Here is Shakespeare's Sonnet 2:
When forty winters shall beseige 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 ask'd 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 deserved thy beauty's use,
If thou couldst answer 'This fair child of mine
Shall 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.
As with Petrarchian sonnets, this one is divided into an octet
and sestet, with a volta or change in perspective after the last
line of the octet, the eighth line of the poem. The octet sets up a
picture of an elderly person who has lost all of his (although it
might just as well be her) beauty, and the sestet moves on to
suggest that the old are renewed in their children, and their faded
beauty is reborn in them.