My wife read Shakespeare's sonnets for the first time within the last few years and I remember discussing them as she read them. She routinely observed and reported to me that the theme of fruit-bearing and progeny were pronouncedly present. When one thinks of Shakespeare and thinks about sonnets, one assumes that they are going to be walking into a pink menagerie of sickly-sweet sentimentality, but what one actually discovers is a poetic polemic urging young love to consider something so practical as reproducing. For example:
But if thou live, remember'd not to be,
Die single and thine image dies with thee. (III)
Be not self-will'd, for thou art much too fair
To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir. (VI)
So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon:
Unlook'd, on diest unless thou get a son. (VII)
If I could write the beauty of your eyes,
And in fresh numbers number all your graces,
The age to come would say 'This poet lies;
Such heavenly touches ne'er touch'd earthly faces.'
So should my papers, yellow'd with their age,
Be scorn'd, like old men of less truth than tongue,
And your true rights be term'd a poet's rage
And stretched metre of an antique song:
But were some child of yours alive that time,
You should live twice,--in it, and in my rhyme. (XVII)
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