Sonnet 3

The Case for Posterity

1 Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest
2 Now is the time that face should form another;
3 Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,
4 Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
5 For where is she so fair whose unear'd womb
6 Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
7 Or who is he so fond will be the tomb,
8 Of his self-love to stop posterity?
9 Thou art thy mother's glass and she in thee
10 Calls back the lovely April of her prime;
11 So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,
12 Despite of wrinkles this thy golden time.
13 But if thou live, remember'd not to be,
14 Die single and thine image dies with thee.

Notes

TLN 29archaic vocab
“Look in thy glass and tell the face”
'Glass' is an Elizabethan word for mirror (flat glass backed with tin and mercury). The speaker tells the youth to look at his own reflection and reckon with what he sees: a face worth reproducing in a child.
TLN 33archaic vocab
“unear'd womb Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry”
'Unear'd' means unploughed (from Old English 'erian,' to plough). 'Tillage' is the cultivation of land by ploughing and planting. 'Husbandry' means farming — but also the duties of a husband. The three words work together as an extended agricultural metaphor: a woman's womb is fertile ground that the youth, as a responsible farmer-husband, should be cultivating.
historical The procreation argument (Sonnets 1-17)
TLN 35archaic vocab
“who is he so fond will be the tomb, Of his self-love”
'Fond' here means foolish or doting, not merely affectionate (its primary modern sense). The speaker asks: who is so foolish as to let self-love become his own tomb — that is, to let vanity end with him rather than pass beauty on to a child?
TLN 42rhetorical device
“Die single and thine image dies with thee”
The couplet delivers the poem's logical conclusion with deliberate bluntness: if the youth dies without a child, his face — described throughout as a glass, a mirror, a reflection of his mother — simply goes dark. 'Single' means unmarried and alone. The whole argument collapses to one bare, twelve-word sentence.
historical The procreation argument (Sonnets 1-17)