The Procreation Sequence

The first 17 of Shakespeare's sonnets, concerned primarily with asking the Young Boy (possibly the Earl of Pembroke or the Earl of Southampton) to reproduce so that he can continue his line of beauty..

Christopher Martin: "While the procreation sequence's tight focus insures coherence, it simultaneously threatens a monotony that has also taken its toll on the poetry's modern audience."

The argument of the sequence may be repudiated in the "conclusive statmrny giving up on the hope of children expressed" before (Vender, 371) in Sonnet 84:

Who is it that says most, which can say more,

Than this rich praise, that you alone, are you, In whose confine immured is the store Which should example where your equal grew?