Theme:     Young Man
Content:   Encouragement for the subject to have children at the expense of the author putting down his own verse.

• "Why don't you make war against time by having children, which is a better way of memorialising yourself than my verse?"
• This is predominantly an m quatrain emphasising time as the enemy.
• might in mightier is the phonetic reversal of time.
• Modesty of the poet revealed in barren rhyme.
• Mightier way immediately morphs into Make war.
• The word war seems to be pivotal to this sonnet, echoed here to start with in wherefore and also in way.

• "You are now at your peak with many virgins wishing to have your children that would resemble you better than your portrait."
• The flower analogy is re-introduced with the virgin women being portrayed as virgin soil yet to have flowers planted in them and the children being the flowers that will grow there.
• The verse, classified as barren in quatrain 1, is contrasted with the virgins who are able to bear the subject's children.
• Paintings are also classified as an inadequate reproduction of the subject's image compared to the real article: children.
• War appears again, this time within flowers.

• "The drawings and writings of today can not make you literally live in the eyes of men."
• lines of life alludes to lines on the subject's ageing face, the family lineage of the subject that will be continued if he has children, and the poet's own lines of poetry.
• This is predominantly a p quatrain (set up by painted in the previous quatrain).
• Reference to the writer's modesty again in pupil pen which also repeats that the verse is inadequate compared to the subject having children.
• Possible pun on "penis" in pencil and pen, particularly with the p alliteration.
• War appears again within inward, outward, worth, and perhaps nor.

• "To father children is to capture you as you are today, but you must live your own life."
• The couplet closes the drawing/painting analogy with drawn.
• Drawn also contains the pivotal word war in reverse, suggesting that the subject has to do the opposite of drawing, i.e. produce the real thing in children, to replicate his own image. In fact, drawn contains not only the reverse of war but also the reverse of inward.