Sonnet 1

“Sonnet 1” is the first sonnet of Shakespeare’s sequence. Like most Shakespearean sonnets, this poem can be broken into four parts: three sections containing four lines (quatrains) and one section with two lines (a couplet). Generally, the speaker is read as Shakespeare.

In the first section, or quatrain, the speaker only refers to himself with the plural pronoun “we” (Line 1). He is part of a general consensus that the “fairest creatures” (Line 1) should increase their numbers. That is, the most beautiful people should create more beautiful people by having children. The good looks of such attractive people, figuratively speaking, are akin to “beauty’s rose” (Line 2). Women were often described as roses in the literature that predated and influenced Shakespeare, such as the Romance of the Rose from the Middle Ages. However, Shakespeare uses the rose metaphor to describe The Power of Beauty in general, here without a gendered referent (although later in the poem, it becomes clear that the addressee whose beauty the speaker worries about is a young man).

The first singular pronoun in the poem refers to the person being addressed—the addressee. Sonnets often address the speaker’s muse or beloved. Here, the speaker uses male pronouns for his beloved in the first quatrain: “his,” which is repeated twice in Line 4. This possessive pronoun refers to the young man’s “tender heir” (Line 4). Just as they might inherit wealth, the addressee’s progeny will inherit his beauty, which can be passed down and thus shared. The male possessive pronoun also describes the addressee’s hypothetical offspring carrying on “his memory” (Line 4): The beauty of a parent becomes a memory of that person in their child.

The first quatrain also introduces the metaphor of food. The speaker says, “the riper should by time decrease” (Line 3). As food ages, it ripens, then spoils. The speaker believes that beauty’s ripeness—or the time when one is more beautiful—is in youth.

In the second quatrain, the speaker directly addresses “thou” (Line 5), which is an archaic version of the pronoun “you.” The speaker lightly rebukes the addressee for being “contracted to thine own bright eyes” (Line 5), or being engaged to himself, rather than enter into a marriage contract that will lead to heirs. There is a suggestion here that the addressee’s beauty has made him vain and eager to behold his own appearance—like Narcissus, a figure from Greek mythology who falls in love with his own reflection, the addressee is too focused on looking at himself with his “own bright eyes” to consider suitable marriage partners.

Line 6 stresses that this kind of self-obsession cannot last. The imagery of fire conveys that the young man’s beauty will burn out if it only fuels itself. The speaker describes a cycle that is clearly untenable, arguing that the addressee “Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel” (Line 6). The addressee is thus both the firelight (because of his beauty) and also the energy that feeds that fire—clearly not a functional system.

The second quatrain also develops the metaphor of food. The addressee’s refusal to marry and produce heirs to carry on his good looks makes “a famine where abundance lies” (Line 7). In other words, if the addressee were to change his mind, he could produce plenty of beauty, but instead, he spends his beauty on his eyes and on his own fire, fomenting deprivation. Just as literal famine leads to death, so will the young man’s beauty end if he doesn’t procreate—an idea that develops the theme of Defeating or Being Defeated by Death. The speaker argues that being unwilling to have children makes the addressee his own “foe” (Line 8); the implication is that to some degree, the unwillingness to have offspring is a kind of self-murder. Here, at the center of the poem, the metaphor of food returns: The address is “to thy sweet self too cruel” (Line 8).

In the third quatrain, the speaker connects beauty and light with the end of winter and coming bloom: The young man is “the world’s fresh ornament / And only herald to the gaudy spring” (Lines 9-10). Here, the imagery of decoration is associated with excess or being gaudy. Nature’s baubles include fresh flowers and the young man. The metaphor of roses is further developed in Line 11: “Within thine own bud buriest thy content.” The rosebud represents beauty, and the young man buries what is contained within himself—his beauty—by not having children and allowing himself to be defeated by death.

The third quatrain associates excess with wastefulness. The speaker calls the young man a “tender churl” (Line 12). According to the Norton Shakespeare, this use of the word “churl,” which typically means “a mean-spirited person,” could also be read here as “an old miser.” The phrase is thus a paradox: The young man is both “tender,” or fresh and still barely ripe, and already aged before his time. The miserliness he displays creates “waste” (Line 12). In other words, he lets his beauty go to waste by not passing it down to his heirs.

In the sonnet’s final couplet (two-line section), the speaker pushes the metaphor of food to a devastating extreme, invoking one of the seven deadly sins of Christian theology, which all of Shakespeare’s contemporary readers would have been very familiar with. If the young man doesn’t take “Pity” (Line 13) on the world, he is a “glutton” (Line 13)—a serious accusation of not just earthly, but spiritual misdeeds. The young man’s gluttony is expressed in his perverse insistence on consuming his own beauty without sharing it with others or preserving it via procreation. The only thing that this kind of behavior benefits is death, which will continue to eat the hoarded good looks in the young man’s “grave” (Line 14). The poem warns against giving death this triumph, and again entreats the addressee to defeat death by passing on his genetic legacy.