Sonnet 17
Who will believe my verse in time to come,
poetry
legacy
beauty
time
Who will believe my verse in time to come,
If it were fill'd with your most high deserts?
Though yet, heaven knows, it is but as a tomb
Which hides your life and shows not half your parts.
If I could write the beauty of your eyes
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say 'This poet lies:
Such heavenly touches ne'er touch'd earthly faces.'
So should my papers yellow'd with their age
Be scorn'd like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be term'd a poet's rage
And stretched metre of an antique song:
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice; in it and in my rhyme.
What It Means
The last of the Procreation sonnets. Shakespeare worries that future readers will think his praise is exaggerated — just a poet flattering his subject. If the young man had a child, that child would be living proof. Without one, all that remains is the poem, and poems can be dismissed as lies. Shakespeare is deliberately self-deprecating about the power of verse, and closes the procreation argument with an admission: only a child can truly preserve what this young man is.
Context
Final sonnet in the Procreation sequence (1–17). From Sonnet 18 onward, the immortality argument shifts decisively to verse.
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