Sonnet 1

    FROM fairest creatures we desire increase,

    beauty
    procreation
    mortality
    self-love
    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.

    What It Means

    Shakespeare opens his sequence with a direct argument. A beautiful young man exists, and his beauty should be passed on through children rather than dying with him. The logic is economic: beauty is like wealth, and hoarding it — keeping it only for yourself — is wasteful. 'Beauty's rose' is the young man's attractiveness. 'Self-substantial fuel' means he burns himself up on his own self-love. The final couplet lands the accusation hard: by refusing to reproduce, he is a glutton, consuming what the world deserves. It's a persuasion poem. Shakespeare is trying to talk someone into having children, and the strategy is flattery mixed with guilt.

    Context

    Part of the Procreation sonnets (1–17), generally dated to the 1590s. Some scholars believe these were commissioned by the Earl of Southampton's family to persuade him to marry and produce an heir. The sequence was first published in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe.

    Buy the Arden edition of the Sonnets on Amazon →

    As an Amazon Associate, ShakespeareGo earns from qualifying purchases.

    NextSonnet 2 →When forty winters shall beseige thy brow,
    ← All 154 sonnets