LXVIII explained

What happens

Themes in this chapter

• Beauty and Transience

  The poem contrasts the fleeting, natural beauty of the past with the artificiality of the present, emphasizing the transient nature of true beauty.

• Truth and Deception

  The beloved's unadorned beauty is presented as truthful, while contemporary fashion is depicted as deceptive 'false Art.'

Characters to notice

• Youth

  The beloved youth is portrayed as a living relic of an earlier, purer age of beauty.

• Time

  Time is referenced through the 'map of days outworn' and the contrast between past and present.

• Nature

  Nature is personified as storing the youth to demonstrate true beauty to false Art.

Key passages

• “Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn, When beauty lived and died as flowers do now”

  His cheek is like a map of a past era, when beauty was natural and fleeting like flowers.

  The poet establishes the youth as a living relic of an earlier, more authentic time.

• “To live a second life on second head; Ere beauty’s dead fleece made another gay”

  To be worn again on another person's head, as when hair from a corpse is used to adorn someone else.

  Criticism of using dead people's hair for wigs, a practice the poet sees as unnatural.

• “And him as for a map doth Nature store, To show false Art what beauty was of yore.”

  Nature preserves him like a map to demonstrate to artificial beauty what true beauty looked like in the past.

  The youth serves as a benchmark of genuine beauty against which modern artifice is measured.