From Fairest Creatures We Desire Increase by William Shakespeare

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.