In sonnet three, Shakespeare urges young men to marry and have children, which was comically similar to what the Japanese government has been telling their young men in response to the heavily declining birth rate. The difference here was that Shakespeare’s reasoning and the argument he was making was much more abstract. He speaks of the existence of beauty in the image of a person’s youth. So having children is about the continuation of human youth and beauty across generations. He begins with the idea of looking in the mirror, where you can see fragments of your younger days, and then applies this to starting a family by saying that children are an even more spitting image of your younger self than the remnants of it in the mirror. It is written as a classic Shakespearian sonnet in iambic pentameter, and I could not find any strays from that meter.

An interesting thing about the purpose of this poem was how direct it is. The poem is literally an argumentative essay that makes two points to argue that young men should find a wife and go have kids immediately. His two arguments are that it is foolish to not marry and have a kid because the form of your beauty will be lost to the world, and that it is selfish because you deprive your would-be wife of the joy of having children. His concluding couplet imagines the reader’s deathbed after ignoring his warning as a final push toward heeding his call. Four hundred years before Fumio Kishida urged his citizens to get their child-raising acts together, Shakespeare called out his community.