Sonnet 3 form of a Shakespearean sonnet: fourteen decasyllabic, iambic pentameter lines, that form three quatrains and a concluding rhyming couplet. It follows the form's rhyme scheme: "abab cdcd efef gg". Each line of the first quatrain of Sonnet 3 exhibits a final extrametrical syllable or "feminine ending". The first line additionally exhibits an initial reversal: In this sonnet, the poet is urging the 'fair youth' to preserve something of himself and something of the image he sees in the mirror by fathering a child, "Now is the time that face should form another". The message is reiterated in the last lines
Sonnet 59 as a "force, as it were, 'behind' the representative surface of the poetry." The physical is again seen as part of the psychology used by Shakespeare in the language of his sonnets. Much of the sonnet seems to be focused on a debate as to whether the old style or the new is superior. In fact, the opening lines stating that "If there be nothing new, but that which is Hath been before…" call to mind a similar passage from the Bible's Book of Ecclesiastes, chapter 1, verse 9: "The thing that hath been is that which shall be; and