Theme:     Young Man
Content:   Encouragement for the subject to have children by alternate uses of life and death motifs and an unequivocal statement of consequence in the couplet if he does not.

Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest
Now is the time that face should form another,

• “Look in the mirror and see for yourself that now is the time to have children.”

• “If you do not have children now that you are showing your age then you will trick the world and unbless a potential mother.”
• This is an re sonnet using many words that echo the desired regeneration and renewal.

• “What fair woman would not want to bear your children?”
• Use of the life-giving womb motif emphasises the author's objective of encouraging the subject to father children.
• The sonnet's theme of potentially childless old age is very effectively counterpointed and echoed in tillage.
• re usage continues: where...uneared

• “And what sort of person is so self-loving that he dies with his own beauty, failing to carry it on?”
• Counterpoint rhyme of womb and tomb.
• Use of tomb introduces the deadly prospect of the subject not fathering children.

• “You are the image of your mother in her prime.”
• The mother's glass mirrorsthe glass of the subject in line 1.
• April alludes to the season and month of budding, spawning life.
• Comparing the subject to his mother instead of his father may indicate that the subject's father was dead at the time of this sonnet's writing. Henry Wriothesley, the 3rd. Earl of Southampton, who was Shakespeare's patron, was a ward of state due to his father's earlier death. Similarly, Robert Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, was the illegitimate son of Lady Sheffield and the Earl of Leicester so technically did not have a legal father.

 

• “You will look back on this time in your life as the golden period.”
• The glass of the subject in line 1 now transforms to just windows in his older age giving a dimmer and less flattering reflection.
• Counterpoint between the subject's future age and wrinkles and this current golden time that he should not squander.
• Golden itself, contains the inevitable transformation into old.

• “But if you do not marry and have children, you will not pass on your beauty.”
• Resolute conclusion to the sonnet emphatically stating the death of the subject, his memory and his image if he dies without fathering children.
• Image itself, contains hidden age.
• re usage concludes: remembered