Sonnet 14
Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck;
astrology
beauty
truth
mortality
Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck;
And yet methinks I have astronomy,
But not to tell of good or evil luck,
Of plagues, of dearths, or seasons' quality;
Nor can I fortune to brief minutes tell,
Pointing to each his thunder, rain and wind,
Or say with princes if it shall go well,
By oft predict that I in heaven find:
But from thine eyes my knowledge I derive,
And, constant stars, in them I read such art
As truth and beauty shall together thrive,
If from thyself to store thou wouldst convert;
Or else of thee this I prognosticate:
Thy end is truth's and beauty's doom and date.
What It Means
Shakespeare claims he doesn't read fortunes from astrology, he can't predict plagues or weather from the stars. But he does have one prophecy, drawn from looking into the young man's eyes: if you die without children, both truth and beauty will perish with you. The stars in this sonnet are the young man's eyes, the only source of prophecy worth trusting.
Context
Fourteenth in the Procreation sequence. The astrology frame is an interesting device, Shakespeare distances himself from superstition while still making a deterministic argument.
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