Sonnet 3: Look in Thy Glass, and Tell the Face Thou Viewest

Sonnet 3 is the first poem in the sequence to look backward — and that change of direction is what makes it different from everything that came before.

Sonnet 3 (Full Poem)

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, remembered not to be,
Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

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At a Glance

Here are the key facts about Sonnet 3 for quick reference.

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Why It Still Matters

The third quatrain of Sonnet 3 contains one of the most quietly beautiful images in the procreation sequence: “Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee / Calls back the lovely April of her prime.” It is the first moment in seventeen sonnets where Shakespeare stops pressing forward and looks back — back to the mother, to her spring, to the beauty the youth himself once renewed in someone else’s eyes.

That backward glance changes everything. Sonnets 1 and 2 argue that beauty must be passed on; Sonnet 3 reveals that it already was. The youth is himself the product of exactly the act Shakespeare is urging. He exists because his mother’s beauty was not hoarded. He is living proof that the argument works — and that is a far more persuasive move than any threat about future shame could be.

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Key Themes

Sonnet 3 develops the procreation argument through four interlocking ideas, each arriving at the same conclusion from a different angle.

The Mirror as Moral Instrument. The poem opens with a command — “Look in thy glass” — that is more than an invitation to admire. The mirror in Sonnet 3 is a device for moral reckoning. What the youth sees in it is not just his face but his obligation: a beauty “now is the time” to reproduce. The glass shows him what he has; the poem tells him what he owes. Narcissus looked in the pool and saw only himself. Shakespeare wants the youth to look in the mirror and see a future child.

Beauty as Inherited and Owed. The third quatrain makes the poem’s most original argument: the youth’s beauty is not originally his. It came from his mother. He is her mirror — the living reflection of her April. This means that beauty in the poem is not a possession but a relay. It was passed to him; he must pass it on. To refuse is to break the chain — and to deny someone else the experience his mother had when she looked at him.

Self-Love as Tomb. The second quatrain asks who would be “the tomb / Of his self-love, to stop posterity.” The image is grotesque in precisely the right way: the self-loving man becomes his own burial place, the point at which his line ends and is sealed. This is a sharper version of the Narcissus argument than Sonnet 1 made — not just that self-love is wasteful, but that it is literally fatal to everything that comes after.

Generational Time. The poem spans three generations in fourteen lines: the mother’s past, the youth’s present, the child’s future. That span gives the procreation argument its deepest emotional resonance. The youth is not being asked to do something abstract or dutiful. He is being asked to continue a process that has already given him everything he has — his face, his beauty, his existence — and to pass it forward to someone who will look at him the way his mother once looked at her own reflection.

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Key Literary Devices

The poem’s techniques are doing careful argumentative and emotional work throughout.

The Mirror. It appears in the first line and echoes in the third quatrain — “thy mother’s glass” — giving the poem its structural spine. The first mirror is literal: the youth’s reflection, his own face. The second mirror is human: the youth as his mother’s reflection, carrying her beauty forward. Shakespeare uses the same image to make two different points, and the repetition binds them together. A mirror reflects what is already there; a child reflects what was there a generation ago. Both are forms of reproduction.

Agricultural Metaphor. “Uneared womb” and “tillage of thy husbandry” import the language of farming into the argument for reproduction. An uneared field — one not yet ploughed — is not resting; it is failing to fulfil its purpose. Husbandry is both the management of a farm and, in its older sense, the duties of a husband. Shakespeare fuses the two meanings deliberately: the youth’s failure to marry is both agricultural waste and domestic negligence. The earth that goes untilled yields nothing and benefits no one.

Seasonal Imagery. “The lovely April of her prime” is one of the sequence’s most compressed and effective images. April is the beginning of spring — not its height, not its maturity, but its first freshness. The mother’s prime is described not as summer (full bloom) but as April (opening), which makes it both more beautiful and more fleeting. The youth carries that April forward; without a child, it ends with him.

The Closing Couplet as Verdict. “But if thou live, remembered not to be, / Die single, and thine image dies with thee.” After the tenderness of the third quatrain — the mother, her April, the promise of seeing one’s golden time reflected in a child — the couplet lands with deliberate flatness. No metaphor. No softening. Just the fact: die alone, and everything dies with you. The contrast between the warmth of what precedes and the cold simplicity of what closes is the couplet’s entire effect.

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Stanza by Stanza

Lines 1–4. The poem opens mid-action — the speaker has already positioned the youth in front of his mirror before the first word. “Look in thy glass” is an imperative, not an invitation, and it establishes the poem’s urgent tone from the outset. “Now is the time” reinforces that urgency: not eventually, not when circumstances allow, but now, while the face still has what it needs to “form another.” The consequence of inaction is stated bluntly: “thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.” The world is deceived — led to expect beauty that will not continue. Some unnamed woman is denied the chance to carry this beauty forward. The youth’s refusal, framed this way, is an act committed against others, not merely a private failure.

Lines 5–8. The second quatrain asks two rhetorical questions, each expecting the answer none. What woman of any beauty would refuse the youth’s advances? None — “where is she so fair whose uneared womb / Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?” And who would be so foolish as to become the tomb of his own self-love? The questions flatter the youth even as they rebuke him: his beauty is irresistible, his failure to act is therefore a choice, and that choice is as senseless as it is destructive. The word “tomb” is the quatrain’s weight-bearing word. Self-love, when it stops posterity, does not merely leave beauty preserved in amber. It buries it. The man who dies without children is his own sepulchre.

Lines 9–12. The third quatrain is the emotional centre of the poem and the point at which its argument becomes something more than argument. “Thou art thy mother’s glass” — the youth is himself a mirror, but not the reflective surface he has been gazing into. He is a living mirror, carrying his mother’s image forward into the present. When she looks at him, she sees her own April — the freshness of her youth, restored. The seasonal image does not claim that youth is recovered; it claims that it is “called back,” summoned into view by the child who embodies it. The promise that follows is reciprocal: “So thou through windows of thine age shalt see, / Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.” His wrinkled future self will look at his child and see what his mother sees when she looks at him now. The word “windows” is well chosen — age is a frame through which the past becomes visible, not a wall that seals it off.

Lines 13–14. The couplet does not develop the tenderness of the third quatrain. It abandons it. “But if thou live, remembered not to be, / Die single, and thine image dies with thee.” The syntax is compressed to the point of bluntness: if you choose solitude, you choose oblivion. “Remembered not to be” is an unusual construction — not “forgotten” but “not to be remembered,” as if memory itself will refuse the effort. “Thine image” echoes the mirror of the opening: the face he sees in the glass will not outlast him. The poem that began with a command to look ends with the consequence of looking and doing nothing.

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Analysis

What separates Sonnet 3 from its two predecessors is the introduction of the mother. In Sonnets 1 and 2, the argument is essentially prospective: look forward to what you will lose, what the world will be denied, what shame awaits an unproductive old age. Sonnet 3 turns the argument around and makes it retrospective. The youth is already the product of the act he is being asked to perform. His own existence is the evidence for Shakespeare’s case.

This is a more generous and more psychologically sophisticated move than anything in the first two sonnets. Sonnet 1 accuses; Sonnet 2 threatens; Sonnet 3 reminds. The reminder is warmer and harder to refuse, because it does not ask the youth to imagine something that has not happened. It asks him to recognise something that already has.

The mother’s April is the emotional pivot of the poem and, in a sense, of the entire procreation sequence. It establishes that beauty is not self-generated — it is inherited, carried, and passed forward. The youth did not create his own face. It came to him through his mother’s willingness to do exactly what Shakespeare is now urging him to do. The moral weight of that fact is considerable, and Shakespeare states it gently rather than driving it home, which is the right instinct. The gentleness of the third quatrain is what makes the couplet’s bluntness so effective: the poem offers the warmth of generational continuity and then, in two lines, shows exactly what is lost if the offer is refused.

The mirror, which opens and closes the poem’s imagery, does important structural work. In the first line it shows the youth his present face — beautiful, unrepeated. In the third quatrain it shows him as his mother’s mirror — her beauty already living in him. The two uses of the same image make the same argument from opposite directions: you are looking at something that should continue, and you are yourself the proof that continuation is possible.

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Related Sonnets

Three sonnets speak directly to the concerns of Sonnet 3.

Sonnet 1: The sequence’s opening argument, which Sonnet 3 both extends and softens. Where Sonnet 1 accuses the youth of hoarding beauty, Sonnet 3 reveals that beauty was itself given to him — making the accusation more personal and the appeal more generous.

Sonnet 2: The poem that projects the youth into the shame of his future. Sonnet 3 follows it with the complementary move — projecting him backward into the generosity of his past. The two poems bracket the present between a cautionary future and a instructive past.

Sonnet 62: The sequence’s most sustained examination of self-love, written without the procreation frame. Where Sonnet 3 diagnoses self-love as the force that stops posterity, Sonnet 62 examines it as a psychological condition — the speaker catching himself in his own glass and recognising what he sees. The mirror recurs, but to different ends.

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