Sonnet 1: “Contracted to thine own bright eyes”

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,

Thy self 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.

Sonnet 1 has a simple argument. The poet, I call him W., for “the writer,” implores a young man (Y.M.) to marry and have a child. During the course of its fourteen lines, we are interrupted by two parenthetical thoughts, both of which describe Y.M. First, he is “contracted to thine own bright eyes” and then he is a “tender churl.” These are important to the dramatic context of Sonnet 1.

“…we’ve been introduced to two characters and a theme. We also know something about the relationship between the characters. Y.M. is a person worthy of being implored by W. who, in this sonnet, does so in a variety of tones of voice. In the first quatrain (the first four lines) we hear a dispassionate saying; the second and third quatrains display some emotion, somewhat chiding—these especially give me the impression of someone older and wiser giving advice to a youth; the final couplet ends with an impersonal appeal to morality on behalf of the world.

“The combination of Shakespeare’s diction, his manipulation of tone, his ability to mimic the way we speak, even in this simple, conventional first sonnet, lead not only to a sense that we are listening to a personal conversation but also to a sense of drama. As if something more is going to happen.”

—Shakespeare’s Sonnets Among His Private Friends, p.19 (publication date 10/1/21)