Sonnet 2

William Shakespeare

Teacher card

Form: sonnet
Published: 1609, in Shakespeare's Sonnets
Length: 14 lines, 115 words, 1 word in 38 is long
Year band: Reading load: Years 3–4. A guide from word length, not a curriculum level.
Themes: birthday, retirement
Time: 5–10 min, depending on the activity

The text

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow,And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,Thy youth’s proud livery so gazed on now,Will be a tatter’d weed of small worth held:Then being asked, where all thy beauty lies,Where all the treasure of thy lusty days;To say, within thine own deep sunken eyes,Were an all-eating shame, and thriftless praise.How much more praise deserv’d thy beauty’s use,If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mineShall sum my count, and make my old excuse,’Proving his beauty by succession thine!This were to be new made when thou art old,And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

William Shakespeare (died 1616), Shakespeare's Sonnets (1609), lines 54–67 of Project Gutenberg ebook #1041. Public domain in Australia: the author died before 1955. Copied word for word and checked against the ebook.

What to do with it

One link and one task line for each activity. Send a student the one you want them to do, or print this page and hand it round; each link has a QR code.

Its lines are dealt for names in posy cardsin posy · 14 lines · about 5–10 min
Task for students (you can change the sentence before you print; nothing is saved)See how posy takes lines from this poem, then make a card for someone using them.
See how posy takes lines from this poem, then make a card for someone using them.
posy.popplepoetry.com/sources#sh-2

Send the whole hand-out

This page’s link. Students open it, read the text and pick what to do; nothing asks them to sign in.

Link for the whole text

https://popplepoetry.com/find/shakespeare-sonnet-2 · popplepoetry.com