Blessing and unblessing

Amber,

Thanks for the questions--I'm interested in the arrival of the ladies as well.  Up until now, our stakeholders in the subject's beauty have been the subject himself, the world, and the speaker.  Now we get the subject's wife and his mother.  I'm inclined to read 'some' the way you implied--distancing her from the action, making her less present as a character.  We haven't met wife or mother before, and it feels to me like they are being pulled in as secondary considerations.  There's another possibility though: if he chooses not to marry, he will 'unbless some mother.'  This implies that marriage is so much the expected option that to choose otherwise would be to take away something already effectively bestowed, even if the recipient has not yet been determined.  I'm intrigued by the unblessing--blessing is just as irreversible as some other relevant actions:  marriage and conception.

I want to come back to a question Randall asked last week about the nature of beauty.  In this sonnet, there are several lines distinguishing inner self from outer self:  The first line makes a distinction between 'thou' and 'the face thou viewest' just as the last line refers to both 'thine image' and 'thee.'  In Sonnet 2, the idea that beauty is an inner, essential characteristic is mocked:  "To say within thine owne deepe sunken eyes, / Were an all-eating shame and thriftlesse praise."  But this week, I get the feeling that there is some validity to inner beauty, the kind you still have when you grow old.  At least, this sonnet promises, you will have enough left such that you can recognize it in somebody else's youth.  Is beauty part of a platonic idea, something eternal and unchanging, or is it a quality of the moment, a construct of time and circumstance? 

Finally, I'm interested in the two parallel questions in the second stanza:  "For where is she so fair whose uneared womb / Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry? / Or who is he so fond will be the tomb / Of his self-love to stop posterity?"  I think the dominant meaning here is that all women wish to become pregnant, just as all men wish to leave their mark on the world.  But by framing these as questions, it seems like the poem is allowing for other ways of living at the very moment it asserts orthodoxy.  Does this undermine the ostensible rhetorical purpose of convincing the youth to marry?  Amber suggested something similar may be going on with the repeated exhortions to look in the mirror.

Hope you're doing well.  We got pretty well swamped by Tropical Storm Hermine this week.

-Chris