Sonnet 1/I "From fairest creatures"

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.


Quatrain 1

1 From fair/est crea/tures // we / desire / increase,
2 That there/by beau/ty's Rose / might ne/ver die,
3 But as / the ri/per should / by time / decease,
4 His ten/der heir / might bear / his me/mory.

Quatrain 2

5 But thou, // contrac/ted to / thine own / bright eyes,
6 Feed'st thy / light's flame / with self-/substan/tial fuel,
7 Making / a fa/mine where / abun/dance lies,
8 Thyself / thy foe, // to thy / sweet self / too cruel:

Quatrain 3

9 Thou that / art now / the world's / fresh or/nament
10 And on/ly he/rald // to / the gau/dy spring
11 Within / thine own / bud // bu/riest thy / content,
12 And, ten/der churl, // mak'st waste / in nig/garding:

Couplet

13 Pity / the world, // or else / this glut/ton be,
14 To eat / the world's / due, // by / the grave / and thee.


A few preliminaries. An English or Shakespearean sonnet is fourteen lines of iambic pentameter (five feet of verse, the base two-syllable foot an iamb [unstressed-stressed] often varied with a trochee [stressed-unstressed], a spondee [stressed-stressed], or a pyrhhic [unstressed-unstressed] for varied rhythm and drama). The meter is always in a delicate tension with the syntax of the sentences as sentences.

Stress is often hard for people to hear since our oral culture is flat sonically (even if loud). It's easy for any native speaker with one word of two or more syllables: no one says, "tender." Try it. Single-syllable words are more difficult: the quality of the consonants and the length of the vowel are both helpful. Stress can include volume, pitch, timber, and emphasis. The sounded word is musical--the poet is a musician whether accompanied by an instrument or not. The ancient figure for the poet, Orpheus (Shakespeare [WS] knew him from Virgil and Ovid), played the lyre; the Biblical one, David (from the Bible), the harp. The music is there with or without the lyre or harp. It's in the delivered meter. The art of delivery is a rhetorical art (more anon), and scanning/reading aloud is an interpretive art. Read poetry aloud as often as possible since it is your voice which is WS's instrument.

I have indicated a foot break with /; a caesura (or cut or pause) with //; the relatively stressed syllables with bold; a debatable stress with italics; and enjambment (the wrap-around of one line to the next) with >.

A sonnet has four subsections or stanzas (a stanza in Italian is a room): three quatrains and a couplet (the units defined by the rhyme [abab; cdcd; efef; gg]). Because the sonnet came to England from Italy, there is a vestigial trace of the Italian or Petrarchan form--not a 4/4/4/2 structure, but an 8/6 one--in the English or Shakespearean one, the sonnet's turn or volta often (but not always) comes at line 9. Shakespeare's sonnets have multiple turns.

A sonnet is an integrated whole and can stand alone as a rhetorical, poetic act, but in Shakespeare's Sonnets each is also a part of the whole of the epic sequence. (Some critics dispute this, but it is, I think, true.) #1, for example, is an introduction to the entire sequence, to the Fair Youth (FY) Sonnets (1-126) as opposed to the Dark Lady (DL) Sonnets (127-154), and to those called the Procreation Sonnets (1-17) because in them the Speaker--WS's poetic ethos (rhetorical character or poetic voice)--tries to persuade his beloved friend to reproduce himself sexually. WS's Speaker (S) is the result of continuities of concern and language from sonnet to sonnet: "We are thereby made to believe throughout the sequence in the sustained and real existential being of the speaker" (V), who may, of course, be WS himself.

The first 17 sonnets echo a letter by Erasmus to a young man to marry (included in Thomas Wilson's Art of Rhetoric). In early modern, as in ancient culture, rhetoric (including the grammar and logic which precede them in the trivium) and poetics are thought of as coordinate arts within one art of language.


Q1 establishes the law of love's desire for beauty's increase; Q 2-3 indict the FY for his failure to increase; the C exhorts him to remedy that failure.

1.1-4

The opening quatrain (Q) provides the thesis of the sequence: beauty arouses the desire to perpetuate that beauty in the face of its eventual decline and demise. Though this is a general human response to any beauty, the desire is intensified when we love the beautiful one. This is the Speaker's understanding of the human impulse to lyric poetry--making and receiving. 1.1 is an instance of anastrophe or hyperbaton (unusual word order), what Puttenham calls "the Trespasser" since the poet trespasses against ordinary syntax. WS throws the prepositional phrase ("From fairest creatures") back before the predication ("we desire increase"). The pyrhhic in the 3rd foot (separated by a caesura) allows a mid-line pause between object of desire and desire, the anastrophe and caesura combining to sharpen the focus on the moment of beauty experienced, its (re)productive immortality then desired. By speaking for himself and others--"we," the first person, plural personal pronoun--the S would have his thesis be a law of human nature.

Notice that "increase," which will allow either of its syllables to receive the primary stress, can be performed "increase," thus sonically enacting the word's meaning. This raises interesting possibilities with its rhyme word, "decease" in 1.3, where the sound pulls against its meaning. In 1.2 the beloved is "beauty's Rose"--a conventional metaphor which the Speaker will use unconventionally later. Shakespeare's Rose of Beauty is very different than Dante's Rose of the Elect in Paradise. At 1.3, we know that the reproduction will be sexual (later it will be artistic). The "tender heir" might carry or "bear" (an important word in the sequence) the memory of the FY, the "riper," the comparative adjective used as a substantive (perhaps a neologism). Notice the internal rhyme of "heir" and "bear." B points out that the metaphor suggests "the bearing of heraldic arms." Yet the metaphor of the FY's beauty as a rose then figures the "tender heir" as a new shoot replacing the fading old one, the "riper" one.

Puttenham calls metaphor "the Figure of Transport" since the poet transports meaning from one field of reference to another: trans-portare is a literal Latinization of the Greek meta-pherein, both meaning "to carry across." It is the most important figure of speech there is.

1.5-8

The turn comes in 1.5. Q2 shows us that the FY is failing to reproduce himself because he misunderstands the need for procreation. The S's rhetorical goal is deliberative--he wants to persuade the FY to an advantage or good in the future--though there creeps in a forensic rhetoric in his indictment of the FY's act of self-demolition. In 1.5-6, the coordinate conjunction ("But") lets us know that Q2 will give us an antithesis of the FY's counter-act against that natural principle of increase, marked by the violence of the the trochaic reversals opening both 1.6 and 1.7. He "[f]eed'st" off of the fuel of himself; he is "[m]aking" of his own abundance a famine, the metaphoric register here becoming dark. The FY is a "self-cannibal" (V) blasting his own fecundity to waste. He is his own devouring enemy. The spondee of "bright eyes" gives sonic density to their beauty, yet, since he's "contracted"--married, but also diminished and bound to his own eyes--we have our first allusion to the myth of Narcissus.
He is cruel to his "sweet self"--a loving spondee. "Sweet" is one of the Speaker's favorite adjectives for the FY, but we have trouble hearing the eros of the word: for a time, the young were catching it when they drew out the word as a compliment: "swwweeeeeet." Notice the half-alliteration within the spondee ("-sw-" in "sweeet" and "-s-" in "self"), providing a sonic depth to the S's love for the FY. Ethos is revealed by delivery. The rhyme words of lines 6 and 8--"fuel" and "cruel" are dissylabic (B), in which case the lines have an extra, unaccented syllable. Sutton delivers them as monosyllables to avoid affectation.

V examines the juxtaposition of a metaphor of culture (the FY is a candle burning out) and that of nature (he is a rose refusing to bloom) as a kind of catachresis, or mixed metaphor: "The cognitive dissonance of the metaphors presses the reader into reflection; and this technique, recurrent throughout the sonnets, is the chief source of their intellectual provocativeness." Whether this is, strictly speaking, catachresis (what Puttenham calls "the Figure of Abuse") or not--when does a shift from one metaphor to another become a mixed metaphor?--V is certainly right that shifts from one metaphoric field to another are a central part of the S's "mind" and the sonnets' capaciousness.

1.9-12

1.9-10 provide a cosmic frame for the FY's beauty--he is the fresh ornament of "the world," and announcer of a season (notice the scope of space and time)--making the FY's self-regard a world-historical event, which it does seem to be, of course, to the S because he loves him. One's beloved is a world-historical event. The pun in "content"--"content" means material substance, but "content" means happiness--requires that a reader deliver one or the other, not both interpretations. The second syllable of "buriest" is one syllable by syncopation (B), the last two vowels pronounced as one, rich vowel. The FY buries either his body or his happiness; either way, he "mak'st waste"--the spondee giving us the FY, who is the paragon of the sweet beauty of the world, yet also, through his own narcissistic auto-consumption, a destroyer of that world. The FY is entombing himself.

1.13-14

In the couplet (C), WS employs only single-syllable words: As Gascoigne would have it, "The more monosyllables that you use, the truer Englishman you shall seem, and the less you shall smell of the inkhorn" (in R), the inkhorn of the student studying Latin's multi-syllable words. The S offers the FY a way out--a re-reversal of his reversal--"Pity the world"--within a logical disjunct: either pity, or be "this glutton"--to eat what belongs to another--the world, in fact--and in so doing, be both victim of death and deathly self-victimizer. Pity is a kind of love; gluttony, a deadly sin. The S figures the FY as a kind of Christ-like dispenser of his own beauty--unless, that is, he eats himself.

Shakespeare's Sonnets are full of beauty and ugliness, and both must be experienced imaginatively and sonically, especially since the FY, as we will see, is beautiful, according to the S, but not good.


Rhetorically, 1.1-4 is an introduction to the sequence and 5-14 to the FY Sonnets (at least the "procreation sonnets"). Included here is both an exordium which establishes the S's ethos, the FY as his audience, and the S's purpose, and a narratio, the narration of circumstances requiring the S's appeal to his audience. Thomas Wilson explains that organization or dispositio is "the knowledge to frame an oration," and such framing within a sonnet, of course, makes flexible if bound use of the sonnet structure itself. Framing or design in discourse is both a rhetorical and a poetic art, a substantial part of rhetorical poetics. Wilson's specific point that an oration requires "an entrance" is standard. We are in. In what? The lyric world made by WS's S.