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Excerpts

1

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'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.

In this first of many sonnets about the briefness of human life, the poet reminds the young man that time and death will destroy even the fairest of living things. Only if they reproduce themselves will their beauty survive. The young man's refusal to beget a child is therefore self-destructive and wasteful.

1. increase: reproduction, propagation

4. tender: i.e., young; bear his memory: i.e., carry its (or his) image as a living memorial

5. contracted: bound by contract, betrothed (but also with the sense of "limited, shrunken")

6. Feed'st . . . fuel: See longer note, p. 332. self-substantial: derived from one's own substance

10. only: peerless, preeminent; herald: forerunner, precursor; gaudy: brilliantly fine

11. thy content: (1) that which is contained within you -- specifically, your seed, that with which you should produce a child; (2) your happiness

12. churl: miser (with wordplay on "lowbred fellow" or "villain"); mak'st waste in niggarding: i.e., diminishes or impoverishes through miserliness

13-14. this glutton . . . thee: i.e., be the kind of glutton who devours the world's due (the children one owes the world), first by refusing to reproduce and then by dying (See Erasmus's "Epistle" [B], in Appendix, p. 620.)

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