Shakespeare's Sonnets: IX

A widow can look at her children and see her deceased husband in them. However, the world is like a widow without children if the young man does not marry and have offspring. The world has nothing to remember him by and has no consolation.

Sonnet IX

Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye,

That thou consum’st thyself in single life?

Ah! If thou issueless shalt hap to die,

The world will wail thee like a makeless wife;

The world will be thy widow and still weep

That thou no form of thee hast left behind,

When every private widow well may keep

By children’s eye, her husband’s shape in mind:

Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend

Shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it;

But beauty’s waste hath in the world an end,

And kept unused the user so destroys it.

                No love toward others in that bosom sits

                That on himself such murd’rous shame commits.