Shakespeare’s speaker is full of doubt. He looks ahead to a future where no one will believe his praise, because his words can never fully capture the beloved’s true worth. Even if he could perfectly list every grace, he imagines readers sneering that such heavenly beauty could never exist on earth. His poems, grown yellow and old, would be dismissed as the ramblings of a boastful old man. The mood grows anxious and self-critical—he feels his art is a tomb that hides half the beloved’s life. Then, in the final couplet, the speaker shifts to a sweeter persuasion. He suggests that if the beloved had a child alive at that future time, all doubt would vanish: the child would be living proof, and the poem would still survive. In that way, the beloved would live twice—once in flesh and blood, once in rhyme. The poem carries a tender urgency, mixing fear of failure with a quiet hope that love can outlast disbelief.
Sonnet 17: Who will believe my verse in time to come — Summary
Who will believe my verse in time to come, If it were fill'd with your most high deserts? Though yet heaven knows it is but as a tomb Which hides your life, and shows not half your parts. If I could write the beauty of your eyes, And in fresh numbers number all your graces, The age to come would say 'This poet lies; Such heavenly touches ne'er touch'd earthly faces.' So should my papers, yellow'd with their age, Be scorn'd, like old men of less truth than tongue, And your true rights be term'd a poet's rage And stretched metre of an antique song: But were some child of yours alive that time, You should live twice,--in it, and in my rhyme.