Sonnet 2 Themes
Family
The whole point of this poem is to convince a young man to have kids. The speaker argues that by having a son, the young man will create a family line, and his beauty will live on. But that's not e...
Time
Sonnet 2 bounces back and forth in time, taking us from the present to forty years into the future and back again. This imaginary time travel allows us see the whole range of a man's life, and make...
Appearances
Have you noticed that the speaker of this poem thinks this young man is good looking? Like, really good looking? He manages to cram the word "beauty" in four times in fourteen lines. We think there...
Old Age
Behind all of the talk of beauty, time, and kids in Sonnet 2 is the idea that we all get old and die. When we are young, we don't think much about it, but finally, it gets us all. The move toward t...