Shakespeare Poem Essay, Research Paper

FROM FAIREST CREATURES WE DESIRE INCREASE

When God saw his creatures, he commanded them to increase and multiply. Shakespeare, in this sonnet, suggests we have internalized the paradisal command in an aestheticized form: From fairest creatures we desire increase. The sonnet begins, so to speak, in the desire for an Eden where beauty\’s rose will never die; but the fall quickly arrives with decease (where we expect, by comparative with increase, the milder decrease). Unless the young man pities the world, and consents to his own increase, even a successively self-renewing Eden is unavailable.

The different rhetorical moments of this sonnet (generalizing reflection, reproach, injunction, prophecy) are permeable to one another\’s metaphors, so that the rose of philosophical reflection yields the bud of direct address, and the famine of address yields the glutton who, in epigram, eats the world\’s due. The reappearance of a previous metaphor in a moment of different rhetoricity makes us believe that behind all the speaker\’s instances of particular rhetorical usage there lies in his mind a storehouse or bank of fundamental images to be drawn on. We are thereby made to believe throughout the sequence in the sustained and real existential being of the speaker.

There are two distinguishing features in this originating sonnet, both of which we might not expect in such a brief poem: the first is the sheer abundance of values, images, and concepts important in the sequence which are called into play, and the second is the number of significant words brought to our attention. A quick directory of values considered by the speaker as obvious and self-evidently good would include beauty, increase, inheritance, memory, light, abundance, sweetness, freshness, ornament, springtime, tenderness, and the world\’s rights. The notable images include fair creatures, the rose, bright eyes, flame and light, fuel, famine, abundance, foe, ornament, herald, spring, bud, burial, and (the oxymoronic) tender churl. The concepts – because Shakespeare\’s mind tends to be summoned in pairs: increase and decease, ripening and dying, beauty and immortality versus memory and inheritance; expansion and contraction; inner spirit (eyes) and outward show (bud); self-consumption and dispersal, famine and abundance, hoarding and waste; gluttony, debt. This sonnet is unusual in bringing into play such a wide range of conceptual material.

In short, we may say that this sonnet makes an artistic investment in profusion. Its indexing function for the sequence allows it to be seen as a packed bud from which many subsequent petals will spring. Since its aesthetic display is intended to evoke profusion, the poem enacts its own reproach to the niggardliness it describes; as the heralding bud of the sequence, it displays the same potential for self-replicating increase as natural creatures.

Shakespeare\’s commitment to profusion in this sonnet is visible as well in the way in which two alternate readings, one inorganic and one organic, are given of the young man\’s refusal to breed: he is a candle contracted to the flame of his bright eyes; or he is a rose refusing to unfold his bud. The first symbolizes the refusal of the spirit; the second, the refusal of the flesh. The first creates famine; the second, waste. The juxtaposing of two unsuited categories–here, the inorganic and the organic – is one of Shakespeare\’s most reliable techniques for provoking thought in the reader. When two incompatible categories are combined in the same metaphor – \”a candle which refuses to bud forth\” – we say we have mixed metaphor, figure which calls attention to it self.

This sonnet is leaning mostly towards the typical Shakespearean sonnet whereby three quatrains are summarized by a couplet. We do find though that this sonnet has avoided the two structures a reader might expect the Petrachan sonnet or the quatrains-in-parallel. The quatrains here are not comparative, since direct address does not appear until after the first-quatrain, which, unlike the other two quatrains, is phrased in the first person plural.