, his beauty is a representation and a manifestation of his real truth. That he is an unrecognized prince of the house of Tudor.

Another very important sonnet for the point of providing for Henry’s legacy through the medium of Oxford’s poetry, this pronouncement of the importance of Oxford’s verse for providing for this truth becomes an ever more important thought to the poet because it has become ever more real that this will be the only way Henry is revealed to history. Thus again evidence of the chronology of the sonnets as being in reverse order.

Tying truth and beauty together in lines 1 and 2 is and early practice which will reveal itself more completely in sonnet 14

In addition there is also a mention of distilling Henry’s truth which will come into play with the reference to Henry as an actual distillation in a vile in sonnets 5 and 6.

Vendler comments on beauty being a “major component” in the sonnets and mentions that it has been thematized with truth. She does understand the distillation of perfume as a metaphor for reproduction. In her analysis, Vendler fails to understand that beauty does not refer to physical beauty in the general sense. But she comments that, “Shakespeare never even hints that the beauty of the beloved might not be universally acknowledged”. She goes on to say “on the contrary, there is no allowance for an alternate ideal of beauty…”.

She identifies “that the major theme of the sonnets … is the deception purveyed by appearance”. But her understanding of this is tied to an “Elizabethan consciousness”, instead of the specific nature of what the sonnets actually refer. She evidently believes the purpose of the poem is to split “the youth’s qualities into two separable aspects”. What she apparently does not realize is that the poem is meant to reveal that the youth does not posses the show aspect as the poet would like and instead has the substance, which being hidden requires that the poem reveal it.