What is Shakespeare's seventh sonnet about?

Answer 1

It is overtly a warning that even the mightiest and most glorious of spectacles (like that of the sun, during the course of a day) comes to an end. The poem forms part of a sequence of sonnets in which the poet is trying to persuade his addressee to take steps to reproduce his beauty (which will fade) by begetting a son.

The concluding couplet reads as follows: So thou thy self out-going in thy noon: Unlooked on diest unless thou get a son. It summarizes the overt themes of the Sonnet by conveying a message along the following lines: "You are about to decline from your peak and will die without attention unless you have begotten a son".

However, as with many of Shakespeare's sonnets, there are amusing and skilfully delivered overtones. "Son" and "Sun" represent a rather obvious pun. More subtly, there are also hints as to the wastefulness of masturbation (which theme continues the poet's teasing along similar lines in some of the preceding sonnets). "Noon" represented an Elizabethan euphemism for "climax" (being the time of day when the sun is at its climax). "Die" was a euphemism for experiencing orgasm. With these secondary meanings the couplet is saying something like "So you, ejaculating at your climax, will be experiencing orgasm alone unless you are doing so in such a way that conception of a son results".