Originally Posted by The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Helen Vendler, Sonnet 7, pg. 76
Neither "fore" nor "tract" can be explained by semantic, alliterative, or phonetic needs. At the risk of seeming overingenious, I can only suggest that the golden sun generates, throughout the sonnet, French puns on "or": "orient," "adore", "mortal," and--our point of origin--"fore"; and that the central image of the sun's "car" generates anagrammatically scrambled cars elsewhere; in "gracious," "sacred," and--our point of origin--"tract". The aging of the sun in the poem seems to generate "homAGE," "AGE," "gOLDen pilgrimAGE," and (once again) "age"; and the long and (to the reader) intolerable suppression of the word "sun" of course makes the word "son", when it finally leaps off the page as the closing word, entirely inevitable.