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 makes waste in niggarding.
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.
In almost every line this sonnet lays
down a thread of thought which
will be traceable in the rest of the
sequence. Some of these are obvious,
some more subtle. All may be
dropped from time to time only to be
taken up again later. Some are
introduced briefly, disappearing
when their work is done, like minor
characters in the plays. In the first
line of Sonnet 1, for example, the
word increase (emphasized by its
position at the end of the first line)
introduces the idea of procreation, a
dominant thread in the first
seventeen sonnets but dropped
thereafter. Other threads run through
the whole fabric: beauty (and its
symbol, the rose), immortality, time,
and death—all of which appear in
the first quatrain.
However, the most crucial element in
the sonnets is the character of the
speaker, the only voice Shakespeare
allows us to hear. It is his tragedy
that slowly unfolds, each sonnet a
scene in the drama. The speaker
engages right away in an argument,
his favorite form of discourse, and
the first line is a typical axiom-like
beginning from which the rest of the
sonnet develops. Because everyone
wishes to preserve beauty, he argues,
we wish for the “fairest creatures” to
produce heirs that will make them
live in memory even though they
must die in the course of time. Like a
wise uncle, the speaker leads the
youth he addresses through a train of
logic, chastising him for not wanting
to marry and have offspring to
preserve his beauty. How successful
the speaker will be in persuading the
young man is the key question that draws the
reader on.
An agon—a dramatic struggle—develops between
the speaker and the youth. This subtle contest of
wills goes on so long that the reader realizes how
difficult it is for the youth to be convinced, despite
the rhetorical skills of the speaker. In Sonnet 1 the
youth may well be antagonized by the speaker’s
accusations of narcissism, but he may also be
indifferent. Since he says nothing in the whole
sequence, he must be understood by inference. The
very fact that the speaker feels he must hammer at
the same theme for seventeen sonnets indicates that
the youth is resisting.
By this technique
Shakespeare achieves dramatic interest like that of a
mystery with few clues.
The agon begins with the second quatrain, when the
speaker addresses the youth directly for the first
time with a reprimand. Instead of being contracted
to another (a hint at marriage) the youth as obsessed
with himself as Narcissus was. He is contracted to
his own “bright eyes” (l. 5), which will become a
major thread--a symbol of appearance as opposed
to reality. The speaker warns him that he is using
up his own reserves of energy to feed his life’s
flame. Where he had an abundance of procreative
power he is creating a famine. The octave ends with
the speaker’s most serious criticism: “Thyself thy
foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.” This line enunciates
the overarching theme of the sonnets: betrayal,
especially self-betrayal. The speaker sees in the
youth a betrayal that he will finally realize in
himself. He will also be cruel to himself, sometimes
without knowing it.
Next, in the sestet, the speaker argues that the youth
has a role to play as “the world’s fresh ornament”
(l.9). He becomes a force of nature when described
as a “herald to the gaudy spring.” (l. 10) In these
hyperbolic metaphors the speaker shows his
susceptibility to the youth’s charms, and, in his role
as mentor, he repeats his warning against a
narcissistic approach to life. He clinches his
argument with a paradox (a device
he uses lavishly): the youth is
wasting his beauty by being miserly
(“niggarding,” l. 12). He is a churl, a
worthless fellow, by sinning in this
fashion--but a tender one. (This is a
reverse parallel to his being cruel to
his own sweet self in line 8.)
The speaker ends by admonishing
the youth that he has a duty to the
world, which would suffer from his
failure to reproduce. That would be a
form of gluttony (one of the Seven
Deadly Sins) because he would
overindulge himself, denying his
beauty to others. If he went to his
grave without offspring he would
betray both himself and the world.
By this, the speaker introduces
another force in this sonnet which we
shall call “the world.” This thread
appears in both lines of the couplet
(and in l. 9), and it refers to the
collective will of society, especially
those in positions of power and
influence. This takes us back to line
one, where the word we subtly
introduces the power of society
(including the speaker) to control
individual behavior. Shakespeare
well knew the tyranny of public
opinion.
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