The urge to procreate continues from sonnet 1. This time it is portrayed as a caution against time and age. Forty winters bury beauty in wrinkles. It shrinks youth’s proud livery into a tottered weed, a subtle reminder as to how beauty and youth are closely tied to one’s worth. Perhaps this is why senescence, was dreaded since time immemorial. Afterall it is when we realize that we are rotting away albeit we were decaying all the while. To all enquiries on beauty lost to age, an offspring offers a redeeming answer. His novelty compensates the antique of senescence. His warm blood compensates the blood cooling to death.
Shakespeare claims that reproduction is a natural duty. Coupling this sonnet with sonnet 1, where he suggestively implied masturbation in the lines:
Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel…
….And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding
Sonnet 1, William Shakespeare
Shakespeare urges the fair youth to reproduce. He asserts that a hire to one’s beauty will make one’s youth worthwhile in retrospect, while ensuring immortality in a different way.
