[1] Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface
[2] In thee thy summer ere thou be distilled.
[3] Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
[4] With beauty’s treasure ere it be self-killed.
[5] That use is not forbidden usury
[6] Which happies those that pay the willing loan;
[7] That’s for thyself to breed another thee,
[8] Or ten times happier, be it ten for one.
[9] Ten times thyself were happier than thou art
[10] If ten of thine ten times refigured thee;
[11] Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart,
[12] Leaving thee living in posterity?
[13] Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair
[14] To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.
This sonnet picks up immediately upon the imagery of the preceding sonnet: summer must be “distilled” to last into the winter. It also picks up on the general theme of this series of sonnets, in calling upon the object of the poem to have a child. The distinction in this sonnet is in its monetary/investment imagery. The child is seen as an investment and an inheritance.

First Stanza
[1] Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface
[2] In thee thy summer ere thou be distilled.
[3] Make sweet some vial; treasure thou some place
[4] With beauty’s treasure ere it be self-killed.

You will die. Winter will kill, or you will kill yourself (in killing your own beauty)

Winter is an actor who will deface your summer (your beauty, your youth). The language of “deface” puts an emphasis upon appearance rather than existence. Winter is vengeance that will come and will deface you. The fact of winter’s work is not question. Winter’s existence gives intensity and necessity to the task at hand:

When winter has come, it will be too late. Therefore, you must now distill you beauty, make a vial of this perfume of beauty (have a child)

Ere: before, archaic.

The poet uses treasure as a noun and a verb: first, “treasure thou some place”: make a place where treasure is kept. In your treasure, place your treasure.

In speaking of coming age taking away your treasure, you do not treasure your Shakespeare uses an idea which he will develop elsewhere; such as in Sonnet 75, “Doubting the filching age will steal his treasure”

Second Stanza
[5] That use is not forbidden usury
[6] Which happies those that pay the willing loan;
[7] That’s for thyself to breed another thee,
[8] Or ten times happier, be it ten for one.

Usury is charging interest on a loan. The legal conception is with us in the principle limiting the amount of interest one charge for a loan. The line contains a fine pun on “use” and “usury” must like treasure and treasure in the preceding stanza.

It is not an illegal act when you make a loan which causes happiness (“Happies”) in the one who pay the loan.

It is not wrong to lend yourself to the future when you willing to do so. In fact, the return you make on making this loan will exceed any cost. In fact, you will receive a ten-to-one return on bearing a child.

Third Stanza
[9] Ten times thyself were happier than thou art
[10] If ten of thine ten times refigured thee;
[11] Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart,
[12] Leaving thee living in posterity?

A desire for happiness routinely controls our decisions: it keeps us from acting and causes us to act. We value our own happiness.

So in this stanza the controlling concept is no longer interest on a loan, it is return on our action: this will pay us back in happiness.

Now we are back to the image of “winter” here called “death”.

Death obviously cannot cause you injury if you have left and are beyond death’s action “if thou shouldst depart”. The idea here is that once you have departed you are in fact dead.

The conception comes from Romans 7 where Paul explains that that the law (and death is the sergeant who enforces the law of God):

Romans 7:1–3 (ESV)
7 Or do you not know, brothers—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? 2 For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage. 3 Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress.

Death can only enforce its demands on you so far. But there is a way to surpass death.

Shakespeare takes this idea and applies it to children: if you have a child, you have (in a manner) bypassed death.
Couplet
[13] Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair
[14] To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.

The trouble which will destroy the object is his own pride: Be not self-willed.

Why should you not be so? You are too fair.

You must face this truth: you will die. Do not be conquered by death.

The poem end with a certain irony: if you do not have heir by birth, you will have an heir death. But this heir will not save you from death but will rather make you a prey to death. And thus, you will have an heir and you have face death.

This image of worms is used to good effect in Hamlet, where Hamlet speaks with the King about the King’s counselor – whom Hamlet has just killed:

Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?
At supper king
At supper where?
Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A
certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at
him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We
fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves
for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is
but variable service—two dishes but to one table.
That’s the end.
A man may fish with the worm that hath eat
of a king and eat of the fish that hath fed of that
worm.

The imagery of worms puts a certain bite upon the concept of death. The idea of “death”. One’s own death is an abstraction: but to make it concrete, the idea of one’s body being eaten makes death a more “real” thing.