Sonnet 1: from Fairest Creatures We Desire Increase
Sonnet 1: from Fairest Creatures We Desire Increase - context Summary
Procreation Urged in 1609
Sonnet 1 opens Shakespeare’s 1609 Sonnets as a direct plea to a young, beautiful man to procreate so his beauty will not perish. The poem frames reproduction as a moral and social duty: the addressee hoards his beauty selfishly, denying the world heirs who could carry it forward. It establishes the collection’s recurring procreation theme and sets a confrontational, didactic tone toward the speaker’s addressee.
Read Complete AnalysesFrom fairest creatures we desire increase, That thereby beauty’s rose might never die, But as the riper should by time decease, His tender heir might bear his memory; But thou contracted to thine own bright eyes, Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel, Making a famine where abundance lies, Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel. Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament, And only herald to the gaudy spring, Within thine own bud buriest thy content, And tender churl mak’st waste in niggarding. Pity the world, or else this glutton be: To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.
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