Sonnet 68
Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,
authenticity
beauty
nature
fashion
Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,
When beauty lived and died as flowers do now,
Before the bastard signs of fair were born,
Or durst inhabit on a living brow;
Before the golden tresses of the dead,
The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,
To live a second life on second head;
Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay:
In him those holy antique hours are seen,
Without all ornament, itself and true,
Making no summer of another's green,
Robbing no old to dress his beauty new;
And him as for a map doth Nature store,
To show false Art what beauty was of yore.
What It Means
The young man's face is a map of an older, better time — before cosmetics and fashion intervened. He doesn't use wigs made from dead people's hair or paint on false colors. He is nature's real product, the template against which all imitation is measured. In a world of false beauty, he is the genuine article. His face testifies to what beauty was before the world started manufacturing it.
Context
Part of the Fair Youth sequence, extending the critique of artificial beauty from Sonnet 67.
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