In the concluding couplet, Shakespeare says that nothing can offer protection against time and death – both Time and Death, of course, often being personified with a scythe, with Death as the Grim Reaper – except having children, since this can help you to ‘brave’ or face Time (or Death) when he comes to take you. At least you can rest assured, as you wither and die, that you have done as nature expected and that you will live on through your offspring.One final word of analysis of Sonnet 12: that word ‘brave’, used in the last line, returns us to the ‘brave day’ in the second line of the sonnet. It implicitly suggests that, although putting on a brave face when confronted with Death won’t save you from him, any more than the ‘day’ or sun was kept in the sky when night came on, you will, in a sense, ‘rise again’ as the sun does, through your children. (It’s probably going too far to suggest there’s a buried pun on sun/son going on here, though it has been suggested that we find such wordplay later in Shakespeare’s Sonnets.)Sonnet 12 is a great poem to analyse, because it provides a series of images, beginning with Shakespeare counting ‘the clock that tells the time’, which gradually and subtly move towards suggestions of breeding as a way to defy time’s destructiveness, until this solution is explicitly offered in the poem’s final line.Continue to explore Shakespeare’s sonnets with Sonnet 13, or if you’re getting tired of the procreation motif, we advise rushing ahead to the classic that is Sonnet 18. Alternatively, check out our pick of the 10 greatest Shakespeare plays and our rundown of the commonest misconceptions about the Bard.If you’re studying Shakespeare’s sonnets and looking for a detailed and helpful guide to the poems, we recommend Stephen Booth’s hugely informative edition, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Yale Nota Bene). It includes all 154 sonnets, a facsimile of the original 1609 edition, and helpful line-by-line notes on the poems.