Sonnet 1: From Fairest Creatures We Desire Increase
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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, Feedst 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, makest 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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From fairest creatures we desire increase,
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From the most beautiful beings – 'creatures' here are beings quite generally, not, as in our sense today, mainly animals, but also human beings – so from the most beautiful beings, we wish that they multiply: we want more of them. This is a principle that I, the poet, William Shakespeare, here establish: I just say, it is so. That's generally the case: we want more of beautiful things.
The implication, of course, here is that the young man, whom we will know very shortly this sonnet is addressed to – I'm not saying we will know very shortly who the young man is, but we will know very shortly that it is a young man – the implication is that this young man is one of these beautiful creatures, that he is himself beautiful. Incidentally, the stress on the word 'increase' is on the second syllable, as in: "From fairest creatures we desire increase." That's how the rhythm goes. Today, in contemporary English, we would normally say 'increase' for the noun and to 'increase' for the verb. In Shakespeare's day, this isn't quite the case, and we will come across many words which in contemporary English are either pronounced or stressed somewhat differently; this is going to be a common feature of our exploration. PRONUNCIATION: Note that desire here has two syllables,[de-sire], and as just pointed out increase is stressed on the second syllable, [in-crease], for the line to scan. |
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That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
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So that the flower of beauty, the rose, and thus beauty itself may never die, may continue to go on living.
The rose is a heavily symbolic flower in Elizabethan England and among many other things it stands for beauty itself. It is interesting perhaps to note that in the first published Quarto Edition, the word is capitalised and italicised. This may or may not mean anything: several words are in the first edition capitalised and/or italicised, and there is no real consistency to this, so we don't know whether this has any real meaning. This may, however, be an opportune moment to point out quite early on that spelling and grammar, as indeed pronunciation, are all something of a free-for-all in Shakespeare's day. He himself uses many different spellings of individual words, and typesetting was often haphazard and down to the printer's or typesetter's quirks, sometimes determined by something as basic as what physical letters were actually available at the time in the typesetter's case. Almost – there are probably some exceptions, but almost – all the textual difficulties that these sonnets present stem from such inconsistencies and from obvious printing and typesetting errors, and this is also where the majority of the variations between different editions of the sonnets stem from. |
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But, as the riper should by time decease,
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But, as the older person – here by implication the father of the heir mentioned in the next line – eventually dies...
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His tender heir might bear his memory.
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...his child, his tender child, will remind the world of his father by bearing his memory: the son is naturally expected to resemble his father and carry on his beauty.
ORIGINAL PRONUNCIATION: Note that in OP memory rhymes with die in a short sound closer to our 'oi': [doy | memoroy]. |
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But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,
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But you, who are beholden to your own beauty – the suggestion here is that the young man is somewhat in love with himself and showing some fairly narcissistic tendencies...
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Feedst thy light's flame with self-substantial fuel,
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...you burn with love of and for yourself: 'self-substantial fuel' – you feed your own flame of love, as it were.
Later on, we will hear how Shakespeare admonishes the young man by saying, "thou consumest thyself" – this here is quite similar: the young man is told that he's burning himself up with his love for himself, thus depriving the world of his beauty, as it will invariably perish with him when he dies. |
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Making a famine where abundance lies,
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By feeding on yourself, you take that beauty which you have in abundance and use it on yourself.
The implication is that because you don't produce any offspring – which is only possible by devoting yourself to someone other than yourself – your beauty, which you have in abundance, instead of being perpetuated, is simply used up. |
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Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
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In doing so, you become your own enemy; you are being cruel to yourself.
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Thou, that art now the world's fresh ornament
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You, who are now, on account of your youth and beauty, the ornament or adornment of the world...
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And only herald to the gaudy spring,
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...and who therefore 'heralds' – which here really means 'represents' rather than 'announces' necessarily – spring; spring being youth, fertility, lushness, abundance...
'Gaudy' does not have any negative connotation necessarily here of garishness here, as it would in contemporary English, it is more simply colourful and bright; and the 'only' can be read as 'you are the only, as in the chief, as in the most beautiful and therefore most important representative or herald of spring’. |
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Within thine own bud buriest thy content
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...put yourself into yourself, you bury your own content in yourself.
There may be a somewhat sexually suggestive intention here, we can't be sure of this, but the main point is that you can only create an heir if you 'pollinate another flower', not yourself: if you share your 'content' with somebody else. The young man is admonished for not doing so. PRONUNCIATION: Note that buriest here has two syllables: [beh-rist]. |
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And, tender churl, makest waste in niggarding.
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And you are being wasteful in being miserly. 'Tender churl' is a typically Shakespearean way of addressing the young man in contradictory terms. This is again something that Shakespeare likes to do quite a lot. A 'churl' is a rude, mean-spirited person, but the 'tender' softens this and makes it sound gently ironic.
'Niggarding' simply means being miserly: a 'niggard' is a miserly person, a mean person. As a word in the English language it dates back to the 14th century and has nothing – not semantically and not etymologically – to do with the racial slur that it might easily be confused with, which was coined much later. |
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Pity the world, or else this glutton be
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Have pity on the world, or else you will be and be considered a glutton, somebody who greedily and selfishly feeds himself...
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To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee.
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...by eating yourself up and thus taking yourself and all your beauty, which after all belongs to the world, to the grave with you when you die.
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Sonnet 1 is the first of the originally published sequence, and that makes it also the first one of what are known as the Fair Youth Sonnets, which by definition also makes it the first of the Procreation Sonnets. And we'll get into what these terms mean in just a moment.
As I explained in the Introduction, we cannot know whether this is the first sonnet that Shakespeare wrote, and in fact recent research and analysis of his use of vocabulary suggests that it most likely isn't. What we do know is that the first Quarto Edition of 1609 puts this sonnet first and gives it the number 1, and we also know that Shakespeare was alive in 1609, and while we cannot know whether Shakespeare authorised or let alone prepared this edition, we also have no record of his challenging or contesting it at the time. I explore this in a little more detail in the Introduction.
Our approach with SONNETCAST is to go by what we know and have, and what we know and have are the words as they were originally published. And so I will simply treat this as the beginning of our exploration. And what is pretty clear is that in the constellation that it fits into, which is the Fair Youth sequence or the Fair Youth portion, which is the majority of the sonnets, it might as well stand at the beginning, because there is no evidence that it shouldn't. And within the Procreation sequence, which contains the first 17 sonnets that are addressed to a young man, it may also stand quite happily where it is, which is at the beginning.
So here now, in Sonnet 1, William Shakespeare – for reasons we do not know – tells a young man – of whom we don't know yet and will never know for absolutely certain who he is – that he is being miserly and selfish by not sharing his beauty with the world. He gently admonishes him for being somewhat obsessed with himself and implores him to take pity on the world and give of himself by producing an heir who will then be able to remind the world of his beauty by continuing to live even after he himself has died.
The sonnet thus sets the tone and the theme for the Procreation Sonnets, as they are all concerned with this particular aim: to convince the young man that it is now time to marry and have children, with the express purpose of producing an heir. This, in Shakespeare's day by necessity means a boy.
This is more or less all we know so far: the poet, William Shakespeare, is telling a young man of unnamed identity that he is wasting his beauty on himself and depriving the world of its due by not having children, and asks him to change his ways.
The two most immediate questions that present themselves are of course: who? and why? Who is this young man, and why is Shakespeare at all concerned with the perpetuation of his lineage? This sonnet does not answer these questions and so it will be part of our journey of exploration to look out for clues, of which, thankfully, there will be quite a few...
As I explained in the Introduction, we cannot know whether this is the first sonnet that Shakespeare wrote, and in fact recent research and analysis of his use of vocabulary suggests that it most likely isn't. What we do know is that the first Quarto Edition of 1609 puts this sonnet first and gives it the number 1, and we also know that Shakespeare was alive in 1609, and while we cannot know whether Shakespeare authorised or let alone prepared this edition, we also have no record of his challenging or contesting it at the time. I explore this in a little more detail in the Introduction.
Our approach with SONNETCAST is to go by what we know and have, and what we know and have are the words as they were originally published. And so I will simply treat this as the beginning of our exploration. And what is pretty clear is that in the constellation that it fits into, which is the Fair Youth sequence or the Fair Youth portion, which is the majority of the sonnets, it might as well stand at the beginning, because there is no evidence that it shouldn't. And within the Procreation sequence, which contains the first 17 sonnets that are addressed to a young man, it may also stand quite happily where it is, which is at the beginning.
So here now, in Sonnet 1, William Shakespeare – for reasons we do not know – tells a young man – of whom we don't know yet and will never know for absolutely certain who he is – that he is being miserly and selfish by not sharing his beauty with the world. He gently admonishes him for being somewhat obsessed with himself and implores him to take pity on the world and give of himself by producing an heir who will then be able to remind the world of his beauty by continuing to live even after he himself has died.
The sonnet thus sets the tone and the theme for the Procreation Sonnets, as they are all concerned with this particular aim: to convince the young man that it is now time to marry and have children, with the express purpose of producing an heir. This, in Shakespeare's day by necessity means a boy.
This is more or less all we know so far: the poet, William Shakespeare, is telling a young man of unnamed identity that he is wasting his beauty on himself and depriving the world of its due by not having children, and asks him to change his ways.
The two most immediate questions that present themselves are of course: who? and why? Who is this young man, and why is Shakespeare at all concerned with the perpetuation of his lineage? This sonnet does not answer these questions and so it will be part of our journey of exploration to look out for clues, of which, thankfully, there will be quite a few...
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If you spot a mistake or if you have any comments or suggestions, please use the contact page to get in touch.
To be kept informed of developments, please subscribe to the email list.
If you would like to donate, you can do so here. Thank you!