be paraphrased: Pity the world (by perpetuating your beauty in your children) or glutton-like, you eat your beauty, due the world, by allowing it to perish in the grave and by your failure to beget children.
5. 9, 10. A reference to perfumes extracted from flowers. Compare the close of sonnet 54.
7. 9–12. But when from highmost pitch, with weary car, Like feeble age, he reeleth from the day, The eyes, 'fore duteous, now converted are From his low tract, and look another way. Cf. 'All this blanked not Pompey, who told him frankly againe, how men did honour the rising, not the setting of the sunne; meaning thereby, how his owne honor encreased, and Scyllaes diminished.' Life of Pompey in Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans englished by Sir Thomas North (1579).
8. 14. 'Thou single wilt prove none.' 'Perhaps an allusion to the proverbial expression that one is no number.' Dowden. Compare sonnet 136, line 8.
11. 11. Look, whom she best endow'd she gave the more. See, to you whom Nature best endowed she gives an added gift.
13. 1. O that you were yourself. O that you were yourself forever.
14. 12. If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert. If you would turn from living for yourself alone and would beget children.
15. 4. secret influence. Astrology taught that there emanated from the stars a power or force (secret influence) which determined the characters and the fortunes of men and states.
16. 10. Which this Time's pencil, or my pupil pen. Beeching gives the following paraphrase: 'Neither portraiture ("this Time's pencil," cf. line 8) nor description ("my pupil pen," cf. line 4) can represent you as you are, either in character or beauty.'
18. Sonnets 18–25 form a single series, praising the
