Sonnet 17 is the last marriage sonnet; the speaker makes a final plea to the lad, urging him to produce offspring, this time for the sake of the speaker's own veracity.
First Quatrain: “Who will believe my verse in time to come”
The speaker in Sonnet 17 is addressing the young man again, and he asks the lad to reflect on the future and consider that the speaker’s poems will sound exaggerated in the ears of future generations. The speaker has praised the young man’s attributes, his “high deserts,” and the speaker realizes that such praise will sound incredible, like mere flattery, especially coming as it does in poetry.
Yet the speaker asserts that his sonnet is a mere “tomb”; it does not actually do justice to the young man’s qualities. The poem actually “hides your life.” The poems barely represent “half your parts.” Thus the speaker asks, “Who will believe my verse in time to come . . . ?”
Second Quatrain: “If I could write the beauty of your eyes”
In the second quatrain, the speaker continues musing on the uselessness of filling his poetry with the young man’s “beauty” and “heavenly touches.” He says that if he merely continues to fill his poems with such things, the future generations will cry: “This poet lies; / Such heavenly touches ne’er touch’d earthly faces.”
The speaker and the young man both know how lovely and attractive the lad is, but because the young man’s advantages are rare, it will be unusual if those reading about him in the future will be able to appreciate the facts of his endowment. The speaker is, once again, leading the young man to an inescapable conclusion about his duty in avoiding such a fate.
Third Quatrain: “So should my papers, yellow’d with their age”
The speaker asserts to the young man that if his poetry is thought nothing but a pack of lies, then the young man’s true attributes will be thought of as nothing more than the blathering of an old man, who was long on words and short on truth. The young man’s qualities will come to naught: “your true rights be term’d a poet’s rage / And stretched metre of an antique song.”
The speaker is counting on the young man’s vanity to follow his argument and feel compelled to do whatever the speaker suggests to avoid having his pleasing qualities consigned to the dustbin of history as the ranting of a mad poet.
The Couplet: “But were some child of yours alive that time”
Then the couplet drops the thrust squarely on the issue: “But were some child of yours alive that time, / You should live twice,—in it and in my rime.” If the young man will just do his duty, marry and have a son, the problem will be solved. Future generations will know that the young man was a handsome, pleasing man, and the speaker’s poetry will be vindicated as well.
Other articles on Shakespeare: Who is Shakespeare?
Sonnet Commentaries: Sonnet 1, Sonnet 2, Sonnet 3, Sonnet 4, Sonnet 5, Sonnet 6, Sonnet 7, Sonnet 8, Sonnet 9, Sonnet 10, Sonnet 11, Sonnet 12, Sonnet 13, Sonnet 14, Sonnet 15, Shakespeare Sonnet 16, Sonnet 18, Sonnet 19, Sonnet 116, Sonnet 126, Sonnet 130
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