Looking at his beloved’s cheek, the speaker sees a map of olden days—a time when beauty was as natural and fleeting as a flower's life. He laments that the present age has corrupted this purity with “bastard signs” of fairness: cosmetics and, especially, wigs made from the hair of the dead. It’s grotesque, golden tresses shorn from corpses to live a counterfeit second life on someone else’s head. In contrast, this young man needs no such theft. His beauty is unadorned, self-contained, never stealing summer’s green from another’s leaf or robbing the old to decorate the new. Nature holds him up as a precious record, a living proof to show false Art what real beauty once looked like. The mood shifts between a wistful reverence for the beloved’s honesty and a sharp disgust at artificial fashion. There’s a quiet sadness that such authenticity has faded, but the final couplet strikes a defiant note—this face is a silent archive of a truer beauty.
Sonnet 68: Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn — Summary
Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn, When beauty lived and died as flowers do now, Before these 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.