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 60 claims that the first two lines are "answered directly by two regular lines". Despite this disagreement, both critics acknowledge that the non-iambic feet simulate the undulating and crashing waves that Shakespeare portrays in the first line of the sonnet. While Vendler emphasizes the meter of the first quatrain, Atkins and Arbour continue this analysis by examining the second quatrain. After the first quatrain, the next trochee occurs in the middle of line 5, the only medial trochee of the sonnet, followed by trochees at the beginning of the sixth and seventh lines. The sixth and seventh lines mirror the first