Sonnet 3

Sonnet 3 is one of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. It is a procreation sonnet within the Fair Youth sequence. In the sonnet, the speaker is urging the man to whom he is writing to not waste his beauty by not having children. The intended recipient of this and other sonnets is a subject of scholarly debate, with some believing it to be William Herbert and others Henry Wriothesley, as well as other candidates. The poem is typical of a Shakespearean sonnet in its form: fourteen decasyllabic lines, consisting of three quatrains and a concluding rhyming couplet.