comparing the Youth to a morning sun, looked up to by lesser beings. But as he grows older he will be increasingly ignored unless he has a son to carry forward his identity into the next generation. The poem draws on classical imagery, common in art of the period, in which Helios or Apollo cross the sky in his chariot - an emblem of passing time. The word "car" was also used classically of the sun's chariot (compare R3. 5.3.20-1, "The weary Sunne, hath made a Golden set, / And by the bright Tract of his fiery Carre"). Textual analysis Not unlike other Shakespearean sonnets, sonnet 7 utilizes simplistic "word play" and "key words" to underline the thematic meaning. These words appear in root form or similar variations. The poetic eye finds interest in the use of 'looks' (line 4), 'looks' (line 7), 'look' (line 12), and 'unlook'd' (line 14). A more thematic word play used is those words denoting 'age', but that are not explicitly identifiable. Doth homage to his new-appearing sight, Resembling strong youth in his middle age, ... Attending on his golden pilgrimage; (7.3-6) By using words typical of expressing human features (e.g. youth), the reader begins to identify the sun as being representative of man. The sun does not assume an actual 'age', therefore we infer that the subject of the poem is man. Critics in dialogue Burden of beauty Although Robin Hackett makes a considerably in-depth argument that Shakespeare's Sonnet 7 may be read in context with Virginia Woolf's The Waves as the story of an imperialistic "sun hero", the potential bending of Shakespeare's work this analysis threatens may be best illustrated by the substantial lack of any other criticism seeking the same claim. Like Woolf, Hackett ventures that Shakespeare creates a poem "in which all characters and events revolve around a larger-than-life hero, whose rise or fall, or rise and fall, determines the plot of the story". As Michael Shoenfeldt points out, however, in "The Sonnets," the contextual placement of Sonnet 7, being among the first 126 that address the young man, gives the sonnet a substantially different reading: "the conventional praise of chaste beauty, and turn[s] it on its head — the young man's beauty burdens him with the responsibility to reproduce, a responsibility he is currently shirking". The heir, referred to as "son" in Sonnet 7, is to "continue his beauty beyond