Sonnet LIX

If there be nothing new, but that which is
Hath been before, how are our brains beguiled,
Which, labouring for invention, bear amiss
The second burden of a former child!
O, that record could with a backward look,
Even of five hundred courses of the sun,
Show me your image in some antique book,
Since mind at first in character was done!
That I might see what the old world could say
To this composed wonder of your frame;
Whether we are mended, or whether better they,
Or whether revolution be the same.
O, sure I am, the wits of former days
To subjects worse have given admiring praise.
The poet toys with the old idea that ‘there is nothing new under the sun’ and speculates on what it might mean for his beloved and for the reports of his beauty.He does not take the idea too seriously, and he imagines that the historical record would not have done justice to his fair love’s beauty. He thinks it unlikely that anyone with a comparable ‘composed wonder of frame’ has existed in the past. The praise that was heaped on beauteous persons was probably exaggerated, and the admiration they engendered was excessive, for they were worse in stature and beauty than the beloved youth.