Shakespeare calls his own poem barren and says a child would do better
Most poets boast that their verse will make someone immortal. In Sonnet 16 Shakespeare does the opposite. He calls Time a bloody tyrant, then admits his rhyme is too feeble to fight it, and tells the young man that fathering children would be a mightier weapon than any portrait or poem.
The sonnet opens with a question that sounds like a rebuke: why not wage a stronger war on Time? The addressee is told to fortify himself against his own decline with something holier than the speaker's barren rhyme. It is a startling piece of self-deprecation from a writer who produced 154 sonnets and whose plays are now staged more than those of any other dramatist.
The middle lines picture the young man standing on a summit of happy hours. Around him lie many unplanted maiden gardens, ready to grow him living flowers that would resemble him far more closely than a painted likeness. The image quietly compares a wife and children to a garden, and ranks flesh-and-blood offspring above any artwork.
The third quatrain is the knottiest. It speaks of the lines of life that repair life, a pun that folds together family lineage, the lines on a face and lines of writing. Neither Time's pencil nor the speaker's pupil pen, he says, can capture either the inner worth or the outer beauty that would let the young man live on in people's eyes. A drawing and a poem both fall short.
The couplet resolves the paradox neatly. Giving yourself away in marriage and parenthood is how you keep yourself, and the young man must survive by his own sweet skill, drawn not by an artist but by himself. Scholars know little for certain about Shakespeare's personal life; he married Anne Hathaway at 18 and they had three children, including twins, Hamnet and Judith. The poem does not say whether any of that shaped its argument, but it is unusually humble about what writing can achieve.
Source: Sonnet 16: But wherefore do not you a mightier way
