Sonnet 3

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Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest Now is the time that face should form another, Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest, Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother. For where is she so fair whose uneared womb Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry? Or who is he so fond will be the tomb Of his self-love, to stop posterity? Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee Calls back the lovely April of her prime; So thou through windows of thine age shalt see, Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.      But if thou live rememb’red not to be,      Die single, and thine image dies with thee.
–William Shakespeare

Sonnet 3 by William Shakespeare is one of the 17 procreation sonnets urging the man to whom he is writing to not to waste his beauty by not having children. The intended recipient of this and other sonnets is a subject of scholarly debate, with some believing it to be Henry Wriothesley.

Sonnet 3 is typical of a Shakespearean sonnet in its form: fourteen decasyllabic lines, consisting of three quatrains and a concluding rhyming couplet.

In this sonnet, the poet is exhorting the Young Man to marry and have a child, merely to immortalise his beauty

The parting message can be seen within the last lines of the poems:

But if thou live, remember'd not to be,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

Interpretations

• Timothy Spall, for the 2002 compilation album, When Love Speaks (EMI Classics)

References

• Alden, Raymond. The Sonnets of Shakespeare, with Variorum Reading and Commentary. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1916.
• Baldwin, T. W. On the Literary Genetics of Shakspeare's Sonnets. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950.
• Booth, Stephen. Shakespeare's Sonnets. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
• Dowden, Edward. Shakespeare's Sonnets. London, 1881.
• Hubler, Edwin. The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952.

External links

• A paraphrase of the sonnet
• A brief analysis of the sonnet
• Shakespeare's sonnets.com on Sonnet 3
• CliffsNotes on Sonnet 3