Sonnet 3 by 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)