1. Against my love shall be as I am now,

2. With time's injurious hand crush'd and o'er-worn,

3. When hours have drain'd his blood and fill'd his brow

4. With lines and wrinkles, when his youthful morn

5. Hath travell'd on to Age's steepy night,

6. And all those beauties whereof now he's King

7. Are vanishing, or vanish'd out of sight,

8. Stealing away the treasure of his Spring;

9. For such a time do I now fortify

10. Against confounding Age's cruel knife,

11. That he shall never cut from memory

12. My sweet love's beauty, though my lover's life:

13. His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,

14. And they shall live, and he in them still green.

His Beauty Seen

Dedication: To Elizabeth

In a testament to Elizabeth’s vanity and longevity, Oxford expresses that she too will one day be beaten down by the hand of time. And when that comes he tells her that she will experience what he has cleverly weaving in references to his own promised royalty vanishing. Then telling her that his love will not be diminished by this “cruel knife”, he slyly switches the subject to Henry and proclaims his eternal love and youth reflected in his own words.

1^st Quatrain: (1-4)

Telling of how Henry will one day be like he is now because of similarly having been "against" Elizabeth

2^nd Quatrain: (5-8)

Telling cleverly of his once possible status as king which will be no more and will not even be remembered

3rd Quatrain: (9-12)

Explaining how this very sonnet tells this story so that future generations will know of his "beauty"

couplet (13-14),

Finishing with the thought that at least here in this sonnet Henry will remain ever young

Commentary:

Oxford appealing to Elizabeth’s vanity with the notion that he is trying to provide for the contingency when Elizabeth is worn down and ready for the grave as he is. The message to Elizabeth is that though she make not feel that time is winning an inextricable victory of unwavering attrition upon her, as it is upon him, and loss to it will never the less come. This sonnet is unique in the sense that he is not then offering Henry as a means of victory, Oxford merely expresses that when this happens Henry will live and be recorded in his poetry. This thought is clearly both prescient and certainly true but perhaps a bit too over confident in regards to how the message might be interpreted.

This is a very important dating sonnet when the poet has declared his own age of 40 years. This makes the year most likely 1590. This also makes it about twenty five years since the mid 1570’s (approximately 1573) when Henry was born and the inception of the sonnets themselves. Which we can’t know exactly since his actual birth and substitution into the Wriothesly family is of course a secret still kept.

Also important is the point of the poet’s message being the legacy of Henry.

This sonnet also contains obvious references to another man who is still considered by the poet to be young but who clearly has grown from the child he once was in the early sonnets in this sequence. The reference to his being “king” in line 6 is not an accident of course.

Vendler comments that this sonnet, 62, and 60 share the “image of a youthful man traveling on to age”. She also observes that the speaker is “One who has been crushed by time’s injurious hand”. Not an apt description for the apparent rapidly social climbing man from Stratford whose prosperity was well increased immensely from his very humble beginnings. And who likely would have been the toast of England.

Vendler also seems to understand that this is a sonnet concerned with how beauty can be preserved but the preservation is not against Time as she understands it and it is not a question of how but more that beauty must be preserved as protection and fortification against Time’s effect on the actual subject of the poem, Elizabeth. She prefers to see the explanation of the poem as “a deliberate incoherence of metaphor”. I don't pretend I understand this.