18 pages • 36 minutes read
William ShakespeareSonnet 1
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1609A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Power of Beauty
The speaker’s obsession with the young man’s beauty highlights its power. While the addressee of the poem is male, the sonnet relies on descriptions and imagery that more typically refer to female attractiveness, transforming them somewhat to fit a new male comparison. For example, one metaphor compares the addressee’s features to “beauty’s rose” (Line 2). Floral imagery like this was often used to depict women: The delicacy and elegance associated with flowers tend to be feminine ideals, and—more subtly—flowers were seen as a plant’s receptive reproductive organ, similar to the vulva. However, the speaker here ascribes floral characteristics to the young man he is trying to persuade to have children. While the poem’s flowers retain their association with beauty, they are also endowed with more masculine qualities such as agency and power. For example, while the young man’s rose-like exterior makes him “sweet,” he can also be warlike and violent, becoming his own worst enemy, or “Thyself thy foe […] too cruel” (Line 8). Similarly, the young man isn’t just a passive “fresh ornament” (Line 9) in the world—that would be the role of a beautiful young woman, whom the patriarchal culture of Shakespeare’s time would want to be merely decorative. Instead, the young man’s ornamentation makes him a scout and a “herald,” actively announcing the coming of “the gaudy spring” (Line 10).
Furthermore, beauty’s power is evoked by the destruction it is capable of bringing. The young man has the standard “bright eyes” (Line 5) that are frequently used to depict attractiveness. However, the brightness here doesn’t simply reflect the sunlight, but instead transforms into a fire of its own. The speaker warns that if the young man decides never to have offspring and thus pass on his beauty to others, this beauty will become a conflagration that will destroy him: “Feed’st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel” (Line 6). This illustration of a clearly doomed cycle—being at once a fire and the fuel that powers that fire—shows the overwhelming power of the young man’s good looks; this fire needs to be channeled into more productive energy-consuming activities before it burns up.
Defeating or Being Defeated by Death
The speaker’s primary anxiety is the finality of death—if death is allowed to claim the young man before he reproduces, then it will consume the physical perfection that should be passed down via inheritance.
The sonnet considers ways to defeat death, which becomes a frequent theme in Shakespeare’s other sonnets as well. The speaker’s ideal scenario is one in which “beauty’s rose might never die” (Line 2)—in other words, he wants to find a way to preserve the young man in his prime of life, even when knowing that this is just a “rose,” or flower, that is ephemeral. Immortality can be attained through passing down the young man’s genetic legacy, which would allow a “tender heir” (Line 4) to carry on the physical qualities of their father after he dies. Thus, the sonnet argues, procreation can defeat death by making beauty immortal.
To spur the poem’s addressee to make the right decision and have progeny, the sonnet then demonstrates the horrifying death that awaits those who do not have children. Not procreating is compared to a “famine” (Line 7) or dying from lack of nourishment—starvation would not have been as distant a concept to Shakespeare’s contemporaries, who lived in an agricultural system that relied on good harvests and suffered in bad ones. This vivid doom can be avoided, if only the addressee shares his beauty, of which there is enough to sate everyone else: It is “where abundance lies” (Line 7).
Even more dire is the spiritual death that awaits the young man if he doesn’t father children. Making a paradox, the speaker compares not procreating not only to creating famine but also to indulging in gluttony: “else this glutton be” (Line 13). Metaphorically, the young man only stuffs himself by not replicating his beauty in his offspring—he gorges on his appearance and becomes his own spouse, “contracted to thine own bright eyes” (Line 5). The accusation of gluttony isn’t simply an insult—it is an invocation of one of the seven most serious sins from Christian theology, one that would lead to an afterlife in hell. In this way, the speaker characterizes not procreating as sinful and selfish, a way to surrender not just the body but also the soul to death.
The poem ends with an image of the addressee’s “grave” (Line 14), asking where the young man would rather be once his body is in the ground. If he has children, he would avoid the sin of gluttony and find eternal life in heaven, while his beauty is carried on by his children on earth. Conversely, if he dies childless, he will be burying his bloom inside himself: “Within thine own bud buriest thy content” (Line 11). Death will be the victor unless the young man can “Pity the world” (Line 13) and share his genetic bounty.
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By William Shakespeare
