The map

Wednesday  :(  Even worse:  My Thursday evening class has a two-hour exam tomorrow night …  But here’s sonnet 68:

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LXVIII

  Thus is his cheek the map of days outworn,

  When beauty lived and died as flowers do now,

  Before these bastard signs of fair were born,

  Or durst inhabit on a living brow;

  Before the golden tresses of the dead,

  The right of sepulchres, were shorn away,

  To live a second life on second head;

  Ere beauty's dead fleece made another gay:

  In him those holy antique hours are seen,

  Without all ornament, itself and true,

  Making no summer of another's green,

  Robbing no old to dress his beauty new;

    And him as for a map doth Nature store,

    To show false Art what beauty was of yore.

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Following a principle I learnt in my speech class last year  J  the first line of the closing couplet connects back to the first line of the poem with the word map.  The volta would be the to at the beginning of the last line, explaining why everything that’s said in the first 13 lines of the poem is happening.  More tomorrow—