From 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’st 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, makest waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton
be,
To eat the world’s due, by the
grave and thee.
Summary: Sonnet 1
The first sonnet takes it as a given that “From fairest
creatures we desire increase”—that is, that we desire beautiful
creatures to multiply, in order to preserve their “beauty’s rose”
for the world. That way, when the parent dies (“as the riper should
by time decease”), the child might continue its beauty (“His tender
heir might bear his memory”). In the second quatrain, the speaker
chides the young man he loves for being too self-absorbed to think
of procreation: he is “contracted” to his own “bright eyes,” and
feeds his light with the fuel of his own loveliness. The speaker
says that this makes the young man his own unwitting enemy, for
it makes “a famine where abundance lies,” and hoards all the young
man’s beauty for himself. In the third quatrain, he argues that
the young man may now be beautiful—he is “the world’s fresh ornament
/ And only herald to the gaudy spring”—but that, in time, his beauty
will fade, and he will bury his “content” within his flower’s own bud
(that is, he will not pass his beauty on; it will wither with him).
In the couplet, the speaker asks the young man to “pity the world”
and reproduce, or else be a glutton who, like the grave, eats the
beauty he owes to the whole world.
Read a translation of
Sonnet 1 →
Commentary
The first sonnet introduces many of the themes that will
define the sequence: beauty, the passage of human life in time,
the ideas of virtue and wasteful self-consumption (“thou, contracted
to thine own bright eyes”), and the love the speaker bears for the
young man, which causes him to elevate the young man above the whole world,
and to consider his procreation a form of “pity” for the rest of
the earth. Sonnet 1opens not only the entire
sequence of sonnets, but also the first mini-sequence, a group comprising
the first seventeen sonnets, often called the “procreation” sonnets
because they each urge the young man to bear children as an act
of defiance against time.
The logical structure of Sonnet 1is
relatively simple: the first quatrain states the moral premise,
that beauty should strive to propagate itself; the second quatrain
accuses the young man of violating that moral premise, by wasting
his beauty on himself alone; the third quatrain gives him an urgent
reason to change his ways and obey the moral premise, because otherwise
his beauty will wither and disappear; and the couplet summarizes the
argument with a new exhortation to “pity the world” and father a
child. Some of the metaphoric images in the poem, however, are quite
complex. The image of the young man contracted to his own bright
eyes, feeding his “light’s flame” with “self-substantial fuel,”
for instance, is an extremely intricate image of self-absorption,
and looks forward to the final image of Sonnet 73,
in which old age is depicted as the snuffing of a fire by the ashes
of the wood it was once “nourished by”—almost its self-substantial
fuel.
