Sonnet 2 Poetry.

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,
And dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Thy youth's proud livery, so gazed on now,
Will be a tatter'd weed, of small worth held:
Then being ask'd where all thy beauty lies,
Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,
To say, within thine own deep-sunken eyes,
Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.
How much more praise deserved thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer 'This fair child of mine
Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,
Proving his beauty by succession thine!
This were to be new made when thou art old,
And see thy blood warm when thou feel'st it cold.

Sonnet 2
Is also a working of the standard ‘siege’ conceit found in many sonnets. Forty winters will “digge deep trenches;” trenches were dug during sieges. Trenches are formed also when a field is ploughed, and metaphorically are wrinkles etched in a brow. The image was traditional from classical times, from Virgil (‘he ploughs the brow with furrows’) and Ovid (‘furrows which may plough your body will come already’) to Shakespeare’s contemporary, Drayton, “The time-plow’d furrowes in thy fairest field.” The primary meaning of “field” is a battlefield where a siege might occur, but it retains its agricultural or husbandry sense, taken up later in “weed,” and is also an heraldic term for the surface of an escutcheon or shield, on which a “charge” is imposed. The colours of a servant’s “liuery” were those of an armorial shield’s field and principal charge, so the royal liuery is scarlet trimmed with gold.[2]