The sonnet has a Shakespearean structure, thus it is organized into three quatrains and a final couplet.

In the first quatrain the speaking voice wants to advice his interlocutor (a young man) to have a children ad bless a mother (the sonnet belongs to "Marriage Sonnets").

In the second quatrain Shakespeare adopts an interrogative rhetoric structure to argument his affirmation: the poet asks which woman could be so fair to disdain the tillage of his husbandry and who is he so affectionate to stop his posterity.

In the third quatrain the poet speaks says the interlocutor he is very similar to his mother and she, looking at him, reminds "the lovely April of her prime"; also he, through the age of life, will see it.

In the final couplet the poet wants to underline the aspect that he considers the most important: if the youth lives and dies single his image will die with him.

Reading this sonnet, some elements drive the reader's attention: the first one is the poet's will, expressed strongly in the sonnet.

Shakespeare thinks the beautiful of the youth is so rare that he has to have children so that he can transmit his beautiful to his sons; his fear is that if the youth dies without children the concept of beautiful will be "denigrate" in the future, because nothing could be so handsome as him.

A second element is the idea of women and men in that age: men has to get married and to have children because it was the only way to continue their posterity. Women were the means of that.

The other problem is time. There is not enough time, time changes the beautiful and it brings to death.