Sonnet 14
Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck;
astrology
beauty
truth
mortality
Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck;
And yet methinks I have astronomy,
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons' quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain and wind,
Or say with princes if it shall go well,
By oft predict that I in heaven find:
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,
And, constant stars, in them I read such art
As truth and beauty shall together thrive,
If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert;
Or else of thee this I prognosticate:
Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date.
What It Means
Shakespeare claims he doesn't read fortunes from astrology — he can't predict plagues or weather from the stars. But he does have one prophecy, drawn from looking into the young man's eyes: if you die without children, both truth and beauty will perish with you. The stars in this sonnet are the young man's eyes — the only source of prophecy worth trusting.
Context
Fourteenth in the Procreation sequence. The astrology frame is an interesting device — Shakespeare distances himself from superstition while still making a deterministic argument.
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