Sonnet 4

4

Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend

Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?

Nature’s bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,

And being frank, she lends to those are free:

Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse

The bounteous largesse given thee to give?

Profitless usurer, why dost thou use

So great a sum of sums, yet canst not live?

For having traffic with thyself alone,

Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive;

Then how, when nature calls thee to be gone

What acceptable audit canst thou leave?

Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,

Which used, lives th’executor to be.

General
There may be a debt (Sonnets 4-13) to Marlowe’s Hero and Leander – but, such is the uncertainty over dates, that the debt could be the other way around– Marlowe died in May 1593 and the dates of the sonnets are of course uncertain (see Blog Post: Introduction). Two passages are particularly relevant:

What difference betwixt the richest mine
And basest mould but use? For both, not us'd,
Are of like worth. Then treasure is abus'd
When misers keep it; being put to loan,
In time it will return us two for one.
Rich robes themselves and others do adorn;
Neither themselves nor others, if not worn.
Who builds a palace, and rams up the gate,
Shall see it ruinous and desolate. (ll. 232-240)

The richest corn dies, if it be not reap'd;
Beauty alone is lost, too warily kept.' (ll.328-29)

The sonnet extends the metaphor of beauty and sex as money, adding to it the idea of wills and inheritance. The young man is wasting this inheritance on himself and will have nothing to leave to future generations (KDJ). It plays on the proverbial idea of ‘paying one’s debt to nature’ (SB) and also refers back to the parable of the talents as in Sonnet 2.

Sense

First quatrain
The speaker asks the young man why he wastes on himself the beauty that he could leave to his children and /or has been left to him by Nature. Nature does not give, but only lends and being generous, she lends to those that are also generous – ie will pass on the beauty through other generations.
1. thriftless: (a)unprofitable (b) improvident/prodigal
spend: can be sexual - the main image of failure to turn to women, but there is a subsidiary allusion to masturbation.
2. beauty’s legacy: both the beauty that has been bequeathed to him by nature, and that he could leave to his children
3. KDJ picks up on a semblance in this thought to Wyatt: My lute awake (pub. 1557)

And then may chance thee to repent
The time that thou hast lost and spent
To cause thy lovers sigh and swoon;
Then shalt thou know beauty but lent,
And wish and want as I have done.

Here he contemplates just as WS does, the way that beauty is lent for a short time and is tied up inextricably with mortality.
Also relevant again is Matthew parable of the talents as per sonnet 2.
4. frank: generous
free: open-handed, with connotations of noble; but can also mean licentious

Second quatrain
The speaker then asks the young man, who he calls a beautiful miser, why he misuses the abundant beauty that was given to him so that he might give it to others. A moneylender who makes no profit, the friend uses up nature’s loan rather than using it to generate interest (or children) (CB).
5. niggard: miser
6. bounteous largesse: Since largesse means ‘a liberal gift freely bestowed’, the phrase, which rhetorically balances ‘beauteous niggard’ is tautological and seems to contradict the kind of giving ascribed to Nature in line 3. (GBE)
7. profitless usurer: the youth lends money but does not make any interest – i.e produces no children
8. sum of sums: grand total, deriving from Latin: summa summarum – pointing back to the debt to nature of 2.11 (CB). WS also uses this idea in MV 3.2.157-8 where Portia says: 'but the full sum of me / Is sum of something.'
canst not live: i.e in perpetuity.

Third quatrain
The speaker tells the young man that in being sexually obsessed with himself alone he tricks himself out of the survival of his essence – his own ‘sweet self’. Then, in a fourth question, the speaker asks when he dies what he will leave – an empty balance in his ‘audit’.
9. traffic: (a) trade/bargaining (b) sexual commerce/intercourse – revives idea of masturbation from line 1.
12. audit: an impt image in the Sonnets and developed towards 126: ‘final account/reckoning’ (JK)

Couplet
The speaker says that the young man’s wasted – ‘not put to profitable use’- beauty must die with him. If it were to be used profitably, then his heir will be the agent (executor) to administer his estate (beauty).

Structure
The sonnet is constructed as a series of questions, forcing the young man to face up to his responsibility to reproduce. Within these questions, repetition is also important e.g. 'beauty', 'nature', 'use', together with 'lend' and 'give'.

HV sees the sonnet as a type of homily - behind the vocatives and questionings ‘lies the religious genre of the reproach of the cleric to the sinner.’ But this is tempered by the use of the oxymorons –so, ‘in this poem, homily has been secularized. Not God…but rather organic Nature here provides the motive for reproduction.’ Further the speaker’s bias is revealed in e.g. ‘thy sweet self’ in a way a priest would never say.

Links with other works by WS
8 MV 3.2.157-8

Links with works by other authors
Gen: Marlowe Hero and Leander 1, 234-68;  317-28
3. Matthew 25: 14-30
Wyatt My lute awake