Sonnet 6 does the maths: ten children make you ten times happier
Borrowing the language of perfume-making, Sonnet 6 urges the young man to fill some vial with his beauty before winter ruins it. Then it turns to arithmetic and lending. Breeding is the one form of usury nobody can condemn, and ten children, each multiplied tenfold, would leave death with nothing to conquer.
The poem begins with a warning not to let winter's ragged hand deface the summer in the young man before he has been distilled. The instructions that follow are practical and sensory: sweeten some vial, enrich some place with the treasure of his beauty before it destroys itself through neglect. The word self-kill'd makes refusal to marry sound like a slow suicide.
Next comes a defence of lending at interest, of a very particular sort. Usury was widely condemned, but the speaker insists that this use is not forbidden, because it delights those who repay the loan willingly. Breeding another self is the repayment, and the rate of return keeps climbing: ten for one would be ten times happier, and if each of ten children refigured him ten times over, his happiness would grow tenfold again.
The logic then turns on death itself. If the young man departs leaving himself alive in his descendants, what power would death have? The couplet closes with a warning that mixes flattery and horror: "Be not self-will'd, for thou art much too fair / To be death's conquest and make worms thine heir." The image of worms inheriting a beautiful body is the sting.
The poem's faith in heirs sits poignantly beside Shakespeare's own family. His daughter Susanna was baptised on 26 May 1583, about six months after his marriage, and twins followed, Hamnet and Judith, baptised on 2 February 1585. Hamnet, his only son, died at the age of 11 from causes that remain unknown and was buried on 11 August 1596.
Source: Sonnet 6: Then let not winter's ragged hand deface
