Thy glass will show thee how thy beauties wear,
Thy dial how thy precious minutes waste;
These vacant leaves thy mind’s imprint will bear,
And of this book, this learning mayst thou taste.
The wrinkles which thy glass will truly show
Of mouthed graves will give thee memory;
Thou by thy dial’s shady stealth mayst know
Time’s thievish progress to eternity.
Look! what thy memory cannot contain,
Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find
Those children nursed, deliver’d from thy brain,
To take a new acquaintance of thy mind.
These offices, so oft as thou wilt look,
Shall profit thee and much enrich thy book.
What it's about
A gentle but urgent plea to the young man to recognize time's damage and fight forgetting through writing. The sonnet frames three objects—mirror, clock, notebook—as a trio of honesty, measure, and redemption. It's less about love than about mortality, but tenderly: the speaker wants to help him hold onto himself.
In plain English
The speaker gives the young man three gifts: a mirror to show how his beauty fades, a sundial to track time's passage, and a blank notebook. Together they form a warning system—the mirror reveals wrinkles like graves, the dial shows time stealing forward, and the pages offer a place to store his thoughts before they slip away.
He's urging the young man to write things down. Memory fails; paper doesn't. When the young man reviews these notes later, he'll rediscover his own ideas as if meeting them fresh, and they'll deepen his understanding. The gifts become tools for self-knowledge and preservation.
