Sonnet 1

In this sonnet, the speaker is begging the person that is being addressed to procreate because he is so beautiful. The speaker acknowledges that beauty cannot last forever due to age, and that the only way for this person’s beauty to live on is through his offspring. I find this concept to be tiring in a way because eventually the child will grow old as well and lose his or her beauty, and then they will also have to procreate in order to retain the original beauty. It seems like a waste of time, and also a bad reason to have children, just because of vanity. “Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.”-John Ruskin