Shakespeare's Sonnet 1

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.

Shakespeare's initial sonnet hazards a thesis for all 154: we desire increase. Whether this thesis is more or less influenced by Shakespeare's patron is of little interest, and for now so is the fact that the speaker's argument shifts endlessly throughout the entire sequence. All that will come in time, but for now we must simply contemplate the speaker's opening statement. Procreation is a form of immortality, he asserts, perhaps the closest form which human beings can achieve. Time is the mortal's enemy, and the speaker attempts to communicate this truth to a young man. He exhorts him to carpe dium and reinforces his argument by comparing the fair youth's beauty to a rose. We might even consider Sonnet 1 itself as a rose, as Helen Vendler suggests: "Its indexing function for the sequence allows it to be seen as a packed bud from which many subsequent petals will spring" (47). So if this sonnet concerns itself with the sowing of the fair youth's seed, then the reader can also perceive immediately the connection between biological procreation and poetry, between sex and the word, and that connection will be expanded throughout the sequence.

There are a few troublesome words in Sonnet 1 that strike the 21st century ear as somehow strange, but which we should assume would have been entirely comprehensible to Shakespeare's readership. "Churl" in line 12 means a base man of the lowest societal rank, the opposite of a nobleman. Katherine Duncan-Jones suggests that the word could be used affectionately, however, as in "Juliet's reproach to the dead Romeo, 'O churl! Drunk all, and left no friendly drop' (RJ 5.3.163)," and one can certainly read "tender churl" as gentle teasing in apposition with "tender heir" in line 4. The other word is "niggarding." A niggard is a miserly, stingy person; think Shylock from The Merchant of Venice. The speaker employs both "churl" and "niggarding" to explain a paradox to the fair youth. Though he believes that beauty can be preserved by keeping it within himself, the only way to preserve beauty against the scythe of time in the speaker's cosmology is through procreation. By giving away his "content," both in the sense of biological material and a contented life of self-absorption, the fair youth paradoxically ensures its continuance. The paradox is, of course, natural to every human being and so it hardly strikes us as paradoxical. This naturalness furthers the speaker's powerful insinuation: the fair youth's churlish gluttony is itself an affront to the natural order.

The speaker's argument for the naturalness of this desire for increase requires another word. Returning to the opening line, we desire this procreation "from fairest creatures." And so the speaker's argument also begins with a compliment. He considers the young man one of the world's most beautiful creations, "the world's fresh ornament" and "herald to the gaudy spring," whose beauty exists in "abundance." But the compliment only serves to accentuate the need for procreation, for the speaker's cosmology again insinuates an obligation on the part of the young man: the need for procreation increases in proportion to the creature's beauty. His assertion that beauty be credited to the fair, and implicitly not to the dark, furthers a conventional understanding that Shakespeare will interrogate in sonnets 127-152. For now we need only to note the assumption.

Sonnet 1 has many good things to say about beauty, mortality, nature, the struggle against time, and a myriad of other topics. But what makes it a poem is not simply what it says but how it is said. Consider, for example, the subtle metrical chiasmus shared by "increase" and "decease," or the slight alteration from the otherwise logical and anticipated rhyme, "decease" rather than "decrease," which engages our minds in a subconscious interaction with the poem. A recent NPR radio program on the sociology of animal play provides a helpful analogy. The program dealt with the topic of play, and an interviewed guest explained that if two animals are playing a chasing game, and one is decidedly faster than the other, this one will intentionally slow down so that the other almost catches up, then he darts off in a different direction. The fast animal does this in order to prolong the game of chase and ensure the playful pleasure of both parties. Part of Shakespeare's genius, which the incomparable Stephen Booth has shown in his modestly titled Essay on Shakespeare's Sonnets, is that he engages one's mind in the same way the faster animal engages the slower. He speeds up and slows down, then darts in another direction only to return to the same spot. Readers engage in a subconscious linguistic game, and this game teaches by pleasing the mind, as Dr. Johnson once wrote. As Helen Vendler observes, the Speaker constructs his argument through catachresis, or mixed-metaphor, "a candle which refuses to bud forth" (48). While readers are capable of subconsciously eliding these dissonances, they affect a mental chase between reader and poet in which the poet is always just barely out of reach.