The poet's manuscripts ("my papers"), once they are discolored ("yellowed") with age, will be the subject of ridicule ("scorn'd"), just as "old men of less truth then tongue" are derided. What the youth is truly owed ("your true rights") could be dismissed in the future as "a poet's rage," or rejected as the "stretched metre of an antique song"; "stretched" firstly intends 'exaggerated,' but was used technically of earlier poetic styles. "Antique song" is both ancient and distorted ('antic') song. The sonnet ends with a typical notion that should the young man have a child, he shall live both in the child and in the poet's rhyme.