From Fairest Creatures We Desire Increase
by William
Shakespeare
This
sonnet is about the briefness of human life. In this sonnet, the poet asks a young
man to beget a child. He reminds him 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.
From Fairest Creatures We Desire Increase
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.
This
sonnet has the traditional characteristics of a Shakespearean sonnet—three
quatrains and a couplet written in iambic pentameter with an abab cdcd
efef gg rhyme scheme.
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