The Return of Monday Poetry: Shakespearean Sonnet #1

I know I've been lax in posting Monday Poetry.  But I decided to bring this feature back by bringing the sonnets of William Shakespeare each week.

This first poem is a bit obtuse.  But it is his reflection on how beautiful things and beautiful people have  an obligation to make more beautiful people and beautiful things.  That is because age and death draw us down into darkness, so we have to fill the world with beauty while we can.

SONNET #1

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.