Summary

Continuing his plea to the Muse of poetry, the poet abandons his silence and philosophizes about the nature of truth and beauty. Nature, he says, is the poet’s truth; cosmetic beauty, his falsehood: “Truth needs no color with his color fixed, / Beauty no pencil, beauty’s truth to lay.” He also returns to another of his favorite themes, the young man’s immortality through his verse; he recognizes that his only responsibility in life is “To make him much outlive a gilded tomb / And to be praised of ages yet to be.”