classic theatre

A Sonnet (or short poem) from a collection written by William Shakespeare, published in 1609. 

#3

Synopsis:

The poet urges the young man to reflect on his own image in a mirror. Just as the young man’s mother sees her own youthful self reflected in the face of her son, so someday the young man should be able to look at his son’s face and see reflected his own youth. If the young man decides to die childless, all these faces and images die with him.

Look in thy glass and tell the face thou viewest

Now is the time that face should form another,

Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest,

Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.

For where is she so fair whose uneared womb

Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?

Or who is he so fond will be the tomb

Of his self-love, to stop posterity?

Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee

Calls back the lovely April of her prime;

So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,

Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.

 But if thou live remembered not to be,

 Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

(Project Gutenberg, Public Domain)

A Sonnet (or short poem) from a collection written by William Shakespeare, published in 1609. 

#2

Synopsis:

The poet challenges the young man to imagine two different futures, one in which he dies childless, the other in which he leaves behind a son. In the first, the young man will waste the uninvested treasure of his youthful beauty. In the other, though still himself subject to the ravages of time, his child’s beauty will witness the father’s wise investment of this treasure.

When forty winters shall besiege thy brow

And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,

Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,

Will be a tattered weed of small worth held.

Then being asked where all thy beauty lies,

Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,

To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes

Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.

How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use

If thou couldst answer “This fair child of mine

Shall sum my count and make my old excuse,”

Proving his beauty by succession thine.

 This were to be new made when thou art old

 And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

(Project Gutenberg, Public Domain)

A Sonnet (or short poem) from a collection written by William Shakespeare, published in 1609. 

#1

Synopsis:

In this first of many sonnets about the briefness of human life, the poet reminds the young man that time and death will destroy even the fairest of living things. Only if they reproduce themselves will their beauty survive. The young man’s refusal to beget a child is therefore self-destructive and wasteful.

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.

(Project Gutenberg, Public Domain)