9
Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye
That thou consum’st thyself in single life?
Ah, if thou issueless shalt hap to die,
The world will wail thee like a makeless wife;
The world will be thy widow, and still weep
That thou no form of thee hast left behind,
When every private widow well may keep,
By children’s eyes, her husband’s shape in mind:
Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend,
Shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it;
But beauty’s waste hath in the world an end,
And kept unused the user so destroys it:
No love toward others in that bosom sits
That on himself such murd’rous shame commits.
General
This sonnet uses the argument of Sonnets 1 & 4 that it is a public duty for the beloved to go forth and multiply legitimately. HV points us to the internal workings of the poem as a fantasy on the letter W – if widow = widdow as in Q. ‘The initial and final w’s of widow are mirror images of each other, and its middle letter is repeated – dd – in self-identity….The poem needs to be read in Q spelling, since in modern spelling some of the symmetries disappear.’ She concentrates on the instances of the symmetrical letters: w; u; and v. It is certainly always a worthwhile exercise to examine the Q text, as later editorial decisions and modernization of spellings can mean we miss out on many of these subtleties.
Sense
First quatrain
The speaker asks the young man if it is because he is afraid that he will bring grief to one woman (i.e. make one a widow), that he wastes himself in a single life. In fact if he should happen to die without issue, the whole world will mourn him like a mateless wife (a widow).
2. consum’st: (a) waste (b) destroy – with overtones of eating, burning (as in a candle) and economic consumption. cf. 1.6: 'feed'st thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel'; also R&J, 1.1.210-11: ' For beauty starv'd with her severuty / Cuts beauty off from all posterity.'
Makeless: mateless; widowed (OED)
3.issueless: childless
hap: happen/chance
GBE thinks that the use of hyperbole in this quatrain implies the youth's noble position and importance to the future of the commonwealth ('world'). As you know I have always resisted the idea of putting a narrative on the sonnets, but there are other instances where there seems to be reference by the speaker to a difference in their social positions e.g. 37 where the speaker says that he takes 'all my comfort of thy worth and truth' (37.4). This is not that same as saying, though, that WS himself is referring to e.g. Southampton or Herbert, as tempting as it may be to make that leap!
Second quatrain
The world will be his widow, and continually/always weep that he left no image/likeness (in the shape of children) behind him; when at the same every ordinary, individual widow may well be able to keep in mind an image of her husband in his children’s eyes.
6. form: image, with the suggestion also of something essential.
7. private: particular, individual / living quietly out of the public eye / deprived, suffering (through a macaronic pun on privare (Latin for to deprive)).
Third quatrain
GBE gives the most useful gloss of this difficult quatrain: Whatever a prodigal wastes (‘doth spend’) here on earth merely, as it were, changes hands (‘Shifts but his [i.e. its] place’), because the world continues to benefit from it (‘still…enjoys’). But a waste of beauty yields no return to others unless put to proper use in procreation. If the young man does not put beauty to use/hoards it like a miser, it will be destroyed.
9.unthrift: wastrel, prodigal
doth spend: wastes
11. cf. the Parable of the Talents Matt – cf. Sonnet 2 - also, Marlowe Hero and Leander, 1, 328: ‘Beauty alone is lost, too warily kept’
12.user: waster, user, invester, spendthrift
so: thus
Couplet
He that commits such ‘murd’rous shame’ – keeping beauty to himself by not procreating – holds no love for anyone else.
14. cf : ‘you shalbe coumpted a parricide, or a murtherer of your stocke: that whereas you may by honest marriage encrease your posterite; you suffer it to decaie for ever, through your willful single lyfe.’ Thomas Wilson, The Art of Rhetoric (1553) ed T J Derrrick 1982, p137
shame: note as link word between this and Sonnet 10.
