Sonnet 12 is another of Shakespeare's procreation sonnets. The poet goes through a series of images of mortality, such as a clock, a withering flower, a barren tree and autumn, etc. Then, at the "turn" at the beginning of the third quatrain, the poet admits that the young man to whom the poem is addressed must go among the "wastes of time" just as all of the other images mentioned. The only way he can fight against Time, Shakespeare proposes, is by breeding and making a copy of himself.
Read more about Sonnet 12: Modern Reading, Structure, Critical Analysis, Interpretations
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“Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)