What does 'then of thy beauty do question i make' meean?

Answer 1

Sonnet 12 reads like this:

When I do count the clock that tells the time,

And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;

When I behold the violet past prime,

And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white;

When lofty trees I see barren of leaves

Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,

And summer's green all girded up in sheaves

Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,

Then of thy beauty do I question make,

That thou among the wastes of time must go,

Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake

And die as fast as they see others grow;

And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence

Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

This is one of the many Shakespeare sonnets that goes "When . . ." (blah, blah blah for eight lines) ". . . then . . ." (blah, blah, blah for six more). This line introduces the "then" section. The whole section has the theme that beautiful things grow old and die.

Shakespeare often played with word order to make it come out in iambic pentameter. We are used to "subject-verb-object-prepositional phrase" order but here it is all scrambled. We start with a prepositional phrase "of thy beauty", followed by "do", which is part of the verb, "question", which is the object, "I", the subject, and "make", the rest of the verb. This is like rephrasing "I am taking my daughter to the church" as "To the church am my daughter I taking"! The standard word order (with less iambic rhythm) would be "Then I do make question of thy beauty" or "Then I wonder about your beauty".