The procreation sonnets are the first seventeen of Shakespeare’s sonnets, a group of poems in which the speaker urges a beautiful young man to marry and have a child, so that his beauty will not die with him.
They open the 1609 sequence and set up the relationship at the center of the Fair Youth sonnets. Each makes the same basic case, but each makes it differently, through money, farming, mirrors, perfume, music, and time. And over the course of the group, the speaker’s tone changes, from polite persuasion to something closer to love, until by Sonnets 15 to 17 he begins to offer a second way to keep the young man alive: his own poetry.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about the procreation sonnets for quick reference.
All 17 Procreation Sonnets
Each sonnet in the group, with its first line and the angle it takes on the argument.
The Argument
All seventeen poems rest on a single idea: beauty is not the young man’s to keep.
The first line states it as a general truth: “From fairest creatures we desire increase.” The world wants beautiful things to reproduce, so that beauty itself survives. The young man, by refusing to marry, is keeping to himself something that belongs to everyone, and the speaker calls this a waste and a kind of selfishness. In Sonnet 1, he is “Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel,” and he makes “a famine where abundance lies.”
The argument never changes, but it is made again and again from new angles, and that repetition is the point. Each poem is a fresh attempt to persuade someone who has not yet been persuaded. Read together, the group sounds like an extended courtship, though the speaker is not courting the young man for himself, at least at first.
The Images
What makes the procreation sonnets worth reading as a group is the variety of images Shakespeare finds for the same idea.
Money and Interest
Beauty is treated as wealth that should be invested, not hoarded or spent. In Sonnet 4, the young man is a “beauteous niggard” and a “profitless usurer” who spends his inheritance on himself. In Sonnet 6, lending at interest, normally frowned upon, is justified when the loan is beauty and the return is children.
Farming
Several poems borrow the language of agriculture. Sonnet 3 asks where there is a woman “so fair whose uneared womb / Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry,” with “uneared” meaning unplowed. Sonnet 2 imagines age digging “deep trenches in thy beauty’s field.”
Mirrors and Copies
Sonnet 3 opens with a mirror: “Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest / Now is the time that face should form another.” A child is presented as a living copy, an image of the parent that outlasts the original. The young man is his mother’s “glass,” and a son would be his.
Distillation
In Sonnet 5, summer’s flowers wither, but their essence survives as perfume, “a liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass.” A child, the poem implies, is the young man’s beauty distilled, the part of him that lasts after the rest has gone.
Time and the Seasons
Behind every image is Time, the enemy of the whole sequence. Winter besieges the brow, the sun sets, the clock ticks, and Time comes with his scythe. In Sonnet 12, only children can stand against him: “Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.”
From Children to Poetry
The most important development in the group happens in its last three poems, where the speaker begins to offer an alternative to children.
In Sonnet 15, after watching everything that grows decline, the speaker declares himself “all in war with Time” and promises that his verse will renew the young man as Time wears him down. It is the first time poetry, rather than a child, is offered as the answer.
Sonnet 16 steps back, calling procreation a “mightier way” than the speaker’s “barren rhyme.” Sonnet 17 combines the two: future readers will doubt the poems’ praise, but with a child as proof, the young man would “live twice, in it and in my rhyme.”
Then comes Sonnet 18, and the argument for children disappears. “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”: poetry alone will do the work. The procreation sonnets end there, and the love sonnets begin.
Who Was the Young Man?
The procreation sonnets have prompted more guesses about the young man’s identity than any other part of the sequence, because they read like poems written for a real person under real pressure to marry.
The two leading candidates are Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, to whom Shakespeare dedicated Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, one of the two dedicatees of the First Folio. Both were young noblemen who resisted marriages their families arranged for them. Pembroke’s initials also match the “Mr. W.H.” named in the 1609 edition’s dedication. Some readers suggest the early sonnets were commissioned by a family eager to see its heir married.
None of this can be proved, and some scholars think the young man is partly or wholly a literary creation. Our guide to the Fair Youth sonnets looks at the theories in detail.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the procreation sonnets, answered briefly.
What Are the Procreation Sonnets?
The first seventeen of Shakespeare’s sonnets, in which the speaker urges a young man to marry and have children so that his beauty will survive him.
How Many Procreation Sonnets Are There?
Seventeen, Sonnets 1 to 17, though the last three begin to offer poetry as an alternative to children.
Why Does Shakespeare Want the Young Man to Have Children?
So that his beauty will not die with him. A child is presented as a copy of the parent, the only way, at first, to defeat Time.
Who Is the Young Man in the Procreation Sonnets?
No one knows. The most common suggestions are the Earl of Southampton and the Earl of Pembroke, both young noblemen who resisted arranged marriages.
Which Procreation Sonnet Should I Read First?
Sonnet 1, which sets out the whole argument, and then Sonnet 3, whose mirror image is the clearest in the group. Sonnet 17 shows where the group ends up.
Related Reading
Three pages that continue the story of the young man.