Short answer

Sonnets 5–17 continue the same basic pressure tactic:
the poet addresses a beautiful young man and urges him to marry and have children so that his beauty will not die with him.

The variations are mainly in:

which argument Shakespeare uses
which image-system he uses (time, winter, flowers, mirrors, music, economy, lineage, self-love, waste, immortality through children)

But the core message stays very stable:

“You are too beautiful to let your line end with you; if you do not beget a child, you are hoarding and destroying beauty that should be renewed in the world.”

What Sonnets 5–17 are doing as a group

The governing argument

The speaker treats the young man’s beauty almost as a public trust rather than private property. Because time will inevitably destroy youth, the youth has a duty to reproduce himself in a child. In these sonnets, procreation is presented as the proper answer to mortality.

So the sequence keeps cycling through a few linked ideas:

1. Time is coming for you

Beauty is not stable. Youth ripens and then decays. Summer becomes winter; flowers wither; faces wrinkle.

2. To remain childless is a kind of selfishness

The youth is repeatedly portrayed as:

hoarding beauty
being “cruel” to himself
cheating the future
allowing a whole line of beauty to perish

3. A child is the answer to death

Not literal immortality, but continuance:

your face in another face
your spring living on after your winter
your beauty copied into the future

4. Beauty should circulate, not be locked up

The speaker often uses the language of:

increase
use/usury
profit
treasure
spending
legacy

Beauty is imagined as a resource that should generate more beauty.

Condensed summary of Sonnets 5–17

Sonnets 5–8: Time, distillation, and harmony

These sonnets begin shifting from the opening “you should breed” argument into more elaborate imagery.

Sonnet 5

Time leads summer into winter; beauty fades.
The one hopeful image is distillation: as flowers die, their essence can be preserved in perfume. The implication is that a child preserves your essence when your body fades.

Sonnet 6

This continues the distillation image, but now the speaker gets more direct again: do not let yourself die without issue.
The youth is urged to make copies of himself — effectively to “multiply.”

Sonnet 7

The sun rises gloriously, is admired at noon, and then declines toward evening, when attention leaves it.
So too with youth: admiration is temporary. A son is the answer to the inevitable descent.

Sonnet 8

This one is gentler and more musical. The speaker asks why music, which should delight him, seems to sadden him.
The answer: because harmony itself rebukes his singleness. A family — father, mother, child — is like a harmonious chord; the youth alone is an incomplete music.

Sonnets 9–12: selfishness, widowhood, clocks, and withering

These deepen the pressure by making childlessness seem morally wrong and existentially foolish.

Sonnet 9

Why remain single? Is it from fear of making a widow?
The speaker argues that if the youth dies childless, the whole world becomes his widow, because his beauty leaves no heir behind.

Sonnet 10

A sharper rebuke: the youth is accused of self-hatred or at least of being cruel to himself by refusing to reproduce.
He should turn his beauty outward and build a future through a child.

Sonnet 11

Nature gives growth and decline in cycles. The more one diminishes, the more one should renew oneself through offspring.
The sonnet emphasizes increase and succession.

Sonnet 12

One of the stronger early sonnets. The speaker watches the signs of time everywhere:

the clock counting
day sinking into night
violets withering
black hair turning white
trees stripped of leaves

The conclusion is stark: against Time’s scythe there is only one defense — to breed.

Sonnets 13–17: lineage, inheritance, and the limits of poetry

These feel like the culmination of the procreation campaign.

Sonnet 13

You belong partly to yourself, but not forever. Since you must die, you should prepare a “house” for your beauty — meaning a child who inherits it.

Sonnet 14

The speaker says he does not read fate in the stars; instead, he reads truth in the youth’s beauty.
From that beauty he predicts two possibilities:

if the youth breeds, truth and beauty may continue
if not, both die with him

Sonnet 15

Everything that grows also declines. Human life is a brief performance under the influence of time.
The speaker imagines himself fighting Time on the youth’s behalf — though here we begin to edge toward a second solution: poetry may preserve beauty too.

Sonnet 16

A very important hinge sonnet. The speaker says, in effect:
my verse is not enough — you need a “mightier way” to fight time, namely having a child.
This matters because later Shakespeare will increasingly turn from procreation to poetry as the vehicle of immortality.

Sonnet 17

What if future generations think I exaggerated your beauty in my poems? They may not believe such perfection existed.
Only a child — a living witness — could prove that the youth’s beauty was real.
So the sequence closes by saying: my verse alone cannot certify you; your child can.

The whole block in one paragraph

Sonnets 5–17 repeatedly tell a beautiful young man that time will destroy his youth, and that refusing to marry and have children is a selfish waste of beauty. Shakespeare varies the plea through images of seasons, flowers, perfume, music, clocks, inheritance, and economic increase, but the essential point remains unchanged: the youth should defeat mortality not by remaining singular, but by reproducing himself in a child.

Are they “more of the same”?

Yes — but with a few worthwhile developments

If you want the blunt structural answer: yes, mostly.
The sequence does not become dramatically different before Sonnet 18.

But there are a few things of real interest if you want to understand what Shakespeare is building:

1. The imagery gets richer

The argument stays the same, but the imagery improves:

Sonnet 5–6: flowers distilled into perfume
Sonnet 7: sun’s daily arc
Sonnet 8: music and harmony
Sonnet 12: clocks, nightfall, and scythe-like time

2. Sonnet 12 is a notable high point

If you read only one more in the procreation group, I would choose Sonnet 12. It is more vivid and less merely nagging than several of the others.

3. Sonnets 15–17 begin to pivot toward the larger Shakespearean theme

The really important turn in the sonnets as a whole is not “have children,” but:

Can beauty survive death through art?

That larger question begins to emerge near the end of this sequence, especially in 15–17, and then comes into much fuller view with Sonnet 18 and after.